I wrote a post recently showing the great pile of knitting that I was taking with me on my holiday to Vancouver.  I noted that Vancouver and surrounds has a large number of yarn stores, but I was fairly determined not to visit any of them.  A reader, kiwiyarns, commented that I was bound to yarn shop.  Shortly after we arrived here, I was perusing patterns on Ravelry and came across this cute little cardigan:

It is designed by Jennette Cross for Hill Country Weavers.  I have been following this group with interest for a while, because I like their patterns and their southwestern sensibility and colour schemes.  This one caught my eye because it is pretty and feminine and lacey, but mostly because of the unusual combination of colours.  It is made with The Fibre Company Acadia, which is a merino, silk and alpaca blend.  I have never used this yarn before, but was taken enough with the pattern to notice that it was knit with the colours strawberry and amber.

Earlier this week, Leah and I were having a celebratory lunch at Granville Island in Vancouver (celebrating Leah’s AS grades).  After lunch, we wandered around all of the little shops and galleries and just happened across a great shop for artists called Maiwa, which has supplies for dying, and beautiful fabrics, textile books, and dare I say, yarn.  As it is a shop which carries many different things, they do not have a great quantity of yarn (but what they have is fab).  The yarn is kept in baskets on a table, and the first basket I saw when I walked in the door was filled with The Fibre Company Acadia.  So, of course, I was obligated to root through it, and lo and behold, they had both strawberry and amber in stock.

Well, dear reader, this was serendipity.   I was not out on a yarn aquisition expedition, but this sort of fell into my lap.  I asked the lovely shopkeeper if I could access the internet to look up Ravelry, to determine how many skeins I would need.  They were very helpful.  And then I couldn’t help but notice that the pattern called for buttons, and that Maiwa had a large chest of drawers filled with hand carved wooden buttons.  So Leah and I spent a fun twenty minutes running our fingers through mountainous piles of buttons and searching out the perfect set.

So, despite the best intentions, I ended up buying yarn on this holiday.  It  was serendipity.