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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