It's a mod, mod world...

So I'd heard a little rumour that a local yarn store was shutting it's doors forever more and that "everything must go!". Normally this might excite me, as it's the knitting store that's pretty much the closest possible to me, but truthfully it wasn't one that I frequented often. I always referred to it as "the old lady store", since there's always this same 'lil lady in there, and she's pretty old school about what she keeps in stock etc. No joke, her cash register looked like this:



Which I'm sure worked just dandy, particularly given that they had a cash-only policy. Every now and then I'd pop in there if I needed something that was a no-brainer (I think she had a selection of about 6 aero circulars, that kind of thing), but it was a small store, so that's understandable.

Needless to say I wasn't clamouring to get there for amazing deals on cashmere or anything like that, but decided to pop by Saturday after my french class (and as a little last class French graduation present to myself) on the off chance that there was something great there.

What I had FORGOTTEN about was the massive collection of patterns she's had since she opened the store in the fifties. As soon as I saw the words MARY QUANT, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven:



She had hundreds of mint vintage patterns going for a couple bucks apiece. And when I say hundreds I mean at least a thousand. It's a miracle and a shame that I only made it out of there with six. I was feeling a bit guilty though. She's fallen ill (which unfortunately is the reason they're shutting down), so it was just her (husband? elderly son?) running the place, and the system by which you purchase these patterns was a bit convoluted. He's got these massive binders that you flip through, select the one you want, and then he goes to some filing cabinet hidden deep within the bowels of the store to retrieve you a fresh copy (the older the pattern the more difficult a filing system it seems...). So by about the sixth one I was feeling supremely guilty for putting this guy through his paces, and I had to kind of cap it there. I could have easily kept going though and am not ruling out a reconnaissance mission. Really what I should have said was "please, just bring me to the mystery cabinet and let me rifle!"

Anyway, he was desperate to see the back of me I think, so I didn't want to push my luck. Plus how many of these (if any) will I even get around to knitting. I just new that I particularly couldn't by-pass the Mary Quant patterns. I felt as if I'd stumbled upon a pucci dress!

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In other news, my thoughts have turned to mother's day, and in light of my recent obsession with the fabulous Elizabeth Zimmerman (...I've just added the Rorschach to my list of must-knits!), I've picked up the opinionated knitter for my mother.

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(But the Manos is for me!) I hope she likes it...she can be a bit picky about this kind of thing ---being herself an opinionated knitter (and hopefully she's not also reading this, thereby spoiling one of her surprises). Oopsy.

In knitting news, the Alpaca Vest should be done tonight. I've never loathed a pattern quite so much.