I was tired and it has been a long week.  One day left and just two yarn shops left.  Both shops were what I called fiddly to get to with trams, trains and walks.  I left my room late as I had had a lazy morning packing some of my stuff and doing some blogging.

I made my way to a place called Canterbury, through another called Camberwell – I must say I am not very impressed with Australia’s ability to think of interesting names for places!  It was a short walk to Sunspun Fine Yarns and a lovely cool interior welcomed me in.  This wool shop had a plethora of yarn on sale and I forced myself to ignore all the boxes.  Karen was the lady serving today and she was very helpful in trying to identify interesting yarns for me.  I settled on a lovely cream alpaca.

  
Once all the other customers had gone we had a good chat about the origins of yarns and where they are produced.  There are very few Australian companys manufacture there yarn 100% in Australia and it is the same for the UK too.  My advice when buying yarn of any description is to look closely at the label – you may have to dig the label out of the ball – and you may be suprised how far a ball of yarn has come or gone to get to the shelf in the shop.  It is personally one of my irritations when buying yarn.  I want to know where it was grown, processed, dyed and wound so I can chose to buy Bristish and/or keep the carbon footprint of the yarn as small as possible.  Moan over!

This is the Sunspun Fine Yarn shop…

After a good hour here I made my way back on the train and two trams to Wondoflex Yarn Craft Centre. It was buy far the biggest yarn shop I had visited and had a huge stock of yarn from all over the world.  There was the same problem with finding 100% Australian yarn.  The ladies put me in the right direction and the yarn chose me!  The lilac 100% superfine merino by Cleckheaton was grown in Australia and it was the first colour the lady pulled out for me to feel.  The soft spun mohair loopy was proudly made in New Zealand and was hanging in a peg on its own looking a bit bedraggled as it has come free from its label – I just has to rescue it. The popcorn pure new wool was hand dye in Australia and just said buy me when I looked at it!

  
And here are a few pictures of the shop I took as I was leaving.

And then I went back to my room for a quiet evening, finishing off the bottle of Bob, eating up the left overs hummus and rice crackers and doing some knitting.  Tired but feeling like I had accomplished something.

Quote in picture form again.