FOs from the road

When I was in New Orleans, I found this really sweet little yarn store in the French Quarter called The Quarter Stitch. It is both a needlepoint store and a knitting store. They had the most elaborate needlepoint canvases hung up on the walls--so beautiful, in fact, that I was reeeeallly tempted to actually investigate buying one. I didn't, but I was close! I probably would have been closer, but the owners, after a pleasant hello, proceeded to ignore me while I looked around and they talked with their friends. That was fine with me at first, as I do like to look around before being helped, but I did have some questions about stuff, and they probably could have gotten more money out of me if they'd paid more attention.

Anyway, there were two rooms in the store. The front room had Noro, and some other yarns (including Bee Sweet, which is amazing and expensive), as well as the needlepoint stuff. The other one had tons of books and then lots of novelty yarns in a big basket on a table. Novelty yarns! All different kinds, which seems puzzling to me, since most places I think are turning away from these types of yarns and toward more traditional wool yarns. But then again--why would you need wool in New Orleans? It's HOT THERE. So anyway, the upshot was that I bought this really pretty yarn that looked like Malabrigo (1 skein), but didn't have any label (I would have asked about this as well--I thought maybe it was some sort of locally handspun hand-dyed yarn, but honestly, it's probably Malabrigo) to make a cowl, and then I bought, in a moment of weakness, this really pretty, sparkly, colorful skein of novelty yarn from Prism Yarns, based in St. Petersburg, FL (ahh, a Florida yarn maker!). I figured, well, I'm in New Orleans, and this yarn really screams New Orleans to me.



The yarn is called Dazzle, and it is 100% nylon. The color is Firefox, which you can see here and there was 116 yards in the skein. It is way more expensive than your run of the mill novelties (which aren't that cheap to begin with, really), because it is hand-dyed. Crazy, right? You can't tell in the pictures, but in low or fluorescent light, it is really SPARKLY. And the stripes were a happy surprise! I really love the scarf. I think it shows that you can make something with a novelty yarn that doesn't look too dorky or twee. At least I think so, anyway.


(please forgive Stella--she apparently sees a pigeon behind Spanky)

The other thing about The Quarter Stitch is that they package all the yarn to an insane amount of cuteness. I mean, look at this:


There was some confetti in the bag, and she curled all those ribbons while I was waiting for my receipt. It is such a great package, I was sorry to even tear into it, but I did take the Dazzle yarn along with me to Salt Lake City, just in case I finished Spanky's second sleeve and the garter mitts I'm going to talk about tomorrow.