Well, no, but it sure seems that way. Guess who flew 500 miles to Maine for a week and neglected to pack her laptop? Also neglected to pack socks, but due to that person’s status as a knitter and the proximity of sock yarn the lack of socks was easily rectified. Sorry. Yikes. I’ll be up in West Virginia for a few days this week, but I assure you I’ll slow down on the packing and go fully equipped.
It’s been a busy week! My father and stepmother live in Brunswick, Maine, so I flew up there last Saturday and stayed the week with them. My stepmother is into fiber as well, and she had been telling me about Swans Island Company so we took a trip up to Northport. Most of the store is dedicated to bags and blankets but they had a room full of yarn. I picked up one marked skein of Natural Colors in Winterberry, a cool-ish red, but fell down entirely in their seconds bins and got a lovely blue and white ikat dyed skein of….something…and two orangey-red skeins of….something else. None of their seconds have labels, and while all are at a discount (hence the falling down) it’s tough to tell exactly what you’re getting. I can tell all three are wool, but the orangey-red is a different type than the ikat dyed. Massive skeins, too. If the marked labels on the other skeins are any indication, I have at least 900 yards of the orangey-red, perfect for a large shawl.
After that, we ended up in Belfast, where I visited Heavenly Yarns. They’ve moved to a different storefront since the last time I was up there, but their old store had a seriously steep staircase leading down into the store, and since the last time I was there was the dead of winter under a blanket of slippery snow, I do appreciate the lack of stairs to tumble down. I try to get yarns I’ve never knit with before when I go on destination yarn trips….uh, I mean visits to see family, funny how they coincide like that, so I picked up Brown Sheep Wildfoote in Mountain Path, a green/grey/black three ply, and also Borgo de Pazzi Bice (website seems to be entirely in Italian) in a tonal brown and white, reminds me of lichen. Also grabbed another skein of On-Line Supersocke Norweger Color II in a gray/blue/white self-striping that brings to mind Scandinavian glaciers. Sure, I’ve knit with Supersocke before but often do you take a trip to Maine? And I’ve never been one to listen too hard to my own rules. I also found the holy grail of knitting needles, which for me is size 000 eight-inch long double-points, perfect for a pair of fitting socks at my gauge.
The week wasn’t all about yarn, of course. We took a trip to Prospect, Maine, to check out Fort Knox. No, not the one that Goldfinger tried to irradiate, but named after the same General, and the theme song to that movie was stuck in my head the whole time. Pretty creepy place, actually. It’s so dark inside the actual fort, once you get past the earth mound surrounding it. They encourage using a flashlight to explore, so I had the one on my phone on, and with every turn you take you expect ghosts around every corner.
I have to say, once you’ve seen one seaside photo of boats at a dock, you’ve seen them all, but it didn’t feel right not to include at least one. Come Tuesday I leave for the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, one of my favorite (and very haunted) places to visit.