This weekend I went on an impromptu yarn crawl with my mom. We headed down to San Jose, where our main objective was to stop at Kinokinuya, the Japanese bookstore chain. They have one in San Francisco, too, but it’s easier to get to the one in San Jose and easier to park.
(Aside: my family has a history of watching Japanese and other Asian television. Living on the west coast, they pipe in a lot of it – last year on my mom’s recommendation, Jason and I highly enjoyed the historical Korean epic Dae Jang Geum. Oh, the hats! Anyway.)
So, I picked up a couple of Japanese books – one about knitted and crocheted purses and the other one was a beading book. For imports, these books had reasonable prices, which was nice. Sometimes they are crazy expensive. I wish they would bring in more stitch dictionaries but so far they only have one (albeit excellent).
After that we got lost and wound up in San Mateo, turned around, got to The Alameda, where we went to Commuknity and I bought some sock yarn (surprise), and then onto Los Gatos, where the signage is suckalicious and stopped at Yarndogs, which was nice, though a little overpriced I thought. However they had those little sock blocker keychains, and I got one of those and a ball of Berroco Comfort, with which to make Sam’s replacement skull hat (with glow in the dark embellishments – he better not lose this one!).
We were pretty tired after that, and then headed back up to the east bay, stopping at our personal LYS, the Yarn Boutique in Lafayette, where they totally have new colors of Shibui and Mirasol Hacho. And copies of the Interweave Holiday Knits.
Then my mom dropped me off and I made little mini socks for my keychain:
These were pretty fun to make! I used leftover sock yarn. Rosie from work snagged the orange one. (“It’s cute! Go Giants!” she said. “Can I have it?”) Currently my keys are sporting the green one, which is Dream in Color Smooshy. They’d make cute Christmas ornaments.
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I was flattered this weekend to be the recipient of the “I love your blog” award from Jennifer, which I think is the first time anyone has linked to me with a blog award, so that was nice and many thanks! 😀
Rather than link a few blogs I read per the award rules (you can see my blogroll for that on the right of my page), I’d like to step up on a soapbox for a second and point you all towards the Red Scarf Project, which is part of the Orphan Foundation and benefits foster children who have aged out the system and are now attending college.
I’m sure as knitters many of us have already heard of the Red Scarf Project, but I think it would be great for everyone to participate if they can. The Red Scarf project sends a care package to these kids for Valentine’s Day. I think showing these kids that someone, somewhere, cares about them, is awesome.
The deadline has been extended to December 15th as they don’t have enough scarves yet, so help a kid out if you can! They deserve it. 🙂
