A visit to A Coffee and a Yarn

For those who wanted me to take you with me (which is all one of you, but it's a good excuse to blog it), I went to A Coffee and a Yarn (that is the official website) today. I linked my new old friend on Facebook and said "we have to go here" because she is into crochet too (fancy that!) and hand-dyeing wool. She got married young and had four kids so I expected her to say "how about 27th of August" and instead she said "when can we go? can we go tomorrow?" and I thought well absolutely we can go tomorrow. So off we went, seizing this window of opportunity, having a lovely little jaunt through Newtown on the way.

As you can see, they had wool-spinning happening in the store (you can see the wheel through the window) and sell Black Star Pastry goodies. (I forgot my camera, so took these shots on my 2 megapixel phone, and then for the first time ever discovered I can get them off my phone using another cable, and then I polaroided them, just because I am having fun with polaroiding, even though it blurs things that are not originally blurry.)

Inside there was yarn for sale against the back wall. A lot of it was organic, and we were curious about what wool had to be to be organic, which apparently is concerned with the processing of the wool, not necessarily the rearing of the sheep (actually having looked into that, I don't think that is correct: see here).

Before we left my house my friend was showing me some beanies she had made already from wool from the Nundle Woollen Mill. Nundle is a little place up in the hills outside of Tamworth (the town where we grew up) with a few fine queer old country tales connected to it. I have been on many a youth-group camp in it's cold forests and taken teenagers on rugged outdoor education trekking expeditions through its surrounding wilds. Then when we got to A Coffee and a Yarn, there was Nundle wool for sale on the shelves, indicated by the white card in front of the orange wool you can see.

This is my friend in front of the other shelf where you can buy books and kits and wooden knitting needles.

All up we decided it is a fun place to go. They are also doing a roaring trade in take-away coffee, thus opening at 7 am, which in Newtown must be saying something about the coffee. If you don't take your own yarn craft they have knitting boxes in the middle of each table and you can pick it up where someone else left it and contribute towards knitting blanket squares or other items for the less fortunate. I picked it up (when I'd had enough of stitching crochet squares together) thinking I'd forgotten how to knit, but as soon as I had it in my hands it it all came back to me (helped no doubt by the fact that I didn't have to cast on and start it!) so I knitted a few rows. Knitting must be just like riding a bike. These are some of their table decorations.