Yesterday I discovered two habersashery / yarn shops in Cardiff (a great city, by the way). The first was Miss Petals https://misspetals-haberdashery.com/ located in Queen's Arcade shopping centre, and it's a baby shop (clothes, socks) as well a haberdashers! The lady I spoke with was very nice, and this shop was pristine and well-organised with a gigantic selection of ribbons, trims, zips and buttons, plus the staples of pins, tape measures, tailor's chalk and knitting needles and crochet hooks. There was a small selection of yarn, as well as patterns for sale too.
The second place is called Crafty Sew and Sew (sadly there is no website, and the latest blog post about them is 10 years old) about a 15 min walk from one end of the city centre, and genuinely worth it for any yarn or craft lover because this was a fabulous treasure trove of everything - from the items mentioned above, to copious amounts of embroidery thread, tapestry wool (I hope that's the right term, it's thicker than embroidery thread but come in skeins as opposed to balls), 4ply and DK yarns of all blends, "traditional" 2ply crochet thread, absolutely everything. The lady I spoke with was very knowledgeable and friendly, and I'd say the prices in there were very good - £1.05 per skein of standard Anchor or DMC embroidery thread (yes, she stocked an enormous variety of both) which I believe is often around £1.20 in many other shops, maybe even a little more in the likes of John Lewis. There were also the different variations of DMC threads, such as the metallic ones on spools and the "light effects" ones and perle! These are all available in Hobbycraft for much the same price, so instead of pouring my money into the larger companies that just don't need it, I'm very happy to have found this place!
Aren't they beautiful? These were £1.55 each from Crafty Sew and Sew, Cardiff, DMC Perle series.
I can't move on from this shop yet, as it was such a great experience. On reading some reviews afterwards one stated that they didn't like that stuff was everywhere, and that a lot of items were on the floor (in baskets or boxes, I might add). This added to my enjoyment of the place because once I reached to take a closer look at one thing, I found a load more things! Also I reckon there was organisation to what some may deem as chaos, as rather than have a few balls of yarn out on display, a lot of the yarns were still in the plastic bag they arrived in, in bags of 6 or 8. This meant they were not sitting around collecting dust! The labels were easily visible through the plastic bag and as they were all sealed up I'm guessing no sticky hands had been at them. Also, it's clearly a shop brimming with character and personality that this added to it for me. I came across my favourite yarn brand Patons, as well as Sirdar (the same weight and blend I'm currently working with for the pink snood, so I think I'll be back there soon), plenty of Stylecraft and lots of other brands too, all of which the lady was knowledgeable about. I cannot recommend this shop enough and I really hope it doesn't shut down. Ever! Two doors down was a fabric shop (I didn't have time to go in), so you can even kill two birds with one stone :)
Can you tell where the "costume change" happened?! I've decided to keep going with this snood because I love this combination of yarn and texture so much.
This yarn is so pretty I might knit this and another ball of it onto this snood, probably meaning it will turn out as the longest snood anybody could ever be bothered to knit :D
I had to frog the pink one, (see last week's blog post, or maybe the one before that) as I was using 3.25mm needles for it, and felt they were a little big, so I've started again using 3mm knitting needles, but good news is that it looks much tighter and neater hooray!
If you've made it this far by reading everything, thank you, you must be my sister :)
Love Lingling
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