Holiday Stashing - Part Un

I was a very good Melody on our holiday to North Wales and was very restrained where yarn shopping was concerned - honest!

On our way up to Llanberis we stopped at Abakhan Fabrics for a picnic lunch. The boys were able to stretch their legs on the adventure playground and swings with Mr Melody, while I dodged into the yarn shop for a quick reccie. I came out without buying any yarn, but did buy an open-ended zip! That's totally unlike me.

On our first proper day in Wales we popped into Craig-Y-Don to do food shopping; boring, I know, but someone's gotta do it. I went looking for the Wool Post as last year the shop had moved to smaller premises on the opposite side of the road to where it had been previously. But this year? It had disappeared completely I’m afraid :(

Probably the best yarn-shop-stop this holiday was the day trip to Colinette to visit a few of my forum friends who were attending a workshop there, and to actually visit the Colinette shop in person. I had a list of the yarns I wanted to buy in my head, and had taken the only two Colinette books I possessed with me, you know, to consult in case I forgot what I wanted and how many skeins I needed.

However, fairly soon after arriving my list went out of my head completely, and so I set about chatting to Jackie, Joy, Christina, Linda, Carola, Diane at Colinette, and the ‘Pirate Purls, Knitting Girls’ (who were the Colinette Paparazzi for the day), whilst idly fondling yarns and oohhhing and aaaahing at the colours.

I bought a stack of pattern booklets from the Colinette shop, three skeins of Parisienne from the millshop itself and ordered seven skeins of Zanziba to be dyed in the raspberry colourway to knit Rachael from the Portmanteau booklet. The book is now unfortunately discontinued, so Diane kindly gave me a copy of the pattern with my yarn. I also bought skeins of the new Iona aran weight yarn in a lovely denimy blue colourway called Slate, to knit something from the new Iona book, which will probably be the Ula sweater or cardigan.

The books:

I also bought a couple of pairs of Brittany Birch straights - which have recently become my straight needles of choice - and a set of five Prym bamboo sock DPNs which are probably the slinkiest and smoothest bamboo DPNs I’ve knitted with. THe DPNs are not in this piccie though cos they're in a sock!

My haul from Colinette:


The Melody Family had to run like the wind to catch the 1pm train to Welshpool on the Llanfair Caereinion Steam Railway I can tell you!

More stashing exploits later.....