It’s March, so once again it’s Yarn Crawl time! It’s time for the scenic drive from Salem to Gloucester and back again.  This year’s crawl seemed a little scaled back for some reason. Maybe it’s the economy, the “sequester” or the cold weather, but the stores I visited were less crowded than usual.  Even the Ravelry boards were quieter than usual as the Crawl approached.  *shrug* I scaled back a bit as well, crawling on Saturday only due to impending bills and my dental payment plan of $330 looming this week. So I gave up my Sunday route of driving up Route 22 to Newburyport. Stupid root canal…

My sister/partner in crawling came along as usual but didn’t spend any money this year.  I admire her restraint. I can’t say I practiced much of it myself Saturday, but compared to last year, I kinda sorta did.  Saturday was a beautiful day; sunny but freezing. We started our crawl at our LYS as usual: Seed Stitch Fine Yarns in Salem.

For the second year local dyer Ana from Toil And Trouble had a huge table bursting with colorful yarn at the front of the store. Can I resist gorgeous sock yarn? No. No, I can’t. Look at this spread. Ana is a one-woman color factory! It was hard choosing what color I wanted, but I knew it would be sock yarn, and I knew I would pick up two skeins because I didn’t want to run out in case one skein wasn’t enough for a pair of socks. The sign to the left is cut off, but it reads “Need sweater quantities? Let’s do it!” I like the way she thinks! Unlike some of the other stores, Seed Stitch was pretty crowded. Andrea at the cash register greeted us when we came in and said with a smile, “I knew I’d be seeing you today!” I love Seed Stitch and I’m so glad they’re in my own town. I chose two skeins of single-ply Superwash Merino in the color Kelpie from the Mythos collection:

The flash on my camera’s obscuring the color a little, but you can see it pretty clearly. I like the little tags; they read “bookishly inspired.”  At Seed Stitch I also picked up the Spring issue of Vogue Knitting–just in time for another storm and 8 inches of snow on the ground!

We left Salem and drove through Beverly on our way to Beverly Farms.  I love driving through Beverly on Route 127 because the ocean is on the right the whole way.  We pass beautiful houses; some were built in the 1700s, some are new and mind-boggling mansions, as well as the beautiful campus of Endicott College.  I always sort of hold my breath before plunging into Yarns In The Farms much like a diver hitting the water because this store is very tiny and during Yarn Crawl it’s packed full of people.  It makes me a little  claustrophobic because the layout of the store means that people tend to mill around the entrance.  I was pleasantly surprised to find the store fairly empty. There is a large table near the front that was switched from a horizontal position to vertical and that made a lot more room near the front. I was happy to have a little breathing room (literally) but I’m sure they had a ton of people in and out during the Crawl.  I say this every year, but I love Yarns In The Farms for their eclectic vibe and funky attitude.  Some day I’ll take a class here, I swear!  My sister was disappointed that she didn’t see any CYE pattern booklets for sale this year.  I didn’t buy any yarn but I bought two small packets of roving for needle felting.

Leaving Yarns In The Farms, we drive for miles and miles and miles through residential neighborhoods until we get to Gloucester.  It’s only a half hour or so, but sometimes the remainder of the drive seems endless until I start seeing signs for downtown Gloucester and its tourist attractions. I get somewhat restless until I know I’m approaching Stage Fort Park and the famous Gloucester fisherman statue. (No, it’s not the Gorton Fisherman, but it’s down the street from their offices).  Now Sis and I are excited: we’re heading towards Gloucester’s notorious Coveted Yarns–famous for staying open crazy late hours and during blizzards.  Their Yarn Crawl hours this year for all four days were 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM. I know I can get quality spinning fiber here, and it’s become an annual tradition that Heather, aka Mad Color Fiber Company, takes over their back room with a huge rack of her hand-dyed yarn and fiber.  She never disappoints and this year was no exception.

Coveted Yarns was not as crowded as usual for the crawl; last year the cash register line stretched back to almost the last room in the store. I counted 20 people when I got on the line and staff members actually went down the line distributing free yarn to make up for the long wait! This year there were only three people ahead of me in line.  I picked up some amazing Blue-Faced Leicester in a color called “Police Box Blue.” Heh heh– It’s a special reference for special people. *coughscifigeekscough* Heather and I had a great fangirl discussion of the sci-fi TV show Doctor Who (it’s about an alien who travels through time and spacein a spaceship that looks like a blue old-time British police box, in case you didn’t know).  My spinning stash was greatly enhanced on Saturday.  In addition to the solid blue, I bought two braids of Shetland Combed Top in Acid Wash.

The batteries on my digital camera died so i don’t have photos of the Police Box Blue on my spindle. So sad.

It’s become an annual tradition to pick up another bumper sticker at Coveted Yarns. Look at my car! So classy!

This year, a new store participated in the crawl. Hooked Knitting in Essex opened their doors in January.  I do love investigating a new yarn store.  Foregoing Route 127, I took Route 133 over to Essex, and I could hop on the highway or stay on it to get home from there.  I like to have my driving routes perfectly planned, so if I seem a little OCD about describing them, forgive me. 🙂

The first thing we did when we got to Essex was pull into Woodman’s Fried Clams.  This family-owned business has been thriving for over 100 years and is famous for inventing the fried clam. But I don’t like seafood, so I go there for the onion rings. Best. Onion. Rings. Ever. Seriously. Look at them! Woodmans is open year-round. In the summer the lines are out the door and around the block for their fried clams and fresh lobsters, and even on a cold day in March the line was almost out the door. 

Sated by onion rings, we set off to find Hooked Knitting, and, as far as Essex goes, the store couldn’t be more conveniently located.  It’s on the first floor of a bank building, but in the back, right on the only public parking lot in town. Since this was where I had planned to park anyway, I was pretty happy. (The OCD thing applies to parking, as well. Sorry!)

Hooked Knitting is a small and very pleasant store. The owner stocks some high-end stuff like Malabrigo and Shibui, with a good magazine rack in the back.  What set Hooked apart from the other stores on the crawl? Food! Yep–they had a lovely spread in a small side room with three crock pots, coffee and some baked goods.  “Have some lunch!” the owner greeted everyone as they came into the shop. It was here that I made my most extravagant purchase, and, as my dental payment looms, I feel a little guilty about it. I bought this gorgeous ShibuiKnits silk scarf kit.  Look at those beautiful colors! There was a sample knit in the store and the silk knits up beautifully.  These colors just got to me, they’re so organic. This will surely be a classic wardrobe staple once it’s done.

So all in all Saturday was a good day.  Lots of new yarn to spin, lots of fun stuff to knit.  And the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem had some beautiful live Shetland sheep for visitors to greet outside the museum. They were holding a fiber and wool event! I don’t know if they held it during the crawl on purpose or not, but sadly, I didn’t go, deciding to buy yarn instead of learning about it’s history.  Most of the events sounded like they were geared more towards children, but I would have liked to watch the woman who spun fiber from the Angora rabbit sitting on her lap. Oh well. Maybe she’ll be back next year.

I don’t remember much from high-school science class thanks to my awesome ability to block out any information that a) I know I will never apply to daily life, and b) I don’t understand in the first place. But one thing I do remember is the trick for remembering all the colors in a spectrum by creating a person’s name out of the first letter of each color: Roy G. Biv. We all remember that little gem of information, right? Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Indigo-Violet.  Science class memories came flooding back to me this week as the colors formed on the Zauberball sock I’m knitting.  The colorway I’m using is made of all the colors of the rainbow. Also Skittles. I love the bright, cheerful colors, although I’m knitting the rainbow backwards here. The violet, which is very deep and really more of a black than violet, is first. So I’m knitting Vib. G. Yor. Hmm. Maybe Vib is Roy’s cousin from Russia, or some other faraway locale. It sounds like some mysterious, exotic name, doesn’t it?

I’ve worked on this sock for a little over a week now, in front of the tv, on my front porch, and in a hospital waiting room. I began this project for its portability due to some hospital appointments I needed to take my mom to. At the same time I bought the Zauberball, I picked up 4 skeins of Cascade Pima Cotton to start the Semele shawl as a nice lightweight summer project.  But the guilt from all the unfinished objects piling up is starting to weigh heavily on me.  Despite the addition of two more projects, the following are still languishing away in project bags and paper shopping bags, competing for my attention:

1. Cloudsong Cowl  The main color and contrasting color change several times, but the box colors don’t change on the chart. This threw me off, so I put it down.
2. Cambrian Cowl    From Coastal Knits. This is a thick, quick knit, but I reached a point where the pattern said to block before continuing. I didn’t feel like going through the trouble, so I put it down.
3. Albers Cowl   I threw this over in favor of the Cloudsong, with its fancy schmancy colorwork. Go figure.
4.   Jaywalker socks. I finished one sock, ran out of yarn, ordered another skein (it’s handdyed) and it’s not exactly the same. Eh, I’ll finish these eventually.
5. Cardigan #4    From Noro’s Catwalk 2 pattern collection. I’m actually more than halfway done, with only the right front and two short sleeves to go. But I put it down because it got too hot to knit. Last July.

I know. I’m not proud of myself.

Sometimes, we spinners, however isolated we may feel from time to time, come across a cosmic gesture that lets us know we are definitely not alone. Sometimes we come across a little reminder that lets us know that someone has been on the same path, and we’re reminded that–and this is important–spinning is a thing.

I came across this salt and pepper shaker set yesterday in a downtown antique store.  It only cost $6 for the set. At first I wasn’t sure I wanted to buy it. Despite the low price, I told myself I didn’t need another piece of junk cluttering up my house.  Yet I couldn’t shake the lure of the wheel, not even in tiny, salt-dispensing form.  It’s not the prettiest piece of ceramics I’ve ever seen, but I find its earthy utilitarianism somewhat comforting.

I love antiquing, and in every shop I visit, it’s obvious that salt and pepper shakers have been very popular down through time.  If it exists in real life, someone’s made salt and pepper shakers out of it.  There are many sets that were made as vacation souvenirs because they were popular items to take home, or to give as presents. I wondered who would make a salt and pepper set shaped like a spinning wheel and stool, and it occurred to me that whomever owned this set before me had to have been a spinner.  Who else would want a set shaped like a wheel? Maybe that person received this as a gift.

The store owner couldn’t tell me how old the set was or where it was made. There was no paper label so she ruled out Japan, and thinks it could have been made here in the US. I’ll try to do some research to shed some light on this mystery. She told me that a few years ago she purchased 250 sets of salt and pepper shakers from another dealer, and this set was the only one she had left.  She played around with the stool and laughed that she wasn’t sure if it went in front of the wheel or in the back behind the distaff.  As soon as she said that, I wasn’t sure, either, since I don’t use a wheel styled like the antique wheels. Fortunately, the answer to my question was already in my iPhone from the day before…

The stool goes on the side! You already knew that. Living in Salem, I’ve grown accustomed to coming across random witches and pirates.  Sometimes I even meet random Colonial citizens.  This summer, Saturdays have been dubbed Seventeenth-Century Saturdays, where we modern folk get to meet and greet our forefathers and foremothers. Last Saturday there was a group assembled in front of the Witch House. Many men in army uniforms were gathering for a muster, and sought recruits from the passersby.  Several ladies were present, demonstrating traditional crafts. There were also Colonial toys and games for children to try. I chatted for a few minutes with this lovely lady spinning flax for linen. The wheel is a 1970s reproduction of an antique wheel. She showed me flax that had been dyed with natural dyes such as marigold and logwood, in ranges from gray to natural to black, and light golden shades. The flax was beautiful and incredibly fine.  Some ladies behind her were sewing linen shirts by hand.

Eventually the men departed the camp to, I don’t know, march against the British or something.  The spinner also left. I don’t know if she went on a lunch break, or if the army needed her for some reason, but the other ladies were left to their own crafty devices under the saving grace of some shade trees on a 90-degree day.

These fine ladies fanned themselves against the heat:

These good ladies worked on their knitting and quilting:

It was a scene of productivity and ingenuity; things that we take for granted today. I vowed to appreciate these ideals more. Then I headed over to Rita’s, to take advantage of the Italian ice, and the air conditioning.

That’s right, there’s more.

On Sunday I was looking forward to visiting Newburyport more than anything else. It’s a beautiful Federal-style city located right on the Merrimack River. Downtown is full of beautiful red brick buildings dating from the early to mid 1800s that are full of shops and restaurants.  There’s a large open boardwalk and public park right on the water. A Loom With A View bills itself as “your fiber arts destination” and it really is a destination unto itself. For one thing, it’s the only store in the area that teaches spinning and weaving classes. They always have a small selection of Frabjous Fibers dyed top in stock, and I am incapable of visiting the store without buying some! As you can see, Sunday was no exception. I have been obsessed with the color turquoise for about a year now so this is what went home with me.  I don’t have any specific plans for this fiber, but the more I look at this photograph, the more I’m smitten with the turquoise and grey combination.  Something to think about…

I was disappointed that I missed Hannah Fettig’s appearance at ALWAV.  The store was a little quiet that morning. Her new book Coastal Knits was on my shopping list but there weren’t any copies left.

Sunday was another beautiful day for a drive with the windows down. Since I started with Newburyport first, that meant I had to yarn-crawl my way back home to Salem.  Sweet! We headed to Ipswich and dropped in on Loom N Shuttle, which was very crowded.  They had a lot of Noro, but no Debbie Bliss.  So my sister and I moved on to our last stop of the crawl, Cranberry Fiber Arts in Hamilton.  There were so many things I wanted to buy such as tons of gorgeous Malabrigo and beautiful ceramic buttons.  I found Coastal Knits here, as well as Debbie Bliss’s Folk Chic and Summer Essentials pattern book.  What is there to say about Coastal Knits except that it’s gorgeous? It’s a beautiful book, from the photographs to the layout to the patterns.  Most of the patterns are sweaters, along with some cute stranded fingerless mitts and a lovely chunky cowl.  One of my favorite features of the book is the schematic illustrations. Rather than a bland rendering of the sweater’s separate pieces, the garments are shown, along with measurements, on illustrated women that resemble each of the actual models photographed wearing each garment. It’s adorable!

Since CFA was our last stop, my sister and I dropped off our Crawl passports and crossed our fingers that we would be selected for a grand prize. No such luck so far, but I still have my fingers crossed!