Stash report!

While we were up in Leeds two weekends ago, I grabbed a train for Bradford just after we arrived on Friday afternoon, and made my way to Texere Yarns. (The train to Forster Square is the one you want, runs every half hour during the day.) Texere is a great way to blow your yarn budget.

My favorite way to shop at Texere is to climb onto their (newish) website, take note of the stuff I want to look and touch, and then dive in headlong. The climb up the hill from Forster Square is a bit steep, but you can go through the Cathedral yard to cut off some time. Once you get there, you ring for admittance, and from there on out, if you’re on a tight schedule, you’d better set an alarm.

On the left: what I think of as the “brand names” yarn room. A hallway with books on many subjects and a lot of embroidery threads. Another “brand names” yarn room. Up the stairs past the office, and you’re into the warehouse. In barrels at the doorways, you can grab an enormous plastic bag in which to triumphantly cache your prizes. Poking into every corner is recommended, you sometimes find the most unexpected things.

This time around I was looking for Christmas presents bits and pieces, and for yarns for a pattern I have in mind.

A couple of hours later, I had my haul:

That’s 5 cones of acrylic Paradise Chenille in Herb (I didn’t actually need so many, but it was on sale for 5 cones for £10.00) to go with 3 skeins of Mango Moon’s Capelli in Sage for one of my upcoming patterns (envisioned, but not yet on paper). Two cones of Divine mulberry silk chenille, for the same pattern but in a different yarn and colorway. Some leather, some squares of cut velvet, a precious and lone ball of Louisa Harding Angora with two balls of Louisa Harding La Salute mohair to match.

Oh, plus there was one of Louisa Harding’s Venezia books, on sale for four quid.

I returned to Leeds feeling very smug.

Monday morning: Baa Ram Ewe is another kettle of fish entirely from the great big, rambling warehouse of Texere. It was recommended to me as being a store that embodied the idea of “small but perfectly formed”, and it did not disappoint. (“Jewel-like” comes to mind.) In the university town of Headingley near Leeds (a quick bus ride from the city center), Baa Ram Ewe is just this side of “tiny”, with a work table to one side, the register to the other, and the walls lined with yarn.

Here (after much petting of yarn and much agonizing over how much to go over budget) I scored a ball of Orkney Angora’s two-ply in a soft green (looks like Pretty Thing to me!), a skein of Kirsty Clarke and Wharfedale Woolworks’s banana fibre yarn in “Sea Green”, and a copy of Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitting Without Tears, which is a rare enough find that I felt I should buy it on general principle. (As it so happens, I have a dear friend who needs cheering up; I will probably gift her with the copy of EZ, the loveliest yarn for a beginning knitter I can find in colors I hope she’ll love, and some high quality pins.)

And that, dear friends, is exactly how I found Kirsty in order to ask her to take part in our KAL for Knit-A-Square.

Also, when you spend over £*mrrrph hmrph murrph*, they give you a delightful little bag with their cute logo, and which, more importantly than cute, has handles that will actually go over your shoulder.

All in all, it was a really lovely weekend, yarn-wise.

Okay, everyone, it’s time for our battle cry: “Stash Locally, Shop Globally!”

In other news, I have finally settled on a pattern for the Filatura di Crosa Superior cashmere/silk yarn. From Russia With Love (PDF), but without the center motifs, because, while it looked absolutely lovely with the center motifs, I’ve a feeling the recipient will decide that it is altogether too delicate for her to wear and she’d put it away, carefully wrapped up in tissue, in a drawer somewhere instead of wearing it. So it’ll just be the borders and plain garter stitch, in a half-Mobius tube.

Even in plain old garter stitch, it’s almost unbearably lovely. And that’s including that the garter stitch isn’t the most even thing in the world — I think the loose fibers are getting caught up as I knit, making some of the stitches bigger than others.  Hopefully it’ll clean up a bit when blocked. Which reminds me…blocking wires…must buy blocking wires…

Is there any way at all for me to convey how much I love this yarn? It’s like knitting with kittens.* There’s that same feeling of delicacy, of that fragile, oh-goodness-I-could-break-this-really-easily thing that you get when you pick up a kitten — only to watch that kitten manage all kinds of things that it doesn’t seem strong enough to do without breaking.

I am going to be knitting with this yarn again. Definitely. (Amazingly, Superior seems to be cheaper outside of Italy. Or, perhaps un-amazingly, cheaper outside of Venice. Never mind, it was worth it.)

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* No kittens were harmed in the making of this yarn. That I know of, anyway. I mean, I don’t know what Filatura di Crosa gets up to when we’re not looking. But I doubt it involves kittens. I hope.