Live Near St. Louis? Are You Ready for a Yarn Crawl?

Back in April Yarn Crawl LA got a lot of attention for bringing together nearly 30 shop owners and offering people who visited the shops during the crawl freebies, discounts and prizes. now the middle of the country is getting in on the fun with the Summer’s Last Blast Yarn Crawl in the St. Louis area, running between July 26 and 29.

This yarn crawl will straddle the border, with shops in Missouri and Illinois participating (10 in all). The first 50 customers at each store will get a free zippered notions bag made for the event, and there are all sorts of prizes including yarn from Alchemy and Rowan, Japanese seed beads and more.

Participants can download a passport showing the locations that will allow them to collect stamps during the yarn crawl. People who get at least six stamps are eligible for prizes and those with 10 stamps are in the running for a bigger prize package.

Have you ever done a yarn crawl? Spill it!

[Photo by Summer’s Last Blast Yarn Crawl.]

Next Pattern:

I don’t even know what to say about this amazing knitting pattern. The Bestiary Scarf from Monstra & Mirabilia is so full of details it’s a little intimidating to talk about.

It features, as the designer describes it, an “artistic encyclopaedia of Western mythical creatures.”

The pattern includes a dragon, harpy, Medusa, chimaera, centauress, phoneix, kraken, mermaid, sew serpent, cyclops, wyvern, Pegasus, amphiptere and amphibaena. (It’s a good thing there’s a photo of the proejct with everything labelled because I definitely didn’t know the names for everything.) It’s also designed like a landscape, with water and land creatures toward the bottom ends and sky creatures toward the top.

The dragon is at the center and is worked sideways so it will show as upright when you wear it.

The scarf is worked in double knitting, so the colorwork appears in the opposite colors on the other side.

It’s worked in light fingering weight yarn (on size 0 US or 2mm knitting needles) and the colorwork is shown in charts. The pattern also includes some video tutorials and written instructions to help you along. The designer says the pattern is for intermediate knitters, and “advanced beginners may succeed with patience and the help of the video tutorials.”

When I was an advanced beginner this kind of a pattern would have brought me to tears, but if you love a challenge, and a project that you’ll wear and get tons of astonished reactions every time, this is the project for you. And of course if you have a few double knitting projects under your belt and are comfortable reading charts, this project shouldn’t be hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s fast. But lots of great things take time, and that’s never stopped us before, right?

You can get a copy of this pattern from Monstra & Mirabilia on Ravelry.

[Photo: Monstra & Mirabilia ]

Next Pattern:

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