Dispatch from Japan!

I’ve been here since Tuesday, and this is mostly a vacation, but I couldn’t resist doing some yarn-related exploring while here. A few months back I read a feature in Amirisu magazine, a wonderful bilingual Japanese/English online magazine based in Japan, about new local yarn stores in Tokyo. At the top of the list was Keito, and I made it over there yesterday to check out the store.

the adorable front doors of Keito

誕生日おめでとう, Keito!

They’re getting ready to celebrate their first anniversary this month, and they had an adorable window display complete with a pom pom cake. I was too shy to take any photos inside, but I spent a good deal of time browsing their selection of yarns and books (and they had a great selection of both). It’s a really lovely space, with a table over at one end for their knit cafe events. Keito imports a lot of their yarns, and it was fun to see Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift on the shelves along with one of my favorites, Brooklyn Tweed Shelter! They also had several imported yarn lines I’d never seen before. Somehow, I managed to not buy any yarn, but I did leave with a new stitch dictionary, pictured below:

パターンブック 300 / Knitting Patterns Book 300 is one of the stitch dictionaries published by Nihon Vogue, and as far as I can tell from my Google searches it looks like it’s out of print. There are plenty of stitch patterns in here that I’ve seen before, but quite a few that are nothing at all like what’s found in the stitch dictionaries I’ve purchased in the States. Honestly, I think this book’s got me itching to just make blankets to try out different stitch patterns. It’s not hard to see how the sampler afghan came to be! I’m looking forward to getting it home and trying out some of the patterns.

東京 > 京都

For now, I’m in Kyoto, and I don’t get back to Seattle until the 13th so it may be a few weeks before you see a real update from me. I did get a little knitting done on the train from Tokyo to Kyoto, and you can be sure there will be some travel photos upon my return!