July 5, 2021 – All About the Yarn!!

I think the editor just may take a nap for this one!!!!

I usually write in chronological order but this time decided to group activities instead. So it’s all about the YARN! There are 3, yes THREE, yarn shops within 20 miles. I commented to one of the shop employees that I was surprised there were so many shops in such close proximity and she said, “There are a lot of knitters around here.” 😊 Just what I love to hear!

I took off on my own to visit two shops in Whitefish. The first one I stopped at was Old Sun Knits. As I walked up to the shop, the first thing I saw were four display stands with bright, colorful hats. They all had the same design but different color combinations. They showed waves, mountains, and sun. Lisa, the shop owner said the hats showed all the elements you need for health and happiness. I love that, don’t you?!

One of the first things I noticed inside was a rack FULL of hats with all different designs. As Lisa and I chatted, she told me that she machine knit the hats using her own designs. Before opening the store 3 years ago, she had been selling her hats at outdoor venues and realized that opening a shop selling yarn would give her more time to make hats and have a good income coming in at the same time. Smart thinking! She had some beautiful yarns and one I particularly loved was Montana-made Farmer’s Daughter Fibers from a designer in Great Falls, Montana. I got a skein of her Craggy Tweed DK weight. It is very soft, made of 85% merino superwash with neps throughout for that tweedy look. You should check out her color names also – mine is called Buffalo Gal, some of the others are Elk Antler, Winter Wolf, Mountain Man, Olive Oyl and Paul Newman! Old Sun Knits also carried Cascade and several other Montana yarns, along with some Montana-made gift and knitting items.

  

The next shop was Polka Dot Sheep. This shop was open and bright with a big widow up front. It didn’t take me long to realize that most of their yarn was Polka Dot Sheep, their own brand. The dying is done right there in the back room. They have 10 different base yarns to dye,  everything from fingering yarn to chunky, each colorway in each weight. They also carry Polka Dot Sheep merchandise with their cute colorful logo sheep – I got a sticker, I like having a little sheep sticker on my computer keyboard 😁

Unsurprisingly, I was continually drawn to the same colorway, appropriately called Continental Divide. It isn’t my usual color palette but I just love it. I purchased it in the bulky weight thinking a hat would be just the thing. After a couple of days, I realized that the Continental Divide colorway was all the colors I had been marveling over around Glacier! The Flathead and other rivers are a range of greens, with the rocks underneath showing reds, purples, yellows and colors I don’t even know the names of 😊.

 

 

 

 

 

  

Look at these beautiful colors!I couldn’t wait to start knitting with it – so I didn’t! I wound it into a ball and started the No-Pattern hat from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s Knitting Rules book with a 3×1 rib brim and finished in stockinette. I worked on it while waiting for the shuttle at the St. Mary entrance and finished it that night after we got home. I should knit more in bulky – it works up sooooo fast!!

  

There was one more shop to visit. It was just a short little 15-minute drive from our park, in the small downtown area of Columbia Falls. I missed it the first time, there is a small sign outside that says, “Yarn” and then I noticed Brave Dog Knits on the door. I went in the shop which is quite small but very cozy and friendly feeling. I started looking around at the yarn and heard a voice say, “Hello” but didn’t see anyone. After going further back in the shop, there was a young woman/older teenager? sitting and knitting away. I asked when she learned to knit and she said she learned when she was ten years old. I told her I’d heard stories of people who learned at young ages and how I could never get any of my kid’s interested. She said she learned in school, even though her mother also knit. She said when she was in fifth grade they were given a choice to go outside for P.E. in below zero temperatures or they could stay inside and learn to knit. What a great idea!! I’ve read about children in Waldorf schools and other countries who learn to knit in school starting at the age of 5 – it’s supposed to help a lot with math (maybe that’s what I needed as a kid).

I noticed several flyers about local farms and their yarns and she pointed me in the right direction for those. They were on top of the shelves dividing the small shop in half. There were four different local farm yarns – Raca Paca Ranch, Earthstar, Dunlaveign Ranch, and Tobacco Root Valley. The shop has samples of knitted items hanging all around the top of the shop and these four were no exception BUT their samples were laying on top of the baskets of yarn. I knew I wasn’t going to leave without some local Montana yarn, the question was which one?! Each sample had a tag naming the pattern and yarn and one hat in particular caught my eye, Earthstar Naturals which is un-dyed and processed at Mountain Meadow Wool in Buffalo, WY (which I visited a couple of years ago!). This yarn is spun from the farm’s Cormo flock fleece which they breed for the extra-fine, super-soft wool. Sheep fiber and fleece is only one of the things this farm offers. They also raise heritage chickens and offer the multi-colored eggs for sale, honeybees for fresh, local honey, and they grow microgreens and edible flowers – all which are sold in specific local Whitefish groceries.

I asked the young lady to wind it for me and she was more than happy to, we chatted as it went around the swift. When I mentioned that I was going to make the Cartridge Rib hat she told me they always give out the pattern of a sample knit if the yarn it bought – so, YEA for me! I got to take the pattern (didn’t have to mess with the internet, which we had very little of, to get the pattern. I walked out the door with a wound ball of yarn and the printed pattern, so that hat has been started and is on its way.

  

It’s so great to be back to visiting yarn shops I’ve never been in before! I am still working on my second Wispy shrug by Hannah Fettig. Of course I’m a little worried that this one is going to be too big instead of too small like the last one but keeping my fingers crossed. I’m getting ready to start on the lower part which will be a bunch of stockinette. At least that’s great for driving – or riding I should say. It would definitely be hard to drive, look around at the scenery AND knit while driving HA! (Ed. Note – My alarm just went off from my nap – are we about done here???????) (You seem to be falling down on the job, hubs!)