The Bay Area Yarn Crawl continued, and so did we today: Nina and I got to five yarn stores, three of which I had not known existed before we started getting ads telling us about this DIY Stitches on the part of the local shops.

There were poofy white clouds against bright blue skies and it seemed like every time we got out of the car we’d get this little burst of rain on our heads and it would stop while we were in the stores: we were little strings the cloud-cats were playing with. But since there was just enough water to tease, not to soak, it got pretty funny.

We had so much fun! There were other people following the same order of stores at the same time that we kept running into.

We snacked on homemade blueberry orange and raspberry orange muffins.

It was 5:35. There was a store I had scratched off my list because they also sold fabric, and in my experience the sewing stores have almost no yarns so why bother? But it was between us and home without going much out of the way at all and Nina headed for it because why not? We should be able to beat the closing this time.

There. At the eighth yarn store. There in that shop that sold fabric too and only there was the exact shade of the exact yarn that I’d wanted this whole time for a particular project I had not cast on all week because I just didn’t have what I wanted for it (and boy had I looked) and it had been dyed exactly the way I wanted it, heathered but with no splashes of black like so many of those have and I would be more specific but then it would spoil a surprise so never mind. I came out of there telling my old friend Thank you thank you thank you! for taking me there.

What you can’t see in this picture is that the wall past that mannequin on the left is solid yarn–and we’re talking the good stuff. Malabrigo. Woolfolk. Which I’d told Nina she had to come feel this.

She’d never heard of Woolfolk. Oooooooh!!! Five hunter green skeins came home with her, along with two skeins of the Malabrigo Rios that I had picked out one of–we can be each other’s backup plan.

That shop was for both of us the biggest purchase out of the whole two Saturdays’ worth of expeditions.

That’ll teach me.

At last we got home, got the menfolk, and took them out to dinner, and I am sitting here typing way too late, marveling at how much living got packed into ten short hours in one single stretched-taffee of a day.