Trip to the Yarn House in Caterham

I normally go to Caterham two or three times a decade, so I'd noted The Yarn House in Caterham-on-the-Hill as a interesting looking yarn shop. As it happened, this year I'd been close on a number of occasions, and in February bought the ill-fated Noro Kureyon there. The only reason I hadn't gone back to the shop was that I hadn't been that near for a while.

Saturday was the day of my triannual trip to the area: I was undecided about going, mainly because I didn't have any desire to buy more Kureyon. Maybe another time, but not yet.

On the other hand, it was only about 300 yards off my route, and has a free car park about 200 yards from the shop. I had 10 minutes to spare. I also wanted another look and feel of some Louisa Harding Kimino Angora I'd seen whan I bought the Kureyon. If it was as nice as I remembered, I wanted to make wristwarmers with it. (I know May is the wrong time of year for wrist warmers. But who cares?)

So I stopped at the shop.

I like the Yarn House. It has a good selection of high end yarns, such as Rowan, Red Rooster (a new brand), Debbie Bliss, Artesano Alpaca and Louisa Harding. There was some hand-dyed yarn as well, but as I didn't have time to choose it carefully, I merely nodded at it in passing.

One thing that would make it a good LYS is it has a huge collection of old knitting magazines. Extremely useful if you want to make something from a past issue of a magazine and haven't got a note of the amounts needed. I didn't test it, but they might even know the quantities for on-line patterns such as clapotis.

The staff were friendly, although it is one of these places where you don't know if the people gossiping round the table are staff or merely visit so often that they almost seem like staff. I was asked if I needed help, but when I said I didn't, they left me looking.

Kimono Angora feels beautifully soft and fluffy, and not at all itchy when I rubbed it on my wrist. I was hooked, and the only difficulty now was to choose the colour. All the ones on display were gorgeous, but the two obvious choices was an unusual camoflage/khaki combination or a series of browns, ranging from beige through caramel to deep brown. The latter won out.

After I had paid for my two balls, I said I wanted it for wristwarmers, and the shop keeper said she thought I only needed one ball. She produced a Louisa Harding book, and looked up a pattern: I can't remember if one was enough, because I wanted two balls regardless.

My trip was a success, and I didn't have any last minute regrets about the Kureyon, because they didn't have the same shade on the shelf.