First yarn shopping experience

I finally made it to one of Montreal’s yarn stores. La Tricoteuse is situated on the corner of St. Hubert and Rachel (779 Rachel East). The store is full of yarn: sock yarn, mohair, beautiful silk, yarn of different colors and textures. I must admit I was slightly overwhelmed when I walked in there (and so was Eric).

After spending good 20 minutes simply looking at all the yarns I decided to approach a nice lady (the owner?) for some help. To tell you the truth, the quantity of the yarn made me forget all the project possibilities I had on my mind and the only thing I remembered was sock yarn for the long-promised socks for my sister. After yet another 20 minutes of admiring all the sock yarn, I finally decided on “Canadian color" (#4746) from Regia. It’s a mix of wool and polyamide. The gentlemen at the cash (husband of the lady?) asked me if it was my first time knitting socks and after my affirmative answer he wished me “good luck” (I am not sure I liked the underlying message in that wish. Is sock-knitting really that difficult???). Oh, I also picked some sock needles for the project.

All in all I was really happy with my first yarn shopping experience. Once the socks are done I will return for some new yarn and I might even take some pictures of the store.

I picked “Reverse Psockology” pattern from “Stitch-and-Bitch” calendar (thank you Es'ka and Jen'ka) for the yarn. It is going pretty well so far, but I am expecting the worse.

Since I am posting the picture of half-finished sock, here is one more of “work-in-progress” projects: the baby scarf (to go with the baby carpet) that I crocheted about a month ago. It is still missing white fringes.

My dad is refusing to call it a scarf. He says that it could be anything! I guess I should hurry up with those fringes.

La Tricoteuse
779 Rachel East (corner of St. Hubert and Rachel, not far from Mont Royal metro station)

First Steps

It all started after I heard the news that my very good friend (best childhood friend) in Tashkent gave birth to a baby girl. I decided that I have to send a little something for her, preferable hand-made. So I got some yarn and some hooks, and since I've been practicing crocheting for a little bit over a week, I started the baby carpet in extremely psychedelic color scheme (to tell you the truth, colors look rather tame on this photo):

After finishing the carpet, I wanted to continue crocheting, but make something smaller this time. I also wanted it to be useful and simple enough that if I would not get the design correctly I would still be able to use it. So the big winter sweater was out of the question, and I decided to crochet a dish cloth:
It was a fun and easy project and I decided to continue.
Next was this bright yellow purse that I now use to carry my current projects around:

After the blanket it was the biggest project so far. I really like the texture of the finished material and will probably use this stitch for something else in near future.

Finally, this morning I finished my hook case. I got 7 hooks as a Christmas gift and so far they've been stored in the empty chocolate box. Now they have a cozy home. This is how it looks from outside:

And inside it has room for 9 hooks:


The original case had buttons and would roll to "close". I am contemplating the idea of attaching some ribbons to mine, meanwhile I can just fol it in half to close and it actually stays closed!


I really hope that I would be able to find enough time to camp, cook, and crochet/knit. For now, while it is cold and rainy in Montreal, I'll keep knitting and crocheting!

P.S. The colors on the pictures are not as good as they are in real life. I definitely should start taking pictures during the day - daylight makes everything so much prettier!
P.P.S. I will post links and references to places where I got my patterns from very soon.