north shore yarn crawl 2010

"A yarn crawl? What is a yarn crawl?" That's the reaction I had when I read online about the North Shore Yarn Crawl, and I'm sure it was what my friends were wondering when I sent them the info. Think of it being like a pub crawl only there's no beer involved, just yarn!

We started our day of yarn shopping at a store called Seed Stitch Fine Yarn in Salem, Massachusetts. It's a nice, spacious store with tons of beautiful yarn choices. I really liked how they had a lot of knitted samples next to their yarn to demonstrate ways to use the yarn.

I found this really cool ribbon yarn by On-line Yarn that knits up in ruffles. One of the ladies that works at the shop was kind enough to explain how to pick up just the edge of the yarn (the yarn itself looks like it was knitted) to create the effect. I bought a few skeins to make a scarf in a fun, bright orange shade (in the picture below, it's the skein at the far left) plus some in a grey scheme (the skein underneath the pink knitted sample) for a more conservative palette.

I actually managed to knit up the orange scarf with the two skeins within a few hours. I'll have to take pictures of it and post it later because I like how it turned out, even though it's a little shorter than I had planned.

A few more pictures from this store:


Then we drove up to Marblehead and stopped at a shop called Yarn Over Marblehead. It's a cute little shop where my friend Jessica found a lot of pretty Noro skeins.


The owner suggested this place called Shubie's for us to stop at for lunch. What a great market! They have a huge deli counter full of yummy dishes to choose from, plus a sandwich counter where you can order a custom sandwich. There were some pretty neat food items in the store as well as a huge wine selection. Renee ended up having their udon noodle soup which came in a enormous bowl (she said it was quite yummy), and Jessica and I both had the grilled cheese sandwich.



Our next stop was at the Abbott Yarn Shoppe in Beverly. It was a tiny little shop with tons of yarn crammed into it! The ladies running it were really sweet and even gave us the pattern to these honeycomb mittens (I can't wait to make a pair!).


What really cracked us up was this set of rules for the shop. One of the owners' grandchildren made it and I think everyone should follow these rules.

Then we stopped at Yarns in the Farms which is also in Beverly. Despite the pouring rain, we managed to find a parking spot in some muddy grass and trekked into this cute shop. It's small, too, but packed with tons of yarn.

We saw this little dog at a couple of the stores that day. At least he was well dressed for the rainy weather!

Our last stop was at Coveted Yarns in Gloucester. It was a fairly large store that had a ton of gorgeous yarns, but the lighting was rather dim inside so it was difficult to see the difference between shades. What is neat is that they sell the "seconds" skeins of Lamb's Pride yarn, which honestly, you can hardly tell are "seconds". I grabbed a couple skeins of the bulky weight yarn, and found some pretty teal ribbon yarn (which ended up being a drop-stitch scarf).

I was thoroughly impressed by this wall of Noro yarn:

And here is what ended up being added to my yarn stash at home:

Now if I can just get myself back on track with completing some knitting projects! :)