The NYC Yarn Crawl was on this weekend and I am so lucky to be in town to participate and visit some of the many yarn stores here.
What a tons of inspiration I got.
I tried to plan a bit ahead, so I had a few projects already, in case I would come across just the right kind of yarn. With the choices of shops and in each of the shops the tons of choices of yarns, I got too many new ideas on top of my planned ones! Great to see how many kinds of yarns, textures and colours there exist of a simple string of wool, alpaca, merino or silk, or ...
Ten local yarn stores (LYS) participated in this year's yarn crawl; of these seven are in Manhattan and three in Brooklyn. My aim was to visit all of them, but three days are simply not enough time for all this yarn browsing, so I had to skip the Brooklyn stores.
Here you have the first three shops that I visited:
Purl Soho
This is probably the best known store in the city of all of them. I especially like their blog with new patterns being published occasionally. It is a nicely ordered store - very popular and not only for its knitting yarn, but also patchwork and embroidery. They have their own lovely brand of yarn, always in beautiful colours.
Downtown Yarns
One of the few stores, that I did not know of previously, but it instantly took to my liking as this is probably the only one of those visited this weekend that feels like a real mums&pops store. The people running it are extremely friendly and helpful with a really nice choice of yarns and with an atmosphere that just engages you immediately. Definitely a place that I will come back to.
School Products Yarn
This is one of the two stores that are the most difficult to find, as it is not on the ground floor and does not have any display windows. In fact, you can very easily miss the entrance, as you will first see the sign of the shop upon entering into the building and then you have to go to the 6th floor for the shop. It is supposed to be the oldest yarn store of New York, so on the sixth floor you are met with a plethora of yarn types and all of very good quality. Here you also find good yarns for weaving. The green cowl of my blog for the August Project is from there, both the pattern and the yarn.
