So, yesterday I journeyed up north to the faraway land of Rosemont, IL to visit Stitches Midwest. This was, for you non-knitters out there, me voluntarily giving up hours of time, $11 to park, and $8 for admission for the opportunity to go shopping and effectively light my budget on fire and throw it out the window. However, it was not an ordinary shopping expedition. It was yarn as far as the eye could see. Specialty yarn shops from all across the nation and Canada, with all sorts of interesting and intriguing things. I was surprised to see that there was so very little spinning stuff about, but there certainly was yarn aplenty. I was only there for 3 or 3.5 hours, and still only covered about 3/4 of the floor… and a lot of the time, I was surfing through booths pretty casually, trying not to spend a lot of time in any one place.

so here’s the haul:

12 skeins of Berroco Peruvia, in a colorway called Cayenne. it’s actually a chocolatey brown with some red and green elements. i plan to make a sweater from it, perhaps an Ariann. (This was the big impulse buy of the day. Hey, it was discounted, and there’s no way I could have gotten 12 skeins of the same dye lot from my LYS…)

3 skeins of Valley Yarns Northampton in Chocolate, and 1 ball of Valley Yarns Valley Superwash in Rose. I plan to make a matching hat and scarf out of these, to match my new midlength pink wool boucle winter coat that I found on sale for absurd% off a week ago.

2 skeins of handpainted sock yarn from Shelridge Farm, in Ontario. For socks. For that is what I do with sock yarn.

And finally, 2 skeins of Koigu Painter’s Palette Premium Merino, handpainted in shades of burgundy-purple, which I quite liked for maybe making a pair of Bellatrix.

And finally, I picked up some goodies for a friend, and then I also took advantage of the opportunity to shop for my SP11 spoilee, and picked up several things that I hope he or she might enjoy. So that kind of takes the edge off in terms of having to shop for yarn to put in the presents. Oh, I probably will still shop for more yarn, but I’m feeling pretty impressed with my bargaintacularity. Also, this leaves me more time to come up with ideas for things to make myself for the gift boxes.

Last, I will leave you with more yarn:

Knitpicks Felici yarn in Hummingbird, which I knew I needed some of as soon as I saw Kim’s socks made from Felici, because what I really need in life is more sock yarn to knit up.

And a picture of the skeins I’ve most recently handspun:

On the top is 191 yards of the Cherry Blossom Border Leicester/mohair top that I got at the Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair. I Navajo-plied it to try and retain the color changes. And on the bottom is 318 yards of 2-ply, from Brown Sheep mill ends roving which I carded at Kim’s house and then she sent me home with the batts, and I then spun up on my Babe Production Wheel.