Horsing Around

What is it that drives someone to leave the comfortable streets of a Jersey suburb to the outskirts of... Queens, New York?

For years I shopped online at Smiley's yarns before the recent crop of yarn stores popped up around my town. Their website offers lots of closeout type stuff. I'd buy basic wool for felting and on occasion I could get some rather nice alpaca.

A few weeks ago, after dropping my oldest off at the airport, I realized that LaGuardia Airport is in Queens, New York and that Smiley's "warehouse" is there too. I punched the address into the ol' GPS and voila, I was driving down the combustible streets of Jamaica Avenue. Dang that was a mistake. It is one noisy street! Far noisier than Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn or any other street I've been down in the last 15 years.

Inside the store, the place was virtually empty (pun intended)! I guess they reserve their stock for internet sales.

Disappointed, I couldn't let this hare brained idea to go unchallenged so I set the GPS toward Manhattan and drove to Purl Soho in well, Soho.

Sorry about skimpy pictures but it's actually a good representation of how small the store is. Remember, New York City real estate is EXPENSIVE.

I couldn't not buy any yarn right? I bought a skein of this curly locks stuff intending to use it for an icord handle

Well it doesn't quite look like what I had intended so I'll have to figure out what to do with this

A few doors down from Purl's yarn store is Purl's fabric store.

Of course I bought some fabric. Who cares I don't sew

Oh and speaking of sewing, I bought this from Etsy, this girl can sew!

I got an entire set of double points to go into their neat little compartments!

Yeah, so I've been making lots of bags for gifts. I made this one for one of my sisters-in-law.






I used some stash yarn I bought last year at Rhinebeck. I found the brooch in North Carolina at a vintage store.


This bag was intended for my mother. I bought these cool leather straps for the handles but I'm not sure if I'll give her this one yet. Gifts for her are always so hard...


Finally, after horsing around driving here and there, would you believe that I stumbled upon a retirement home for horses? I was driving my youngest to a basketball event when out of the blue I saw these adorable horses. They were in various stages of recovery from something or another. I didn't want to leave. They were so sweet.