One of the sponsors for the yarn crawl last week was The Vineyard Marketplace in San Marcos. It is the store component of True Vineyard Ministries, Inc. My friend Tina and I visited the store on Friday morning. We were amazed at all the wonderful merchandise on display. Granted we were there for the yarn but we also checked off several items on our holiday gift list and extras for ourselves, including jewelry made by women in Ethiopia from recycled artillery shell casings. The women collect them, melt them down, make beads and then make jewelry.
True Vineyard is a  member of the Fair Trade Federation so everything in their store helps the communities from which they come. Each thing for sale has a story. I really liked that. Those  stories are shared by the folks in the store and also on the shop website when you click to buy!
True Vineyard also employs women in Rwanda to care for a flock of merino sheep and use their fleece to spin and dye into merino wool yarn. This is for many of the women, the first time they have been employed and received a paycheck. When they first started packaging the yarn the women wound it in a football shape; not our usual way of receiving it but very cute. Now most of it comes in the usual skein or cake form. The yarns you see to the right are, on the left, dyed using avocados and, on the right, the legumes from the mimosa tree. The third in my stash now is dyed using madder root. And as I was googling this, I was reminded that madder root has long been used for dyeing things with a reddish, rosy tint….Aveda even has a shampoo for us red-heads to fortify our hair. I might have to go get some!
They work with women in Ethiopia to hand spin the locally grown cotton into yarn. The yarn is then sent to Rwanda where it is plyed and dyed using area plants. My cotton choices (shown at left) were three different skeins of color, all using Cosmos flowers. Amazing the different shades they achieved with the same plant. The cotton yarn is a new adventure so isn’t on the website yet, but the page of wool yarn shows the skein of yarn next to the plant used in the dyeing process. What a great visual; many of the plants they use are familiar but may have different names in Rwanda.Â
I’ve found and brought home other yarns that were dyed using local plants. Being a gardener and having accidentally dyed myself when out working, the yarns I’ve brought home make me smile and think of far-away gardens.
Display of the cotton yarn from Ethiopia
There are several short videos on You Tube about the outreach True Vineyard is doing in Rwanda. Dreams presents many of the women in the program and this next one, that’s titled True Vineyard Ministries 2011 is a montage of the yarn making process.
It was, for me, a powerful experience to be in their store, talk with those working or volunteering there and hear the stories of the women in Rwanda and other parts of the continent that this organization is helping.
2 skeins of yarn purchased to complete the needed colors for 2 patterns
6 combinations of yarn acquired for patterns I brought with me
7 sets (pattern+yarn) purchased that were featured for the crawl at the yarn stores we visited
3 combinations of 3 skeins each purchased just because they are wonderful
And for those of you who have no idea what a skein is…drum roll please…I ended the weekend with 7.75 miles of new yarn in my stash! Yeee Haw.
This post will be a bit of a travel log. I want to share where we went and will link the shops to the posts so you can check them out. We didn’t make many photos; too busy shopping for yarn!
What fun we had and such good luck on the weather. We were able to visit all but one of the shops on our initial list. I even ended up visiting three of them twice sort of by accident. Alas, it does not appear that we won any prizes for our efforts…and yes, that was a possibility. Oh well. Next year!
Thursday – Day 1 visits:
The Knitting Cup (Georgetown) Brought home Chesire Cat in Black Pearl from Frabjous Fibers. So fun just to read the names they use. Have a pattern picked out that should be quite challenging. At least it looks that way. It’s only available in German…
A Sheep at the Wheel (Georgetown) They carry the Noti yarn that I fell in love with during the Dallas crawl. I needed one more skein for a project and was able to check that off my list while there. Yay!
Nan’s Needleworks (Marble Falls) This was actually my first stop since I went by there on my way down from Dallas (the week before, on the first day of the crawl) to pick up our passports and swag bags. Was afraid they’d run out of the bags if I waited for Tina to come down the next weekend.
Tina met Karla and I at Karla’s build site in Liberty Hill. The first time I visited, it was only a concrete pad. Now the framing is complete and the roof mostly done. Yay!
Afterwards, Tina and I had a yummy lunch in Georgetown at Blue Corn Harvest bar and grill. Stumbled upon it really. We were looking for a parking spot near the first of our yarn shops and ended up right in front of the restaurant. ‘Twas best really that we didn’t start shopping on empty stomachs.
Our first stop of the crawl
Here we go! Notice the empty bag she is holding. We brought holding bags to transfer our acquisitions into after leaving each store. That way there was always room for more! Each shop had some of the same big names of yarn but most importantly they each offered yarns from different small dyers and spinners. Some from the Texas area and some from other parts of the country.
Friday – Day 2 visits:
Ply! Yarn (Wimberly) Opened early for the crawl. Lovely space. New owner this year. Â
Vineyard Marketplace (San Marcos) Soo many things to look at. Home to Handspun Hope yarns from Rwanda. We ended up buying gifts for ourselves and others that had nothing to do with yarn.
Hill Country Weavers (Austin) A labyrinth of yarns! Easy to lose oneself here for a good bit of time
Gauge (Austin) Very nice folks, gave us a good back road to avoid the traffic. I’ve just started the project they featured during the crawl (see point 4 at the beginning of post).
The Sated Sheep (Dripping Springs) Soo many small dyers represented here. Loved to see them all and their website has lots of information if you forget the story about what you took home.
Our drive from Fredericksburg to Wimberly took us on scenic country roads. Great way to start the day. Ply! is located just next to the main shopping square. Next we went to San Marcos and the Vineyard Marketplace. They were a sponsor for the event, so we didn’t get a spiffy button to add to our bag; even better, they gave us a needle/hook envelope as our door prize (more on them in the next post). From there we visited the two places in Austin, broke for lunch in between those two and headed to Dripping Springs. All told we drove (well, Tina drove and I navigated) about 200 miles on Friday. And worked around the ACL (Austin City Limits music festival) traffic.
Karla’s pic of her beer flight at the brewery
We ended the day with Karla at Altstadt, the new brewery that just opened outside of Fredericksburg. We were even able to sit outside…no rain and coolish temps.
Saturday – Day 3 visits:
Yarnivore (San Antonio) The yarn I took home with me here was dyed by a young lady who is a visual artist. The colors of the yarns she dyes are taken from her artworks. The painting is shown on the label of the yarn that was inspired by it and you can buy cards and prints of the art as well.
Un-raveled (San Antonio) I’m looking forward to working the shawl pattern using the yarn they were featuring.
The Yarn Barn (San Antonio) They featured Lone Star Arts for the crawl. Some of my favorite yarn.
Inskein (San Antonio) I brought home their featured project as well. The designer for this, Shannon Sanchez, has more on Ravelry that look fun to work, including some Star Trek inspired patterns.
The Loom Room (Comfort) All kinds of weaving looms and supplies. Fascinating. And the art and craft items in front fun to browse through. Need to remember this for gift giving occasions.
Our adventure on Saturday didn’t require as much drive time (160 miles). We opted to visit the 4 stores in San Antonio and the two in Comfort. Wise decision as we would have run out of time if we had tried to go further east. The only rain that found us was during our lunch break.
The yarn and it’s art that came home with me
The artist and dyer I mentioned above is The Knitting Artist. Her website shows her paintings, installations and yarn sculptures but not her yarn. I brought home her yarn inspired by her painting “Sleeping Moon Ice” along with a card showing the work.
The Loom Room in Comfort sits in the back of Comfort Crockery a store that has a great collection of artists’ wares. Even for those who aren’t weavers there were interesting things. I brought home a kit to make cute little dryer balls. They do have some yarn included in the weaving supplies but for the cornucopia of yarn/thread choices you really need to go across the street to the Tinsmith’s Wife. Huge. Several rooms. They have supplies for all kinds of needle and hook addicts (of the yarn persuasion).
Tina as we enter our last stop of the crawl. Still smiling!
We ended our crawl there, turned in our passports that we mostly remembered to get stamped at each store, petted the resident cat, filled our bags with the last of our crawl purchases and went around the corner to celebrate a successful and fun weekend at Hill Country Distillers. A cool drink and some spirits to take home with us for later.
I must post this before I take part in the Hill Country Yarn Crawl. It has been going on since the 5th but I have been waiting for Tina, my yarn partner-in-mischief to join me. We have a plan that should take us to 14 of the 18 yarn shops. Did I mention we’ll be doing most of that in two days? It is an ambitious plan. We shall see how distracted we get. And sandwiched in there somewhere is a stop by Liberty Hill where our friend Karla is building a house. Hmmmm.
My quest on this crawl is to find yarns for three patterns I have printed out to take with and to fill in a couple more where I need one more skein of a different color. I have spent several hours today searching for patterns to assign to part of my stash. I now have six more projects bagged and tagged. And that gives me permission to buy more yarn. Yay!
This is why I always have multiple projects in progress. And in the event that I get snowed in…in Texas…I’ll have plenty to keep me occupied. Whoop!
The DFW yarn crawl happened to me in August. My cohort was out of town for the beginning of it so I stayed pretty close to home for the first weekend. The following weekend we headed north just a ways to McKinney and were able to hit the local store there (McKinney Knittery) and also a yarn convergence inside Tupps brewery. What could be better? I can always go with: “The beer made me buy it”. Works, don’t you think?
My plan was this: 1. Go armed with a few patterns for which I wanted to find yarn. 2. If I found yarn I simply must buy, only buy worsted weight since fingering makes up far too much of my stash. Sounds like a good plan, yes? I went with four patterns.
We stopped first at the Knittery. Pattern yarn found. Check. Worsted weight. Check. Whew!
Tenacious, Magical, Revive and Audacious
Then on to the brewery. And that’s where the plan started to falter. Well ok, actually got totally abandoned. At the first booth. But the yarns. Oh. My. So just take a look at this picture. Fingering. All four skeins. But wow, the colors; all four are merino super wash and soooo very soft.
This next pic is of the display table.
Noti Yarns is a one woman business. She hand paints her yarn. This is one of the woman I mentioned in an earlier post who got started doing this because she couldn’t find what she wanted. In her case, she was wanting to combine variegated with solids and couldn’t find matching colors in the palette she had chosen. And it happened more than once. So, she embarked on the journey that has led her to hand painting these fabulous color combinations. And I love the names she has chosen for her yarns. I could say that might sound like buying the wine for the label on the bottle but with that you never know what’s inside. With yarn it just adds charm.
I chatted with several other wonderful people. The next couple of posts will be devoted to them.
