while in seattle i managed to score a private yarn shop tour from one of the native knit-obsessed locals: the one-and-only Meg. she and i hit four yarn shops in a half day — her favorites near to where i was staying in the wallingford neighborhood of seattle. wallingford is a lovely neighborhood replete with vegan and veggie places (mighty-o being my fav), the lovely green lake, and of course, all things wooly. so Meg and i set out on a zippy little tour while she regaled me with tales of yarn.

i don’t quite remember the order in which we visited shops, but i do remember grabbing a vegan carrot cake and small production root beer at a little cafe just across the street from bad woman yarn. at bad woman i scored some Sublime angora merino to make myself a scarf. the shop was lovely, quite new, great selection, and even some tiny round elastic which i will be sewing into the tops of some of my knee-length socks.

i think next up was weaving works. many people have written about the store, some positive, some not so positive. the shop keepers when i visited were quite helpful. i picked out a bunch of spinning stuff: various types of fluff which i hadn’t seen in stores (soysilk, tussah silk top), a set of medium schacht cards for blending fiber, and some angelina sparkle to blend into some funky batts. i wanted to try out some majacraft wheels with the majacraft wild flyer, but they don’t stock them at weaving works. i think they only had louet and schacht wheels.

we then zipped up the hill to the acorn street shop. the store is very cozy and packed to the gills with yarn. i beelined it to the sale section and scored some lace weight light teal colored kid mohair. they also had some beautiful turned wood drop spindles from somewhere in washington state, but i didn’t get one for fear of breaking it. the people who worked there were exceedingly nice, the nicest and most helpful of all the stores.

the last store we managed to get to before it closed was the fiber gallery. i picked up enough ecological wool for a sweater (three massive 250 gram skeins in a nice light greyish beige) and some natural black alpaca spinning fiber and bright blue dyed mohair locks from two different washington based farms. the fiber gallery carries a lot of sock yarn and quite a few brands of yarn i hadn’t seen in the other stores. the layout is quite open and there is a big table in the front where you can sit and knit or peruse some books.

thanks to Meg i managed to get my seattle yarn fix and then some! another cool tool for finding local yarn stores you might not have seen is knitmap. all the stores i mentioned are on the site. i will definitely try to get to portland someday to satisfy all my wool cravings.