The NYC Yarn Crawl

Check out my haul!

This past weekend I participated in the 2009 NYC Yarn Crawl.  I forget how I found out about this, but I found out about the yarn crawl right before it started.  Right away I started trying to figure out how to hit every store.  I also tried to figure out who I could convince to come with me and I came to the sad conclusion that although I have knitting friends I don't have a whole lot of knitting friends in NYC.  Todd is usually a pretty good sport about my knitting habit especially since I made him the sweater and matching socks but I decided that I'd have this adventure on my own.

As it turned out I managed to hit seven stores.  Not too shabby.

1. Starting on Friday night I headed down to the east village to Downtown Yarns.  I convinced Todd to let me sneak in a store on a work day by driving to work and then promising him that we could have dinner nearby.  I had forgotten that I really like this little yarn store.  The people are very friendly and they have a good selection of interesting stuff.  Plus there is this very sweet golden retriever that can often be found asleep blending in with the skeins of wool.  I asked the women at the store what fun new stuff they'd gotten in and that turned out to be a really good idea.  This store also has a great display in their front window of knitted leaves.

Saturday was the main event and I decided that it would make the most sense to try to got to a group of stores that were sort of close together.  After close scrutinization of the map and list of participating stores I decided that I could get to the most stores by focusing on the west side of Manhattan.

2. In the morning afternoon I (finally) headed into Manhattan and started near the PATH station with  School Products (1201 Broadway, 3rd Floor).  I learned that they're the oldest yarn store in NYC and that they have a fantastic selection of hand-dyed cashmere.  I wandered around touching all the yarn and could have stayed there longer.

3. Nearby I stopped at Habu Textiles (135 West 29th Street).  This was a weird little shop with little baskets of tiny skeins of yarn on the floor.  It was interesting to see the unusual products that they sell, but I'm not sure I'd have stopped there if I'd known.

4. In the interest of saving time I hopped on the train to Knitty City (208 West 79th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway).  I'd walked by this store before, but had never actually been in it.  It is a nice store with some fun but expensive silk and cashmere novelty yarns.  Unfortunately it was jam packed.  I did managed to squeeze my way to the back of the store where I found some very nice ladies who had come into NYC together for the crawl and the sale yarns.

5. My next stop was the The Yarn Company (2274 Broadway near 82nd Street).  I'd been to this store once a while back with Nikki.  The people who run it are really nice and I was tempted by their fun displays to buy some tasty sock yarn and almost tempted to buy a cashmere scarf kit.

6. After a quick stop at a bodega to get a fruit salad I hiked the rest of the way up to Yarntopia (974 Amsterdam Avenue rear 108th Street).  I have mixed feelings about this store, but they have a nice selection of sock yarn and they were running an interesting deal on overstocked cashmere yarn: 30% off if you buy the rest of the stock.  This deal became less interesting when I realized that each ball was $50.

7. I got in a bonus store on Sunday when Jess' train got delayed.  I persuaded Todd to stop at Purl Soho (137 Sullivan Street) on the way to Penn Station.  I'm glad that I got to squeeze in Purl Soho because the people in the store are really nice and they make very good use of a tiny space.

There isn't a yarn store near us in Bayonne and the yarn meet up in our town is held at a coffee shop so I don't really have a circle of local knitters or a local yarn store, but I'd like to have one - it is on the list of requirements for our new town.  I like the idea of having a LYS.  On the one hand I want to be able to find good yarns at a good unrealistically cheap price.  On the other hand I'd like to have a place to meet other knitters and hang out with people who are as obsessed interested in knitting as I am.  Actual stores offer the opportunity to talk about yarn, get advice about patterns and to actually see and touch the yarns.  Unfortunately it is often cheaper to buy yarn online, but I appreciate the efforts of the organizers of the yarn crawl and the participation of the yarn stores so I did buy at least a little something from each store.  In an effort not to just go crazy I set out with a list of yarn for patterns I actually wanted to make, but I didn't actually find many of those yarns in the wild on the crawl.

The haul: At the top is the shopping tote provided by the yarn crawl organizers - one of the store owners said that it was wishful thinking, but by the end of the weekend I'd more than filled one.  In the second row is a pair of skeins of sock wool, a skein of Noro Daria Multi and The Yarn Girls' Guide to Knits for All Seasons (the book written by the owners) from The Yarn Co.; a black spangled novelty yarn and a lovely gray lace yarn from the sale bin at Knitty City.  On the right hand side with the Vogue knitting magazine are two different kinds of silk yarn I want to try to make the flowered scarf on the cover of the magazine with from Yarntopia.  In the next row is the very cool tote bag from Purl Soho; some gorgeous hand dyed cashmere from School Products; a skein of Misty Alpaca's Chunky to finally finish a pair of slippers; and some superwash wool also from the sale bin at Knitty City.  At the bottom is a new Jared Flood pattern book, some Road to China yarn to make the Beaumont Beanie and a couple of balls of Rowan Lima.

I really appreciated the stores that stayed open late for this event.  In the evening on Saturday Todd managed to wait until 7pm before he called to find out how things were going.  I think he was relieved to hear that I was done, but truth be told, if there had been some stores open even later I would have kept going.  Say for example if the Brooklyn stores had stayed open late I would have hiked all the way there to visit them.  Sadly I didn't win an of the raffles.  I almost thing it would be better to have more smaller raffle items so that more people could win.