A Pile of Booty

I never did update you on what I managed to buy while we were in Scotland.

There was this, not inconsiderable, pile of crafty books -

There's, from the bottom, a lovely book on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Designers Design for Themselves which is about American Arts and Design, Knitting in Vogue (Patterns from the 1930s to the 1980s), Knitting Nostalgia - Knitwear 1920-1950, Amish and Menonite Quilts, Designing for Weaving, The Knit Kit, Handknit Style, Simplicity's Quilts and Patches, and finally Spinning and Weaving at Home which includes instructions for making a spinning wheel out of a bicycle - not sure I'll be trying that but it's a interesting book anyway.

I also had a little Stash Enhancement Moment which resulted in the following -

That's 200g of merino in lovely tones of green and a ball of the brightest Opal sock yarn I could find. I have to say that stash enhancement opportunities were few and far between. I had a vague plan of buying some Jamieson & Smith shetland in various colours with the aim of some fair isle knitting but I never actually saw any in any yarn shop I was in. Sadly it seems that yarn shops in Scotland have fallen by the wayside exactly as they have in England. Perth didn't seem to have a yarn shop at all, most of the other shops I was in were full of acrylic stuff and baby yarn. Twist Fibre Craft Studio in Newburgh was a beautiful shop, with lovely stock (and it was there that I bought the things pictured above), but by and large I was disappointed with the quality/choice of the yarns available elsewhere. I'd got it in my head that there would be lots of great yarn shops lurking in the many places we visited but alas this was not to be. Maybe we were in the wrong places, or maybe our timing was bad - certainly there were shops I knew about that we didn't get to because we weren't in the right area when they were open, or we just didn't have the time to spare to make a detour. Probably just as well - if they'd all been great shops I'd be bankrupt!

Next post on Monday hopefully, when I will be reporting on my trip to London on Sunday - to a comic fair primarily - might manage to squeeze a yarn shop in somewhere if any are open on a Sunday.

Also I have exciting news about something happening later in the week, which involves another trip to London. I have such a cosmopolitan lifestyle.