Saturday is Local Yarn Store Day, a day to visit and celebrate your local yarn store.  We have tons of fun things planned, from yarn tastings and trunk shows to new products and prizes all day.  and I invite you to come and see what's special for this day.  But first, why is LYS day even a thing?  I'm more than a little biased, but here's why local yarn stores matter.

Obviously, with a local yarn store you have a chance to see and touch all the yarns in real life.  You can compare colors and hold the skein up to your face to see what best suits your complexion.  Instant gratification too.  See it, touch it, and walk out the door with it. Right. Now.  Get help, take a class, take a moment.  Your local yarn store is a place to come and a place to be.  It's a third place. 

In his ground breaking book, 

I've really been looking forward to the warmer weather.  This spring has been a long time coming, but I think it's finally here.  I have been anticipating it so long, looking for tiny buds on trees as I pulled my coat tight around my neck, and I got thinking about the balance between anticipation and more

Years ago I read an article in Gourmet Magazine by a woman who had planned a dining trip around Europe.  She scoped out all the top restaurants and booked hotels accordingly.  For months before the trip, she pored over the menus, deciding what she would order, focusing on the specialties of each area and each chef to ensure the optimal experience at every restaurant and throughout her trip

After the trip, at home, writing about the experience, she realized that while more

This past weekend I came across an interesting article by Jenny Anderson.   She talked about her brother who had given up the glamour of life in New York City and settled his family in boring small town suburbia.  What was this drab life of little league and kid parties, compared with the exciting urban world of museums, galleries, and theater?  She admittedly looked down on his choices  a bit.  At least until her brother's struggle and eventual death from cancer.

What she found was that her brother had thrived in a community that he had built for himself and his family. He had built his community literally, through his work as an architect, and figuratively, through his involvement with his more

Nightshift has taken the knitting community by storm.  Designed by the uber-adorable Andrea Mowry, Nightshift is a large, asymmetrical triangular shawl that uses slip stitches to produce a fabric that plays colors against one another to wonderful effect. With a beautiful  surprise on every row, Nightshift is fun and interesting to knit without being overly challenging -- a lot of bang for your more

Here comes Spring, and with it the plant-based fibers so many of us love to hate.  Yesterday in the shop, Bonnie, a ten-year old new knitter, was practicing her knitting.  Her stitches were perfect, but she was struggling against her yarn. It was dishcloth cotton, which is no treat to use.  She was valiant, and persevered, but you could tell it wasn't much fun.  My goal, of course, is to create a hoard of dedicated new knitters -- I couldn't possibly sit by and watch this lovely child get frustrated and lose interest in knitting simply because she was fighting with her materials.  So I swapped her dishcloth cotton out for a soft, more loosely spun cotton.  After a couple of rows, she looked up and proclaimed it to be much easier now! 

That's because there's cotton, and then there's cotton.  I wrote a post about cotton several years ago which helps explain what I mean. 

Cotton yarn is different from wool, that's for sure, and cotton sometimes more

I love Peruvian Connection, a catalog of beautiful art knits inspired by a variety of global textiles.  The garments are usually hand knit by local artisans who earn a fair trade wage for their work. Stranded, intarsia,and jacquard knits in bold colors and gorgeous graphics, they are not inexpensive, nor would you expect them to be.  They’re art, after all, and worth every penny.

Their most recent email had the subject line “You’re an interesting woman…more