Eagle Creek Park

More staycation pictures! We spent a lovely few hours hiking in Eagle Creek Park.

Fishies!

Go, pollinators!

Looking across Eagle Creek

Maybe I'm a sap, but I see a heart.

Yup, we did that.

What about if the flag looks like this?

My favorite.

I always am stunned by how beautiful lotus flowers are.

We had sun and rain, which was just fine with us. We started the longest trail, deciding we could stop halfway if we wanted. We were having such a great walk that we did the whole trail. Then we went home, showered, and went to dinner to eat fried pickles, burgers and fries at Burgerhaus. I love us.

White River Gardens

Andrew and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary on June 17. We thought about going to Chicago for a week's vacation to celebrate, but the hotel in Chicago was very expensive, even when I was trying to be frugal. We decided we'd rather spend the money on fun things rather than an uncomfortable bed in a tiny room, so we stayed home and played tourist in our own city.

One morning was spent at White River Gardens. We spent a lot of time enjoying the butterfly house.

In the gardens themselves, there are very odd animal sculptures. I'm pretty sure they did not get the intended reaction out of me.

Come here, tiny child, SO I MAY EAT YOU.

Okay, so what's the next step toward world domination?

Hic--And then I said--hic--Wait, what? 

And this goose is shoving his friend in the pond. Real nice, goose.

Despite the sculpture, the gardens were gorgeous.

I highly recommend a visit if you're ever in Indy! Oh, and there's a zoo next door, too, if you're into that.

Yarn Shopping in Manhattan

Some people collect Swarovski animals. Some people collect stamps. Some people collect spoons.

I collect yarn.

Naturally, once we'd booked our vacation, I started scoping out yarn stores. Fortuitously, there was an article on lesser-known Manhattan yarn shops in the Interweave Knits Spring 2014 issue. I knew I wanted to visit Lion Brand, and I also decided to check out School Products Yarn and Habu Textiles. (The last two are located in the same building, which figured heavily into my decision.)

First up: Lion Brand.

I have mixed feelings about Lion Brand in general. You can buy Lion Brand at places like JoAnns, Michaels, and even possibly at Wal-Mart. It's economical. It's mass produced. When I'm feeling snobby, I turn up my nose at yarn like this and pretend I only knit with yarn blessed by Buddhist monks, handspun by novice Catholic nuns, and dyed with organic dyes in filtered water by a women's cooperative.

Mom and I outside Lion Brand

On the other hand, there are some pretty great yarns in their line (I've knit a lot of projects out of Lion Brand yarns) and knitting can be a prohibitively expensive hobby. There are lots of times when an economical yarn is not only necessary from a budget standpoint, but also is appropriate for the recipient. Some people need knitwear that can be thrown in the washer. Not everyone can handle hand washing in Soak.  

The storefront for Lion Brand is a cute spot in Chelsea. It's appropriately yarn bombed and has a great window display. Inside, even the light fixtures are knitting-related.

There's a Sampling wall so you can see how a yarn behaves on the needles (or hooks).

There's a gnome hidden somewhere in the store, and the first person to find it each day gets $5 off their purchase. Andrew found it. He's extremely useful.

I was most interested in the yarn lines that are only available in this store and online, yarn I couldn't buy locally. I ended up with a skein of Fettuccini, made from remnants of garment manufacturing. If you buy it online, you get random colorways. That makes me twitchy, so I'm glad I got to pick my skein of gray and white.

I also bought two skeins of  Baby Alpaca in a beautiful dark gray.

My last purchase was a bag--the sort that can be wadded up into a pouch and kept in my purse. It came in handy the rest of the day, holding small purchases and maps. The store was really lovely, and so were the people working there. I'm really glad we went.

Next up was 135 W. 29th St., the Haymarket Building.

School Products Yarns is on the 4th floor. It has a big center section and then yarn on shelves around the edges of the room. 

It seems to have a lot of sale yarn--like this:

Despite that, I couldn't find anything I wanted to buy. This is startling, and I can't really explain it. I loved the bright blue in the picture above, but there was only one skein of it and I couldn't think what I'd do with it. Disappointed, I headed up to Habu Textiles on the 8th floor.

It was a little bit difficult to shop. The floor was crowded with baskets, and there was very little walking room around them. The shop also carried a bit of fabric, sold in 1/4 yd.

The Interweave Knits article warned that you'd need to ring a bell to summon an employee, and they were correct.

I bought a beautiful inky-blue bamboo laceweight. It has 574 yd./skein. I'm thinking about making this with it.

My experiences will be different from anyone else's, of course, but I was pleasantly surprised by Lion Brand and felt I wouldn't go to either of the other stores unless I was just in the mood to shop with no definite purchase in mind. I'm not really a shopper, so I can't imagine wanting to poke around on the off chance of finding a great skein.

Back!

I've been on vacation! We had a great trip, and I'm slowly figuring out how to do normal things like working, paying bills, and finding food for myself.

Knitting went with me.

This is the Starshower cowl by Hilary Smith Callis. I started it before we left and worked on it diligently for about 10 seconds while on vacation. Then I abandoned it in favor of sunshine, reading, and the ocean. I cast off last night and plan to block it this evening. I'll have pictures soon!

And we'll discuss a few NYC yarn shops I visited. Opinions? I have them.

A Quick Trip

This weekend we drove two hours to Cincinnati for a quick overnight trip. We saw the Reds game on Friday night and another one Saturday. They won both. Naturally, their victory was because we were there. You're welcome, Cincinnati.

Friday was rainy, and both days were chilly. We wore waterproof (well, water resistant) coats Friday and snuggled underneath one of those sad plastic ponchos to keep our legs warm. It rained for the first few innings and then dried out. It wasn't bad at all.

I made friends with Mr. Redlegs and Rosie Red.

We try to go to Cincinnati a couple times each baseball season, often in May and late September. I am a delicate flower who has no desire to sit in the sun in 95 degree weather surrounded by beer drinkers for three hours at a baseball game.

I love baseball. I always have. I think it's because I played softball as a little girl and understand the rules. Many, many, many people think baseball games move too slowly.

That's why you knit.

Clifty Falls State Park

Indiana's State Park Inns have discounted rates Sunday through Thursday in the winter. This works out great for us since we don't have kids with school schedules that keep us from taking some time off in February.

We like staying in the inns, but there must be a town close by. There also has to be a fridge in the room. The reason for this is that we are not home cooking, meat and potatoes people. Even before I became a vegetarian, I wanted no part of fried chicken, meatloaf, or green beans with bacon. Since this is precisely the sort of food our state park inns think we want to eat, we do not want eat in the inn very often at all. This time, we had breakfast there once. (Pancake edges should not be crunchy. That's all I'm saying.) The rest of the time, we either ate out in a nearby town or ate food from a Trader Joe's spree I did before we left.*

We went to Clifty Falls State Park.

Our first full day, the weather was beautiful. We took a long hike.

The sky looked like this:

There were signs that Spring is coming:

We did parts of several trails that day. One of them took us across the creek. Neither of us fell in. I deem that a success.

There are four named waterfalls in the park: Big Clifty, Little Clifty (startlingly creative, I know), Tunnel, and Hoffman. We visited all four. I have no idea which one this is, but here's one of them:

The next day was cold and rainy, so we walked around historic Madison, a nearby town. My friend Holly had talked about a couple of shops when she visited recently (here), and we made sure to hit those places as well as whatever else attracted our interest.

The next day was cold, but it was so cold that what precipitation there was was primarily frozen. We decided it was fine to walk in. The trails were going to be very muddy after the rain the day before, so we walked as much as we could on the roads and went off on the trails at strategic points to see what we wanted to see.

It was also the day we found this:

There are over 150 steps there. I come from a part of the state that has been squished flat by glaciers; I am not used to this many steps. I felt really out of shape when I finally made it to the top.

We had recovered from the steps enough that we decided to visit the observation tower that looks out over the Ohio River when we came upon it.

It gave us a view like this:

When we weren't walking or eating, we played a computer game together and I knit. We have developed a comfortable routine of playing adventure games together. Andrew operates the laptop, and I knit. He is much more persistent than I am, so he often wants to spend more time figuring out puzzles than I do. (I have no problem cheating by looking up the answer online. This is a game. It's supposed to be fun. When it stops being fun, I stop caring about it.) I have found that if I'm knitting, I don't care if he's spending fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to unlock a secret door in the castle.

It was a short, quiet vacation and really, really lovely. I was reminded how lucky I am to have this life with Andrew. He is my favorite person, and I can't imagine what sort of karma allowed us to find one another. I bow to the ground in gratitude.


*By the way, Trader Joe's doughnut holes are delicious, and I don't usually enjoy doughnut holes. You should try them.