Knit One, Purr Too

A day of yarn and tea

At the First Friday craft night last night someone brought up the fact that Skein Lane was going out of business. But it's in El Cerrito and we were all a little more interested in discussing, instead, the fact that there is a new yarn store apparently opening up in West Sacramento, which is a lot closer. And I didn't think anything more of the fact that there was a long-time yarn store shutting its doors until this morning, when my knitting mom called and said 'Hey. Want to go to El Cerrito and check it out?'

Richard, of course, was oh-so-upset (not!) with me deciding to go on a yarn crawl instead of staying home, since our plans pre-phone call included grocery shopping, and the rather arduous task of packing all the recyclables into a car to take them to the recycling center (my town, unfortunately, does not provide curbside recycling). So he got to stay home and spend a lovely lazy day doing only fun things and poking at cats, and I drove off to pick up my knitting mom, and off we went.

Skein Lane looks like it was a very nice store. There was still quite a large selection of yarn available, even though they've been going through the process of selling off all their stock for a week or more. We spent a fair bit of time browsing through the store, checking out what was available, but naturally the two of us gravitated towards the display of sock yarn and I am sure it comes as no surprise when I note that sock yarn made up the bulk of what I eventually bought (see picture below). I also succombed to the allure of a skein of something by Noro that looked perfect for my One Skein secret pal, and four skeins of cotton in swirls of pinks and purples that will likely become something for either my niece, or some random baby.

Since we were both hungry by the time we were done in El Cerrito, my knitting mom suggested we take a short detour through Benicia on the way home to check out the cute little yarn store there, as well as see if the tea room around the corner had any space for two for lunch.

The Benicia store is small, but cute, and has a lovely selection of yarns that are well displayed and organized, including a large selection of Koigu. If I hadn't already had a bag of new sock yarn in the trunk of the car, I could have easily done some serious sock yarn stash enhancement there. Absolutely gorgeous stuff.

The tea room did have room for us (a rare thing, since usually you can only get into tea rooms with a reservation) so the two of us nibbled scones and tiny little tea sandwiches and sipped tea, and the followed all of that with bowls of fresh peach cobbler topped with homemade whipped cream until we were completely stuffed.

It was a fun little impromptu yarn crawl, and even though I really do not need to buy any new sock yarn for quite possibly the next several *years* based on the recent alarming accumulation of new stuff, I am still quite pleased with what we were able to find.

Posted by Jenipurr at August 5, 2006 08:45 AM