Golly. I hardly know where to begin after having spent a very intense week in London and Edinburgh. I was there for work as a visiting professor, which I'll write about on my
academic blog later if I can gather my thoughts on the experience. And I think I'm going to have to break up the shopping and crafting updates into separate posts here too, since there's just so much!
I had a lot of work to do while I was there, and my hosts had planned a lot of really fun activities for me, so there wasn't a huge amount of time for being a tourist. I've also been in both cities before and seen all the major sites, so this time I used small, independent yarn shops as my guide for exploring. I went to two shops in London and one in Edinburgh, and also stopped off in the yarn departments of quite a few of the major department stores, so I feel like I got a pretty good overview of what's available.
My first stop was
Loop in Islington, which also turned out to be my favorite of the shops. I really liked the neighborhood, which was in walking distance of University College London where I was based.
This is pretty much the perfect yarn shop. It's small, but has two floors filled with lovely yarns and it has a quirky vibe rather than the overly sweet pseudo-country style one often finds at such places. For some reason, I usually just ignore the sample knits in most stores, but the ones here (mostly lace shawls) were exquisite. My goal had been to buy some British yarn and to maybe find some buttons to replace the ugly ones on my
Plain and Simple Pullover. Loop had both. They specialize in antique buttons and some of them are totally amazing (and spendy). Here's what I ended up with:
The yarn is Juno "
Alice Sock," which is a fingering weight silk-alpaca-cashmere blend made in the UK. The color is called "Shadow Cave," and there's just enough to make some kind of simple shawl. I'm thinking maybe of making Henslowe (
Ravelry link here). I even got a cloth bag to go along with the purchase.
Later that same day I stopped in at the Liberty department store, and couldn't resist buying some Liberty Tana Lawn. The idea is to make hankies, but I may just admire it instead. They were selling a packet of three hankies there for something like thirteen pounds, and I got enough to make eight hankies for twelve. The pattern is called "
Lillian's Berries," I think. The yarn department there was almost entirely Rowan, which for some reason didn't appeal to me at all (Then. More on Rowan yarns in a later post...).
