And Part III (Yarn Shop Hop)

Kamille's is located at Gardner Village, a fully restored pioneer town in West Jordan, with Archibald Gardner's 1853 flour mill at the center. West Jordan isn't exactly my favorite neighborhood, but Gardner Village is charming and Kamille's log cabin just gorgeous.

(Just imagine this in sunshine and green trees. Cute, huh? Yeah, I can't wait for spring either.)

Now, the inside is just as beautiful: the logs are visible, there's antique-y furniture, original art, and--yarn! Kamille's specializes in Plymouth Yarns, which I like, and yarns by Crystal Palace and Feza, which I don't like. Those three brands are the most prominent. There's a little Noro, a little Kraemer, some Berroco. The store carries plenty o' books, booklets and notions; there's a cozy sitting area downstairs and a classroom upstairs. Classes? Yes, very soon Ann Budd is going to teach four workshops here.

After an adventurous drive to a residential neighborhood way south, I arrived at my last stop, Three Wishes Fiber Arts. Once at a mall that got depressingly empty, the store moved to the backyard of the shop owner's house: Kristine built a cottage behind her house and, voilà, made it her new LYS.

Looks weird, is unorthodox, but it works. The inside of the cabin is a real yarn shop: there's a table large enough for the group of knitters who were happily stitching 'n' bitching when I arrived, and the floor-to-ceiling shelves are full of yarn: lots of Ella Rae, Thaki, and Manos del Uruguay, some Elemental Affects, St. Denis, and Fiber Optica, some Zauberball, Lang Yarns, and Filatura. And tons of stuff for weavers and spinners! Kristine wants to add a patio soon for happy summer knitting. If her cottage weren't so far away, I'd join!

Wasatch Yarn Shop Hop: Part II

Who can resist a challenge? Today's weather was crazy snowy yucky, but that didn't stop me, a still relatively unexperienced driver, to take our brand new car and drive it through the snow to unfamiliar areas in Salt Lake Suburbia.

My first stop was at Unwind, a LYS in Sandy (think Big Love) that shares a space with a funky jewelry/art/furniture shop.

Don't mind the gloomy atmosphere; that's just the weather. The interior is bright and cheerful and happy, and so is owner Corinne, who is totally into the Yarn Shop Hop's book theme and chose Dr. Seuss's Lorax. One of the free patterns is Lorax himself, made of Berroco Vintage and Katia Baltika:

I thought him so fantabulous that I got the yarn. When I mentioned that my gauge is usually off, Corinne gave me a few extra feet of Baltika (the fuzzy stuff), just to make sure I wouldn't run out. Now, that's cool! I enjoyed talking to her, and I liked her store. Corinne's definitely got a love for Cascade and Berroco yarns--there were more different yarns by each company than I knew existed, which doesn't mean all that much: I'm a faithful 220 and Ultra Alpaca knitter and don't usually explore beyond those staple yarns. This may change though. (I have my eye on Cascade Alpaca Lace. And Cascade Pure Alpaca. Just hand over an alpaca herd, please.) Corinne also likes local yarns, and besides Cascade and Berroco she keeps smaller batches of local or otherwise interesting yarns (such as hemp yarn, recycled silk yarn, and very artsy ribbon yarn, all by Darn Good Yarn). She has a variety of Katia yarns, but those are leftovers from before a recent store makeover, when she carried more novelty yarns. Now she is expanding on spinning supplies and even carries silk hankies! (Perhaps you vaguely remember that during one hot summer month in 2010, while getting more pregnant by the minute and thus more hormonal, I picked up a drop spindle and some fleece and gave it a go. It didn't go too well, but now I'm thinking that I wouldn't mind taking a class and learn it properly. Unwind would be a good place to do so.)

While in Sandy I also visited the other LYS there, Unraveled Sheep.

Unraveled Sheep's theme this week is The Wizard of Oz, and many yellow bricks took me through this well-stocked store to a bunch of happy knitters and a fluffy little dog curled up in front of a fire (the dog was curled up, not the knitters). Mary Triplett is the designer-in-residence, and it is perhaps of her love for colorful fair isle tams that the store has a wide selection of Elemental Affects yarns. Also present: Cascade (lots of it!) and Berroco, Rowan, Sublime, Debbie Bliss, some Noro and some Koigu, Filatura di Crosa, and Elsebeth Lavold. And a lot of other yarns. And magazines. Booklets. Books. In sum: this is quite the store.

Stay tuned to hear about my trip to Kamille's and Three Wishes Fiber Arts (I won't mention how lost I got. Suburbia is evil)!

Yarn Shop Hoppin'

Just in case I haven't mentioned this often enough yet, the SLC knitting scene rocks! The latest and greatest that our local yarn shops are doing is to host a one-week "Wasatch Front Yarn Shop Hop." Just think: seven yarn stores, two free patterns per store inspired by favorite movies and/or books, and a prize drawing at the end.

Not knowing any of the yarn shops but my beloved around-the-corner, greatest knitting community EVAH, Blazing Needles, I hopped to two stores yesterday, despite a 60% chance of heavy snowfalls. In sunny weather I arrived at the Black Sheep Wool Company, very conveniently located in downtown Salt Lake, just a few blocks from the Temple (i.e., should you visit SLC for touristy stuff, you're really close to this LYS):

This is quite a lovely yarn shop, with a large, open browsing and shopping area and an adjacent room for classes. There's some sock and baby yarn, but mostly the store seems to feature heavier, sweater-worthy yarns. There's lots of Berroco, Rowan, Cascade, Debbie Bliss, and Sublime, and yarns of other companies, and the store carries a large selection of pattern booklets (which makes me happy--I love pattern booklets).

Then there were a few dress forms wearing Miriam Felton designs. Yay--a trunk show! So I asked, is Ms. Felton coming to the store anytime soon? Em..., the saleswoman said..., Miriam works here. Really?? Really.

That just blew me away. I mean, the Icarus Shawl was one of my very early projects, and since then I've collected many of Miriam Felton's designs. I love her stuff! She's frequently teaching classes at the store, and blimme, I'm signing up for one.

(Do I feel stupid for not having known that Miriam Felton is a local? No more so than when I discovered that Susan Lawrence spends a lot of her time at Blazing Needles...)

By the time I made it to The Wool Cabin, the clouds had gotten seriously dark, and the temperature had dropped by 10 degrees:

The Wool Cabin is a large store, with a separate room full of comfy chairs for knitting groups (in 2011 the store won the title of "Best Social Knitworking"). The store had been described to me as a store for "Mormon grandmas" (said without any judgment, by a man Mormon himself), and sure enough, the store is very baby-oriented: lots of cotton and acrylic blends in pastel shades, samples of baby patterns are everywhere, every available baby pattern collection is in stock (or so it seemed). There's Debbie Bliss, Rowan, and Sublime again, but also some Madelinetosh and (very little) Lorna's Laces. My verdict: it's not my kind of store, but I'm glad it exists and serves its community well!

After two stores my baby-free time was up, and I went home. If all goes according to plan, I'll visit two more on Tuesday. I'll be sure to report back to you....

PS: The snow never came.

Baby, it's cold outside

You're so right: I'm cheating. I changed the timestamp to Friday, but in truth it's already Saturday morning as I'm writing these lines. We collectively pooped out at eight last night, without having blogged or done the dishes. One week of daycare, and the three of us are sick. Conrad's got two green "worms" creeping out of his nostrils at all times so that even the "nose police" can't keep up wiping snot off his face (that's daycare lingo), and DH and I have a cold too.

Anyway. It's Saturday morning and super duper cold outside. It was in the high teens when I snapped this photo at 7:20 am:

What you see is our backyard (the antlers? the "dude" trash can? Courtesy of the landlord's son, who's a pretty cool dude, so we kept his stuff), plus a hint of pink that greets us every morning. Yet one more thing I love about Salt Lake is the weather: we have had clear skies and sunny days almost the entire time we've been here. Very little rain, very little snow, very few gray days. I love the crisp, dry air. It's cold now, but by noon it'll be just another mild December day, perfect for a stroll through the neighborhood to watch people putting out Christmas lights. And what are you doing today?

The Santa Shack

When deciding on a neighborhood in Salt Lake City we had very little to go on. By pure chance we ended up in Sugar House, one of the oldest neighborhoods in town that is far enough away from downtown and the university to make for affordable living, without being in the 'burbs. A great mix of "normal" people lives here; students and families, older folks, white and blue collar workers. My favorite aspect of the neighborhood is that everything is within walking distance, including three big parks and two grocery stores (Whole Foods for Food [in the Michael Pollanean sense] and a regular one for everything else). What we don't have (not yet anyway; plans to change this are underway) is a large shopping mall. There's no Macy's in sight, and because of that we also don't have a mall Santa.

I hadn't thought about mall Santas before--or Santa Claus in general (after all, I grew up with the Weihnachtsmann)--until the topic came up among my mommy friends. I didn't think I was going to take Conrad to a mall, wait in line, and then plop him onto the lap of a stranger, especially since he is going through a bad case of separation anxiety. I changed my mind, though, when I saw the Sugar House Santa Shack, which, as I later learned, is somewhat famous among locals and an articulation of the neighborly anti-big-box-store attitude. A small wooden shack with a large Santa inside, just two blocks away.

So I bundled up the Bean, put him in his stroller, and took him to Santa. As anticipated (feared!), he lost his marbles when he met the hairy fella dressed in red. It took the photographer several stuffed animals that she had to throw at me (!) to squeeze a tiny smile out of Conrad. But here it is: a photo with Santa.