Yarn Store Reviews - DC

Well, this is a little late, but I mislaid the chip with the pictures on. In fact, as is usually the case, it was in exactly the right place ..... but I'd not remembered where I'd decided that "exactly the right place" was (this time).
A couple of weeks ago I was down in DC and the AG decided that that just wasn't good enough, and that she should also get a chance to go to the nation's swamp - sorry!- capital. I've been there enough times to realise that anyone running for office in Washington, DC, is not only totally untrustworthy (pre-requisite for being a politician), but also certifiably insane (the federal government got DC because nobody else wanted it!). Have you seen the rats there? - bigger than most cats.
So, after leaving the Spawn off after taking him to the PA Renaissance Faire (seriously recommended!), we set off for DC and our hotel room. Bless Red Roof Inns - we got there at about two in the morning and there was a guy in reception, wide awake and smiling to say "hi" and give out keys and directions. Way more awake than we were!
Next morning, after a looong stop at a World Market, where we bought one of about 10% of the whole store, it seemed, we drove off to find WoolWinders. After that, we went further on to an absolutely wicked good chicken lunch at Pollo Rico and then chased down The Yarnista who was visiting at at The Yarn Spot.
Now the photos. They're all from a phone camera, I'm afraid, but seem reasonable, all the same.

Woolwinders
This shop is on a street in a modern area of Rockville that seems to be just a suburban residential area, but then you find shops interspersed into the housing, just like in Europe and, just beside a Quizno's, the Local Yarn Store, Woolwinders.

It's been run by a new owner for almost a year, is spacious, airy, and was full of sunlight on the sunny Sunday morning when we visited. My AG is mainly on the look-out for sock yarns, and commented that, although it didn't have a huge amount of the "standard" brands (Opal, Trekking, Regia), it did have a lot of "indie" labels. The AG bought some Spud & Chloe Fine Sock yarn, so doubtless you'll see pictures of that here in a few months, after it hits the needles.
One yarn that Woolwinders has quite a bit of, and which has great (to my fingers) texture and certainly great colours, is Blue Ridge Yarns, from a lady in Amissville, VA.














Another nice thing about this shop is that, with all the light, they also have lots of knit-up samples, so you can see just how a colourway will turn out - useful if you've no experience with the dyeing patterns.
For all the pictures that I took of Woolwinders please see this album on PhotoBucket. You'll see how roomy and well-lit the shop is.

The Yarn Spot
Laid out very differently to Woolwinders, The Yarn Spot on Georgia Ave, Wheaton, was actually our real reason for being in DC ...... the AG belongs to the Three Irish Girls yarn club, and the Boss Lady of the three was due to teach and have a trunk show and sale there that Sunday. As she's been moved to the far northern wastes of Duluth, MN, for most of the year, getting a chance to meet her in the area (well, only 150 miles away) was irresistible. As a result, I regret to say that the photos are almost all of her yarn, and not of The Yarn Spot, which is a rather nice and very friendly shop, despite being totally overrun with Yarnista-fans!

Here's the AG with The Yarnista herself (fresh from the wild northern wastes, of course, first discovered by the Sieur de Lhut). I, of course, was handed her rather swish Nikon to take a picture of her with two other customers, and blazed off three in a row to demonstrate that only a man can make the same mistake twice in under a second! (She might have warned me that it was on burst repeat [grin]).


To the right is what the AG scored from the afternoon. I'm now looking forward to more sox!

Here are some pictures of the Trunk Sale.


Please excuse the odd blurred area - if you look closely you'll see that most of them are actually people taking or replacing items, and being "caught in the act"!

For the rest of the pictures please see my PhotoBucket album here.

So thank you to both stores for being welcoming, friendly, having great wool, and being totally worth the 300 mile round-trip.

[Tech]
Just one item today - for those involved with SSIS there's a great resource at Sherry's BI Corner.

TTFN

Knothing But Knitting for Ewe

Last year we did a kind of tour around all the yarn shops in the Philadelphia area that my wife could find in the phone book, etc. I came along (usually as driver), and took pictures. Here are some of them. What I will say, before all of these, is that the knitting community has some of the friendliest people around. Knitting To Know Ewe, Wrightstown, PA This may look totally disorganised, but really it seems that it's very easy to find things. Here's a selection of their wools - just a beautiful colour array. Loop, South Street, Philadelphia Loop is one of no less than three yarn shops on South Street. It's a very modern store, with beautiful new hardwood floors and a very Scandinavian feel to it. One of their favourite tricks is to arrange skeins of hand-dyed yarn of very similar colours in arrays on the walls. It took me a long time to persuade my digital camera to reproduce what my eyes were telling me were the colours. In these two you see a span of oranges and a span of blues. You have to believe me when I tell you that it took about 25 pictures to get the colours in the camera to match those on the wall! In the end I had to resort to holding my had in front of the light source to get the camera to register colour corectly. Then, of course, there was the smell of scorching flesh if I did that for too long !

The background image above is a close-up of an array of hand-dyed yarn from Loop's wall. I'm not too sure that the effect is working too well with the text, unfortunately, but it certainly is an interesting example of what you can achieve within the limits of the HTML you can include in a blog.

More woolly things next time.