Yarn shopping!

So we went up to Nottingham on friday for Liz's birthday. Matt ended up with a horrible cold so we came home before the party on saturday, but it was nice to spend some quiet time with Liz and Denzil and actually get to chat.

Anyway, you don't care about that do you? This is a knitting blog! The point of this is that we got into Nottingham early so we could do some shopping. So of course I insisted that we go to Yarn in Beeston - since its pretty much just opposite where we had to go to catch the bus into town anyway. Yarn opened up after I had left Nottingham, which is such a shame. Its small, smaller than the Interknit cafe in Farnham which I guess is my LYS. But its lovely, and the staff are very friendly. L&D bought me some yarn from there for my birthday last year, which I thought was incredibly thoughtful seeing as they have no idea how to knit and had no idea how expensive yarn was! LOL.

My favourite purchase was some Araucania yarn called Ranco Multi. I had never heard of this before - its from Chile, which seems rather silly given the amount of sheep we have in this country but I'm afraid I just could not resist the purply-goodness. This will become socks for me as I have a distinct lack of purple socks, which seems wrong.

Next up was more sock yarn. I asked Matt if he would like me to knit him some socks, mostly thinking he'd say no. But apparently he would. So I said he could chose some yarn - whatever he wanted. I knew he didn't want stripey socks, so there was some nice dark grey and some nice blue semi-solids I spotted. But no, he went for this:

This, my friends is Opal Uni in the brightest red you've ever seen. He also wants PLAIN socks, no pattern at all. I think knitting stocking stitch in this stuff for his man-sized feet may just send me INSANE. You know those times you wish you'd kept your big mouth shut? I doubt he would ever has ASKED for socks... LOL!

Oh well, will be a good opportunity to try out toe-ups I think.

And finally, a single ball of Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran. The plan was to pick up a ball of this to knit a pair of Fetching for my sister. Mostly as a quick "sorry" present - I forgot to pack her birthday present when we went for New Year (her birthday is the 22nd Dec) but also because I want to have another go at cables, and its a present for less than a fiver. They didn't have much choice in colour, so I ended up with this quite nice green:

Not what I would have usually picked, but its nice. However, Soph gets bad eczema on her hands and needs proper gloves in the winter, so doesn't think she will use them. I might do them for her anyway, for spring. They look like a nice little project so I'll probably knit them and then decide what to do with them.