Stashful in Seattle 2006
Monday, February 13th, 2006This may become an annual February getaway — yarn stashing trips to Seattle. This past weekend, Jen, Michelle and I drove ourselves down to Acorn Street Shop, Weaving Works and Hilltop Yarn in Seattle for a little yarn shopping. Even though I Mapquested all the directions, we still managed to get lost several times… but we were not detered and are planning on another trip…
Our first stop was Acorn Street Shop where Jen pretty much blew her budget. Michelle bought one of their lovely patterns, “Waterfall Lace Scarf”, and spent much of the rest of the day looking for yarns to use for the scarf. Amazingly, I found some Cash Iroha from the exact same dyelot as the yarn I bought in Tokyo — how does that happen?! Anyway, I bought two skeins of it for just in case, since there are rumblings about the patterns specs being short on yarn.
I also bought…
Lunch was just a couple blocks up the hill from Acorn at Nana’s Soup House. Wonderful, delicious soups and bagettes — if you were so inclined, you could get a “Tanker” of their Baked Potato Soup.
Next stop was the beautiful and incredible Weaving Works — I think several times I mumbled that might head might explode… the wall of Koigu, the shelves of dyeable yarns, the bins of rovings… Michelle was going through some drama with several different skeins of alpaca (Honey Lane vs. Frog Tree) — her pain was palpable.
For Jen’s birthday this past fall, I gave her a little Ashford spindle to “get her started” and now she’s thinking about a wheel. It’s a fabulous thing that Weaving Works has lots of wheels to play with. She tried a Lendrum, Ashford Traveller, Ashford Traditional and Schacht Matchless and ended up leaning towards the Lendrum and Traditional…
Here’s what I managed to restrict myself to:
We spent so much time at Weaving Works that we had to cut our time at Hilltop short… besides, we had dinner reservations at Monsoon:
Located in the Capitol Hill neighbourhood, Monsoon is a beautiful mix of Vietnamese and Westcoast cuisine — fresh, fragrant and fantastic. Our order was:
- grilled tiger prawn and green papaya salad and rau ram
- grilled monetary squid stuffed with duck meat and dried shitake
- grilled la lot beef (grilled flank steak wrapped in la lot leaves)
- caramelized idaho catfish claypot with fresh coconut juice, green onions and thai chilies
- fresh dungeness crab
- asian eggplant with green onions in spicy coconut sauce
- coconut creme caramel
- vietnamese banana cake with coconut sauce
- black and white sesame ice cream
How good was Monsoon? Well, three chatty girls were rendered completely silent for 20 minutes as we enjoyed some gorgeous crab and catfish… it was just that good.
We might just have to get ourselves back down to Seattle before next February.
