Sunday 7 August 2011

Yarn Store Outing

A knitty friend of mine, BionicLaura works in a yarn store on the other side of Dublin, Winnie's Craft Café. To my shame, I hadn't yet made the trip to visit her or scope out the shop.
Well, I fixed that last Friday. I bundled Alice in the car and off I went.

I must say that it's a lovely shop. I was greeted with a really gorgeous window display of a knitted teddy bears picnic. So cute. I've no pictures, sadly, I was a bit remiss there.

Inside, the store has a great selection of yarns not available elsewhere along with the usual staples. There is also a huge selection of beads & jewellery making accessories. Needless to say the magpie in me made me buy some beads:


Miyuki Japanese Seed Beads 6/0 Round in Turquoise. Yum. I've no idea how many are in the tube, but I'm sure I'll find a use for them soon.

They also have lots of knitting notions, including these lovely stitch markers hand made by a woman in Uganda. I just had to get some:



I spied this lonely skein of laceweight in a basket on a table and snapped it up:



It's Garnstudio Drops Alpaca Lace. 70% Baby Alpaca, 30% Mulberry Silk. You can see the price, great value for 870 yards of laceweight. I think I might try to dye it.

You may remember I visited Cushendale Woollen Mills in Kilkenny last year, and absolutely loved the mills and their yarns. When I saw these skeins of DK I had to get them. I love the shade of charcoal:



There's also a really scrummy café in the back of the shop. While I was there two other lovely Dublin Knitters, (both Helens) arrived and we decided to have lunch together. I had the most delicious rocky road I've had in a long time. Alice also seemed to enjoy the millionaires shortbread!

Overall I must say it's a really lovely store with a great selection of yarns reasonably priced and the added bonus of the café in the back makes it a must visit. It's a shame it's a bit difficult to get to for me, but I'll definitely go back!

In knitting progress news, I've finished the yucca chart repeats on my Aeolian Shawl:



This took longer than I thought. The pattern states to repeat the yucca chart 12 times and you'll have 293 stitches. Not so. I think I ended up doing 15 or 16 repeats of the chart to get that stitch count. Still, I'm there now and ready to move on to the transition chart. This portion of the shawl used 22g of yarn, so I have 77g left. Hopefully it will be enough!

Good knitting!

5 comments:

Cathy said...

I bought the same beads when I was there. Used them for a shawl and have sone spare if you're short at any stage. Lovely to work with and fit a crochet hook!

sheknitupthat said...

I also have beads like that in green - lovely to knit with in fingering. Great shop review!

kelgell said...

That store on the other side of Dublin sounds great. I love the idea of a yarn store with a cafe.

Two Cables and a Frapp said...

Great items there ! The beads are really pretty as are the stitch markers. I see you are partial to blue. The lace is pretty and not too expensive. Looking forward to seeing shawl later. How are you finding the pattern ?

Knitrageous said...

Winnie's sounds wonderful! Can't wait to see your finished projects!