All the Road Running

Towards the end of last week, while driving around central New York state, I put on the Mark Knopfler/Emmy Lou Harris album "All the Road Running". It occured to me that the title summed up our vacation to a certain extent. We seemed to be in the car a lot driving around last week. Towns are rather spread out there, although not really knowing where I was going most of the time made the distances seem longer than they actually were.

But we did go to interesting places when we were driving around. We visited some of the wineries and tasted some wines (brought some home as well). We visited several used book stores and had fun browsing. We went to the Corning Museum of Glass and learned quite a lot about the history of glass making around the world. (I have a collection of depression glass, so visiting this museum was a high priority for me.) As usual, I carried the camera around with me most of the time, but ultimately, I didn't take very many pictures.

And then there were the yarn stores. We only stopped at 4 of them - Homespun Boutique in Ithaca, The Yarn Bin in Skaneateles, Patchwork Plus in Marcellus, and The Knitting Connection in Syracuse. I managed to buy something at each shop, and I ended up bringing home quite a bit of yarn.

The Yarn Bin had a sale room, and I was able to stock up on some acrylic and acrylic/wool blends.

2 of the stores, Homespun Boutique and Patchwork Plus, were mainly fabric stores, but each one had a quality yarn section as well. At Patchwork Plus, I found Elsebeth Lavold Baby Llama (on the right) and Sirdar Escape, another acrylic/wool blend (on the left).

At Homespun Boutique, I found some hand dyed Misti Alpaca worsted weight (on the right), and at The Knitting Connection, I found Blue Sky Melange, a sport weight alpaca.

After I added all this yarn to my Ravelry stash, I decided to add up the yardage. I brought home 4,493 yards of yarn, which translates to approximately 2.5 miles of yarn. Talk about sabotaging my stashdown efforts! I think I bought more yarn last week than I had this entire year (which does make me feel good about my yarn diet prior to vacation). But it is fun to shop on vacation, when I have the time to enjoy it, and I figure this is just the start of next year's stashdown efforts.

So vacation was fun, but I am glad to be home again and back to my routines. Next up, my plans for fall crafting.