San Francisco has to be one of my favourite places in the world, so I was delighted when we managed to shoehorn it into our recent holiday to the USA. When I say shoehorn it in, I mean it – we had already decided to go to Florida, so we decided it would be the perfect opportunity to also visit San Francisco and Las Vegas. Perfect opportunity might be a bit strong – Fort Lauderdale to Las Vegas is a 5 and half hour flight – that is longer than it takes to get to Tel Aviv from London, to put it into perspective!
Nevertheless, we ploughed on with the booking and I’m so glad we did. I first visited San Francisco over 10 years ago, and back then I loved it so much I doubled the amount of time I had scheduled to spend there and celebrated my birthday in the city. This time that wasn’t an option, but we are already planning our next trip!
Anyway, on to the important stuff. After over a week of being in the USA I hadn’t seen any yarn shops outside of stopping for 30 seconds to squeeze some cheap stuff in Wallmart. Knowing how upset this had made me, my lovely husband had done his research and found me a yarn shop a few blocks from our hotel. Little did he know that it was better described as yarn heaven!
Imagiknit is totally mind blowing – they have two whole rooms of yarn which is arranged on floor to ceiling shelves. One room is for natural animal fibres and one for plant and synthetic fibres.
I’m afraid to say I dragged my poor husband around that shop for about an hour (actually, that may be a charitable guess – it was ages!). The poor guy couldn’t even justifiably complain – he had given me a yarn budget to spend as a present. It was hard to choose!
After thinking long and hard, and stroking every skein of yarn in the shop at least twice, I settled on four hanks of Madeline Tosh Twist Light yarn which I just fell in love with. They’re soft, with a slight sheen, not too fluffy, and the colours were just perfect – there’s a slight variegation in each hank but it is very subtle. I think they’re going to be a dream to work with – but as with all my special yarns, now I need to find a “worthy” project for them!
As I didn’t have a swift and winder at home (I do now, it seemed like a great opportunity to buy more yarn in hanks!) I decided to stay even longer in yarn heaven and wind all four yarns into centre pull balls. So much fun, I think I want to do this with all my stash yarn! I can’t believe I’ve spent years hand winding balls like some kind of chump!
I’m told that Imagiknit ship internationally, so I’m in very real danger of placing another order soon.
While we were in San Francisco we also spent one day going to Alcatraz.I had been to Alcatraz when I went before, but I’m sure it was prettier this time!
The prison tour was as fascinating as ever, but this time I really noticed the spectacular views from the island.
The bird life was pretty tame and photogenic too.
I think my favourite part of the Alcatraz trip had to be finding out that the prisoners used to crochet to help them pass the time. Apparently one of the inmates knew how to crochet and taught a few of his friends – which started a craze! The funniest part of the whole story was the pretty pink yarn they used to illustrate their point in the cell setup – I couldn’t help but think it might be a bit girly for my tastes, but maybe Al Capone liked it… 🙂
That evening we also went on a sunset bay cruise – which is a pretty grandiose term for a tourist boat trip with a buffet, but we enjoyed it nevertheless!
Being a couple of animal lovers, we were delighted to spend the majority of the sunset cruise enjoying the company of this seagull, who we christened Dave.
Dave loved to pose for photos, but I think he was really there for the buffet. He was quite shouty.
I think that’s quite enough pictures of birds for now!
Until next time – thanks for stopping by!
Elsie Pop xx
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