So, Google completely lied. The yarn store is actually more like 4 minutes from my house. This is dangerous, dangerous news for me. Luckily (at least for my bank account), I have pretty much no time to knit right now.
It turns out the store is not really a yarn shop, it’s more of a general store of fiber-related crafts. This is good and bad, actually, because I now have pretty much a one-stop shop for most of my addictions hobbies, but it also means that there’s not the kind of diversity of offerings that you’d expect from a yarn shop. As Redbeard would say – there’s breadth but not depth.
Though some interesting depths are there! There is a huge selection of large, interesting buttons, and I think they must stock every color of embroidery floss ever made. The yarn selection is… interesting. I found some really neat things, but in the end just got this as my first haul:
Why grey? My son has Made It Known that he requires mittens. Silver mittens. I took him with me and we looked at our options together before he wandered off to the play nook (where he promptly barricaded himself in). I actually did find a cool, glossy, multi-colored yarn that could possibly be said to have silver in it, if you are 4. But, it was the good stuff, meaning hand wash only. There is no point where knitting my 4-year-old (“Look at the rocks I found today!”) son hand-wash-only mittens becomes a good idea. But, then I found this (acrylic) grey. I uptalked it into silver to my son and bought some “3.5mm” needles to go with it.
On a totally unrelated topic, I predict that a new “metric woes” tag is going to get really big over in the side bar before this trip is up. In this shop, I stared hard at the yarn label, willing it to reveal its secrets:
Washable …
… Made in Kosovo (?!) …
…. and Jackpot! … even in English! … kind of …
So, machine wash in 40 degree water, no bleach, tumble dry okay, don’t iron it… good, good….
And… it’s okay to park on it. Near it? With it. In a parking garage. Or perhaps a stadium …
Crochet or knitting needles, use size 3 to 4. Hmm…. does that mean 3-4mm? And what about this gauge. Well, I can’t read those yet in English, so no wonder it makes even less sense in Metric. The last picture has only just now clicked – it will take about 450 grams to make a sweater. But, for a 40 year old? Size 40?
In the end, I bought the 3.5 DP needles on the idea that the label must mean 3-4mm. Once home, I ended up looking up the yarn online and found that it is a “3” (equally silly measurement system, btw), and so my new US size 4 needles will work just fine. Apparently in this one case, metric and US work out the same.