Monday, October 7, 2013

SHOP HOP ATLANTA PART FOUR OF FOUR




Hello, and welcome back to knitwhim’s Shop Hop Saga.

So far we’ve covered 6 of the nine stores that participated in the hop. Today we’ll cover the last three…. If you remember we were racing against the clock. It was 4:30 PM, two of the remaining stores closed at 6 and they were half an hour apart, plus there was rush hour traffic. Could we make them in time??


Let me just tell you, this store just doesn’t play fair! They had a park bench loaded with malabrigo first thing next to the door. Don’t they know that yarn is like cat nip for knitters? I resisted the urge to touch it. This store was of the Open floor Plan variety, and they had a good selection of high-end (i.e Expensive ) yarns. They even had some very lovely hand dyed yarns from local artist. I always love to see that!
We had one more store on our list that closed at six, and we asked them if they thought we could make it. They told us, straight out : No way! Don’t even try. According to them, traffic would be so bad it would take us an hour to get there. It was 5:15 and my GPS said it would take 22 minutes, so Amanda and I decided to go for it. Almost immediately we got stuck at a red light, and we hit every other red light on our way to the freeway. Once we got there we thought we would be able to speed a little to make up time, but it was slow too! My GPS predicted we wouldn’t arrive until 6:05 PM, So close! I decided to call the store in advance and find out if maybe they could possibly stay open for us…… And they said yes! The man who answered the phone said he wouldn’t mind staying open an extra 15 minutes. Score!
But as we crawled along in a nerve-racking slow speed, our ETA  prediction got more and more dire.  We were only 5 miles away and yet it said it would take us 15 minutes to get there. I called again,  to say that it was going to take us longer to get there, and we understood if he wanted to just leave, *but he didn’t * oh no, he stayed open and we arrived at Rare Purls the happiest most thankfull knitters on the planet. Luke, you are awesome!


Honestly we didn’t really get a good look at this store, we felt bad making  Luke stay late and just wanted to find something to buy fast. They did have some of my favorite hand-knit items of the day on display. There was this one red shawl I really liked – it had a row of ribbon yarn mixed in randomly throughout, very cool! It was draped over a gorgeous spinning wheel, Kind of a shame they had it all covered up, but I’m guessing it must have been fragile because they had a ‘do not touch’ sign attached to it.  I made my first fiber purchase here and we took off at light speed.


The 9th and final stop on the Yarn Hop! It was 45 minutes back in the direction we had come, but they were the only sore open until 8PM which is why we had saved them for last. We got there at 7:30, whew! Plenty of time.


This store was wicked awesome, I’m not going to lie. If Augusta ever gets a LYS (Fat Chance ) I hope it takes notes here!  The Neon sign has knitting needles on it, I’m not sure if  you can tell from my blurry photo.  This store had a very open design, complete with a ‘living room’ area with two couches. There were two women spinning on their wheels there. Squee ^^;; I was so happy to see spinners out and about, it made me happy.  The spinners were very friendly too, I didn’t even get to look at the yarn for the first ten minutes, because we were having too much fun chatting!

The yarn selection was impeccable  - They were the only store to stock more elle rea than cascade, but they had it in ALL the colors, which is what is really more important, you know?

They had some really awesome fiber, including Gales Art and fiber from Lorna’s Laces. (I got the later. )

I also found out that they have a monthly sock club, with sock yarn designed specially for them.…..


So yes, the store had it all. Even a kitchen sink.

And that’s it!  We got our 9th stamp, made sure our names were on the passports, and turned them in.  We’ll find out in two weeks if we win anything or not. Obviously we would really like to win something… we certainly wouldn’t complain if  we won the grand prize J  But honestly, and I’m being completely serious here, I feel like we are already winners. Hitting all nine stores in one day seemed like an impossibility – for about 4 hours there I really didn’t think we’d be able to do it. But we did, we stayed on budget, mostly, and scored a lot of delicious yarn and fiber.  We will definitely be doing the Shop Hop again next year, and for those of you in the Atlanta area, if you didn’t participate this year, mark your calendars, I think you’ll enjoy it!

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