The Yarn Girls Go Shopping

Julie and I went "shopping" on Madison and 5th Avenues on Monday. "Shopping" in this sense means going around to expensive stores (think Barney's, Henri Bendel, Bergdorff Goodman...) and not buying anything- (who has the $$ in this down economy for $300 hats?) - but instead, looking for pricey knits that our customers can make for less! Well, we suceeded. We found lots of cute hats, scarves and other knit accessories that were $200 or more - that can easily be knit up for somewhere in the fifty dollar range. Already I've knit up a cute Balaclava out of Teva Duraham's Tundra (that's me in my knock off - above- think how great this will be in December when it is zero degrees outside!), and a chunky striped beret out of Blue Sky Bulky. Julie is working on an adorable cap with a brim out of Blue Sky Alpaca Worsted and Mercedes is making a chic scarf in black and white out of Karabella La llama. In the next few weeks we will get all the projects up on our website and hopefully get out a newsletter giving you some great gift ideas for the holidays that although they are still two months away - will be upon us before we know it. And who can believe that election day is less than a week away! To help ease your jitters between now and late Tuesday night (hopefully) - we are having an Election Day Sale! All yarns in the store will be 10% off. It is a great time to begin making some holiday gifts - save some $$ on yarn and ease your anxiety by doing a little "knitting as stress relief."

Computer Trouble!

Have we had computer problems!!!! A virus took over our computer a few weeks ago. Finally after Julie spent many many hours trying to get the virus off our computer, we had to call a real tech person to come in and fix us up (he was here for 4 and a half hours!) Then when he left - for some reason our virus protection was not on and over the weekend we got 2 new viruses. Julie managed to eradicate those herself. And she had to install new memory so that the computer would move faster than a turtle! So that's why there have been no blogs. (excuses, excuses...) But - we are hopefully back up and running. Things here at the yarn co are great. We have gotten in pretty much all of our new yarns and they are just to die for. Yesterday we finally received our Bottega 100% Cashmere - Julie will put it on the site next week. It comes in 11 great colors and is a good buy for 100% cashmere - 125 yards at 4.5 sts to the inch for $45.00! If your pockets are not quite that deep in these trying economic times - we also have beautiful merino hp - I must make a sweater for Zoe out of this. And new Teva Durham yarn, Tundra- it is thick like Tahki Baby but super soft and much lighter feeling. We made a cool raglan sweater that is knit from the top down - not really my thing this top down knitting - especially for an adult sweater - who wants to carry their whole sweater around with them?? But it came out nice and is a little different. We also got a beautiful organic multi colored merino wool called Nimbus. We made an adorable baby sweater from it - it has a cool diagonal edge at the neck. We stole the patten from Sarah Gochberg - she brought her little sweater in for finishing and we thought it was such a nice detail! I taught Max how to knit last week. He totally got it - although he does not have the patience to sit and knit more than a few stitches at a time - all of the sudden after the third or fourth stitch his eyes begin darting around the room seeing the gazillion other things he could be doing. But he wanted me to teach him because I am going to go into his 1st grade class and give them knitting lessons. Should be interesting. But - it is part of the first grade cirriculum at Waldorf schools so I figured why not give it a try! Tahki very nicely donated 30 balls of multi colored Baby yarn for the kids to learn on. I'm excited to do it! And I'll keep you posted on how it goes.