Yarn shop crawl, Texas-style

I've said it before. Knitters are the nicest people.

Donia graciously offered to take me to some local yarn shops while I'm visiting the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We had never met before today, but I felt reasonably sure that she wasn't going to whisk me away to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre family's house for unspeakable horrors. Apparently I don't give off a serial killer vibe, so there's no need to pull out the scary eleven o'clock news music and graphics for recounting today's activities.

Of course, my mom had a predictable line of questioning: "How do you know her? Have you ever met? Is she single?" There would be more explaining to do at our first stop.

We started at Simpatico Yarns in Bedford, TX. It's a small but nice shop that automatically earned points for stocking Dark Horse Yarns, one of my favorites. (It was cheaper than where I've bought it too. Maybe I'll have to go back...) While we were looking, one of the women in the store asked if we were married. Nope. Brother and sister? Nuh uh. Dating? Strike three. Obviously an explanation, convoluted or not, was in order.

When I mentioned my blog, the owner(?) made a beeline to the computer to look it up. She thought that she had read it before. This was unexpected. I also pointed her to my movie site, and again she seemed convinced that she had come across something I'd written. Whether she had or not, my mind was blown. One of the last places I would ever expect to be recognized in any capacity is a yarn store in Texas. And you wonder why I'm still secret.

After a nice chat with the women in the store and fajitas for lunch at Posados, it was off to downtown Fort Worth and JenningStreet Yarn. This was the only store in which I pulled out the camera to take the pictures adorning this post.

Unlike every other LYS I've been to, this one organizes the yarn by color. The advantage is that you can make easy comparisons with similarly-hued yarn. If it were up to me, I don't think I'd group the yarn this way, but it's a valid method.

One of the owners wound yarn that Donia had purchased on a previous visit. That's good customer service. The other was working on an entrelac scarf. I don't understand how that pattern can be done, but by now it should be well-established that I tend to make things more complicated than they are.

Following a quick tour of Texas Christian University, we went to the third and final yarn shop of the afternoon. The Knitting Nook tempted me with a few yarns, but in the end I finished the LYS crawl without making any purchases. I almost always buy yarn for specific projects. The Knitting Nook stocked plenty of familiar brands, so I suppose I can find these back in Ohio if necessary. This store isn't that far from my brother's place, so I could always hound someone into taking me back if I decide I must have something from there.

I must give a big thanks to Donia for showing me the sites and taking a few hours out of her schedule to be a kind hostess. It was really cool of her to do this and nice to meet a new friend. Hopefully I didn't talk too much.

Despite this being a yarn-centric day, I didn't do much knitting. This evening I went to a promo screening of Hitman--in a word, awful--and spent more time playing my brother's Wii than I should have. The current hat is more than half completed, so I'm thinking I might be able to turn it into an FO on Thanksgiving.

More tales from Texas next time...