Oct 20 Yarn shopping

Xiaoyan is going to have a baby in the spring. She and Yuan are going to be married, but they are having a hard time getting her a visa. So, to cheer her up a little, I invited her to go to a yarn store that I had heard about. I said that we could pick out some yarn and I would knit something for her baby. She seemed quite excited by the idea.

I had found out about this shop, which is called Wool Spinning City, from the China knitters group on Ravelry. (Those of you who don't knit can ignore that last bit. It makes perfect sense to the knitters.) It is outside of Beijing, but not terribly far from where we are.

Yuan had written the address in Chinese for me. It turned out that when he googled it, a group of Chinese knitters was also discussing it. It seems to be quite famous here in Beijing.

Chuck and I invited Xiaoyan for lunch before we went. Since we had leftovers, we insisted that we could keep them in our little fridge and then she could take them home. (Yuan is in Shanghai for 3 days so she can have some already prepared tasty food.

Wool Spinning City is everything that it is cracked up to be. 3 floors of little shops selling yarn and fabric. On the roof is the sign in English! We started on the top floor and worked our way down. It is overwhelming, because I really have no idea of the brands and most of the labels only have Chinese. So I can tell that it is 75% something and 25% something else, but we don't seem to be able to find out what.

Most of the yarn shops look like this:
I decided that my best bet would be to really look at the places which were crowded and had lots of Chinese ladies buying.

We found a nice feeling yarn - but the colors were bad. No problem, they had 24 colors but no chart - someone went somewhere and brought back boxes.

We chose UCLA blue and yellow. Since she doesn't know yet what it is, we thought that this would be a good choice for either sex.

This yarn came in boxes 500 grams for 36 RMB. But I had seen some that came in handled plastic bags with zippers, so we went back to that store and found some that was OK. Xiaoyan explained to the lady that I really wanted a zipper bag, so she threw in an extra one. (The smiling lady in the blue sweater was my benefactress.)




After we saw all 3 floors, we visited the outside market. Didn't see anything that we needed there, so caught a taxi home.

Xiaoyan picked up her food boxes and agreed that we had a really fun afternoon.

Still eating 4 dinners a week in the hotel because of Chuck's class. We are beginning to go back to our favorites.

Venison with chestnuts and broccoli.

Calf riblets with spaghetti. (This one was a new one and a little strange. The spaghetti was tepid.)
Spicy green beans:

Chuck went off to teach and I had a nice time with my feet up reading. He came home about 9:30, we had a cup of tea, watched a little TV and went to bed.