Knit City

I went to a few different things last weekend and have been meaning to comment on them.

I'll start last first: Knit City at the PNE. (It looks like some of the 2014 content is now gone, so I'm just linking to the floor plan). I could've signed up for some classes, but forgot about it until it was too late. I can't say I was really in the best frame of mind for this either; I'd been shopping two other places beforehand and wasn't enthusiastic about buying more. Anyway, as someone who didn't know much of anything about the local knitting scene, here's what I noticed:

• There were a lot of handpaint/hand-dyed/semisolid yarns. Nice. I'm not particularly interested in doing that myself (no good place to make a mess) but I'm happy to have others do it for me.
• There seems to be lots of hand-spinning going on. I'm not interested in that either, but people seem to have fun with it.
• Thick yarn was far less well-represented than I remember it being in Philadelphia several years ago. I don't know if that's a trend over time or a difference between the two locations. (Or maybe there was some secret huge amount of thick yarn that all sold out before I got there.) While there were a few thicker yarns, I would say almost everything was aran or thinner. That takes more of a time commitment, but OTOH I think anything other than accessories risks becoming too heavy in a thick yarn anyway. Especially in this climate.

I looked around at all the vendors for quite a while, but didn't end up buying anything. I was specifically looking for thicker wool/nylon blend sock yarns. I didn't find any, although there were many nice, usual-weight (say, 7.5 stitches or more per inch) wool/nylon sock yarns, and lots of all-wool yarns in sportweight and thicker. In the end, I ordered what I was looking for from Wool-Tyme instead. When I'm less on-a-mission I will certainly be happy to take another look at what's local.