Updated with more pictures on May 5, 2011.
Yesterday Sofia and I had quite the adventure. Maybe it was more like an odyssey. We walked all over SoHo. It started out when I asked her to help me find a hat for Melissa's Kentucky Derby party and grew from there. Since I'd been in Toronto where it is hard to get the kind of bread product I hope for when I order a bagel I wanted to start somewhere that I could get a NY style bagel with fancy cream cheese Sofia found Bagels on the Square and we met up there. As promised by the reviews they sell an excellent selection of proper NY style bagels - chewy on the inside, crispy on the outside (not bread in the shape of a donut) - with an excellent selection of cream cheese and I got to have exactly what I wanted: a toasted garlic bagel with sun-dried tomato and basil cream cheese. The only thing that would have made this better would have been for it to be a whole wheat garlic bagel, but I realize that would be some kind of miracle even in NYC. They do carry wholewheat everything bagels, but evidently to actually get one you have to get there a lot earlier than 11am.
For our next stop we wanted to have hot beverages to go with our bagels so after a tiny fight with google maps and the compass on Sofia's iPhone we went to the Porto Rico Importing Co. on Bleeker. There we were greeted with the amazing smell of delicious coffee and the beautiful sight of bag after bag of beans that looked good enough to eat. Sofia naughtily took a few pictures before we saw the sign asking for people not to take pictures.
Armed with food and drink we sat in a park trying to avoid pigeons and chatted over breakfast. Fortified with food we set off.
Since the hat shops didn't open until noon I convinced Sofia to nip down to Broome Street to "just look in the window" at Purl Soho. I hadn't been to Purl Soho since I'd stopped there to help Sofia pick up supplies for our S'n'B with Olivia H, but that was at their old location. Their new location is a beautiful big (by NY SoHo standards) space that must be four times as large as either of their old locations and now allows them to combine their fabric selection and their yarn selection in the same space. This actually worked out very well for me because in planning my derby outfit I'd decided I wanted to wear a pair of purple heels, and then do some sort of accented hat/dress combo and Purl Soho turned out to be the perfect place to find the fabric to do this with. Amazingly I had some self restraint and managed not to buy the kit for their "super easy baby blanket"despite touching the deliciously soft sample blanket in their window.
Walking away with just one yard of satiny soft cotton fabric, four yards of ribbon and one bobbin of thread we continued down Broom and happened upon the Harney & Sons SoHo store. Of course we had to stop and try their mother's bouquet blend and their Indian spice.
Moving on we finally made it to our first hat store: Eye Candy. Sadly it was it didn't have what we were looking for so we moved on to another hat shop that we came across just walking up Lafayette. Unfortunately, despite having a larger variety of nicer hats they didn't have quite what I was looking for. After that we stopped in Screaming Mimi's which despite having really fun stuff including an adorable scarf that caught Sofia's eye and a purple scarf that I bought, didn't have the right hats. In desperation we went up to Kmart where I bought an emergency backup cheapie hat.
I was just about to give up when I remembered that I'd seen a hat online at The Hat Shop that I thought might work. Sofia pointed out that it was "way in the other direction", "back where we started" in fact and got out her iPhone to try to dissuade me by showing me that we were .8 miles smack in the wrong direction. Nonetheless I persisted in dragging her back the way we'd come. We passed a vegetarian place, Quantum Leap, that we've earmarked for a future brunch of some kind which I'm hoping will include waffles or pancakes that are made with whole grains and also edible.
When we finally made it to The Hat Shop we discovered that not only do they have really great hats but they also have really nice sales people. I admired all their beautiful hats which were really works of art, and admittedly had a bit of sticker shock, before I finally had to ask the nice people about the hat that I'd seen online and I'm glad I did because it was didn't look anything like the pictures. The sales people even helped me to size it correctly (a hat shouldn't hide your eyebrows or show your forehead), took in the band with a couple of stitches, and helped my to adjust the brim to actually wear it. After that I felt a little bad that I'd picked out the least expensive item in the store, but I'm very happy with it and if I ever need a really great hat again I'll definitely be back. (I'd post a picture of the hat, but I don't want to give away my outfit for Saturday.) I'm only a tiny bit disappointed that I got an enormous bag instead of a hat box, but really that would have been overkill.
After the Hat Shop we happened to pass Wool and the Gang. We first learned about them at last years City Bakery knitting event and they sell their kits in fun paper bags. They have all their patterns in the store ready to wear too and you can either buy the kit or the finished product. In particular they have a luscious bulky weight fuchsia yarn that I really want to make something out of.
The abbreviated version of the rest of the afternoon is that I dragged Sofia to H&M where we failed to find a handbag, then to Victoria's Secret where I used two coupons, a gift card and a discount card and had a whole team of very nice sales people help me pick out the perfectly fitted bra before we finally headed to Whole Foods where we enjoyed sushi off the conveyor belt at their sushi bar and visited Ciao Bella for some dessert.
Being the slightly OCD type person that I am, I went and made a google map mapping out our stops and then looked up the total distance. This is what it gave me:
For our next stop we wanted to have hot beverages to go with our bagels so after a tiny fight with google maps and the compass on Sofia's iPhone we went to the Porto Rico Importing Co. on Bleeker. There we were greeted with the amazing smell of delicious coffee and the beautiful sight of bag after bag of beans that looked good enough to eat. Sofia naughtily took a few pictures before we saw the sign asking for people not to take pictures.
Armed with food and drink we sat in a park trying to avoid pigeons and chatted over breakfast. Fortified with food we set off.
Since the hat shops didn't open until noon I convinced Sofia to nip down to Broome Street to "just look in the window" at Purl Soho. I hadn't been to Purl Soho since I'd stopped there to help Sofia pick up supplies for our S'n'B with Olivia H, but that was at their old location. Their new location is a beautiful big (by NY SoHo standards) space that must be four times as large as either of their old locations and now allows them to combine their fabric selection and their yarn selection in the same space. This actually worked out very well for me because in planning my derby outfit I'd decided I wanted to wear a pair of purple heels, and then do some sort of accented hat/dress combo and Purl Soho turned out to be the perfect place to find the fabric to do this with. Amazingly I had some self restraint and managed not to buy the kit for their "super easy baby blanket"despite touching the deliciously soft sample blanket in their window.
 |
| Mmmm....yarn! (Which I did not buy.) |
Walking away with just one yard of satiny soft cotton fabric, four yards of ribbon and one bobbin of thread we continued down Broom and happened upon the Harney & Sons SoHo store. Of course we had to stop and try their mother's bouquet blend and their Indian spice.
Moving on we finally made it to our first hat store: Eye Candy. Sadly it was it didn't have what we were looking for so we moved on to another hat shop that we came across just walking up Lafayette. Unfortunately, despite having a larger variety of nicer hats they didn't have quite what I was looking for. After that we stopped in Screaming Mimi's which despite having really fun stuff including an adorable scarf that caught Sofia's eye and a purple scarf that I bought, didn't have the right hats. In desperation we went up to Kmart where I bought an emergency backup cheapie hat.
I was just about to give up when I remembered that I'd seen a hat online at The Hat Shop that I thought might work. Sofia pointed out that it was "way in the other direction", "back where we started" in fact and got out her iPhone to try to dissuade me by showing me that we were .8 miles smack in the wrong direction. Nonetheless I persisted in dragging her back the way we'd come. We passed a vegetarian place, Quantum Leap, that we've earmarked for a future brunch of some kind which I'm hoping will include waffles or pancakes that are made with whole grains and also edible.
When we finally made it to The Hat Shop we discovered that not only do they have really great hats but they also have really nice sales people. I admired all their beautiful hats which were really works of art, and admittedly had a bit of sticker shock, before I finally had to ask the nice people about the hat that I'd seen online and I'm glad I did because it was didn't look anything like the pictures. The sales people even helped me to size it correctly (a hat shouldn't hide your eyebrows or show your forehead), took in the band with a couple of stitches, and helped my to adjust the brim to actually wear it. After that I felt a little bad that I'd picked out the least expensive item in the store, but I'm very happy with it and if I ever need a really great hat again I'll definitely be back. (I'd post a picture of the hat, but I don't want to give away my outfit for Saturday.) I'm only a tiny bit disappointed that I got an enormous bag instead of a hat box, but really that would have been overkill.
After the Hat Shop we happened to pass Wool and the Gang. We first learned about them at last years City Bakery knitting event and they sell their kits in fun paper bags. They have all their patterns in the store ready to wear too and you can either buy the kit or the finished product. In particular they have a luscious bulky weight fuchsia yarn that I really want to make something out of.
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| Here Sofia is with the enormous hat bag in front of their fun summer window display. |
Being the slightly OCD type person that I am, I went and made a google map mapping out our stops and then looked up the total distance. This is what it gave me:
Needless to say we took much, much longer than the 1 hour and 15 minutes that google estimated, but it was very productive and lots of fun!
