The one thing that is lacking in my world here is all things yarn related. There are no knitting groups to join, the stores are bit far - I can of course order it, but where's the fun in that? And the other end of it is if these things do exist here, I may just not know where they are. We do have a yarn store in town but it's a little hard to hit, she's only open for 4 hours on Saturday and we are never around. I've gone into a few other knitting shops but nothing really stands out to me, some of them are very blah or they do multiple things which I understand, it's hard to live on yarn sales alone. But if they do more than one thing the yarn is usually a very small display stuck in a corner somewhere which is disappointing to say the least. But things are looking up a bit, there's a nice shop in Port Townsend I can go to when we visit the girls and I found a couple of festivals! I always do the Pittsburgh Fiber Festival with friends, we shop, go to lunch and then at the end of the day compare what we got good, discussing what we are planning on knitting with it.
I miss that.
I found the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival on Facebook of course, it looked pretty size able so I Google mapped it - 82 miles. So I'm sure you're sitting there in your smug, yarnless home thinking - "82 miles - for YARN? Each way?". Yup. David was all on board for it and volunteered to drive - since we're still fairly new to the area we try to do a different destination every couple of weeks. We've been to North Portland, Vancouver, Olympia, Port Townsend, Brownsmead to name a few. We drove to Hillsboro because I had a coupon for Old Navy, Sauvie Island to see how the duckhunting would be, Vancouver to check out the Restore and of course the infamous trip to Winlock to lay eyes on the World's Largest Egg. It's just easier to explore if you have a destination in mind no matter how small or silly it might be. It was supposed to rain but - it didn't! It was perfect weather for a drive. We got there at 9:30am, half an hour after they opened the gates and I was so glad we went early. The first huge parking lot was filled and closed, the next one was 2/3's full - and it wasn't even 10am. The first thing we did was hit the coffee and donut stand to fortify, then off to the races. It was, I believe bigger than the Pittsburgh festival and if you've ever been to that one you should be impressed. David ended up having a much better time than he thought he would - we visited the rabbits first, there were tons of them and most of them didn't even look like rabbits! There was an albino white angora I was in love with, the owner took it out so we could pet it - I can't tell you how soft it was, it was like petting a cloud. They also start at about $150 a bunny, which in our house would just translate into an expensive appetizer for Molly&Rueben so it stayed there.
We looked at goats and sheep, the competition pieces and of course - YARN. OMG, you name it - they had it. I didn't buy a huge amount but I got some really nice lace weight. I stopped buying knitting stuff awhile ago, I have pretty much everything I need or want at this point. When we moved I gave away boxes and boxes of books- with Ravelry I can just buy the pattern instead of a whole book that I just like one or two things in. Before we left PA I gave a friend of mine's daughter a boat load of needles, books, yarn and some other sundry items - yes, I could have sold it or donated it. But I remember when I first started knitting how much I loved it when someone gave me anything knitting related - why not do that for someone else? David made a comment that there were no bargains and no, there aren't - because the yarn is specialty yarn, most of it is hand dyed and some of it is hand spun - one of a kind stuff. We stayed about 3 hours, David had lamb sausage for lunch which he liked, then we went to the local Restore to see if there was anything good - there was but nothing that we needed right now. We did get some new wooden drawer pulls (25 cents apiece) to replace the hideous giant fakey gold ones on the cabinet in the dining room so there was that. And then we wandered home, it was, all in all, a good day.
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