A Fine Yarn Mystery

So there I was in Stockholm in August, walking down the 3-mile-long Osterlanggatan (a really long street-shopping-cafe-alleyway in the Old Town), when I spot Sticka, a yarn store. Hooray! They had a beautiful shawl in the window, and carried most of the high-end yarns (Debbie Bliss, Garn Studios, etc.) and kits for the shawl in the window and another similar one. I picked up some alpaca (go figure) and some sock yarn (go figure), talking with the other cruise-ship tourists who knit while waiting to check out.

Happy!

But wait... Down the street, not much more than 6 stores down on the other side of the street... what's this? "Anntorps Vav, Garn & Handverk"?? "Garn" = yarn, I think. "Handverk" = handwork; a good bet. "Vav" = weave? Maybe. All signs point to a yarn store, or at least a store selling hand-made yarn goodies. We walk in - it's a yarn store! They also carried some familiar high-end stuff - Colinette, Dale of Norway - but also some names I hadn't seen before and couldn't have pronounced. (Sorry, I don't remember the names.)

And.

And.

And they had what looked like hand-spun and hand-dyed yarns in bulky and worsted weights... but they also had a bin of lace-weight. Most of the colors were fairly vibrant, in blues and reds. But I dug around and found this skein of pale greys, creams, pinks, and a little streak of pale mustard. Beautiful. Well, we were running out of time and had to get back to the ship, so I bought the skein and carried it back.

Later that same night, after we had left Stockholm and the ship was rocking gently towards Helsinki, I pulled out my yarn booty to touch and fondle it. Okay, the silk/alpaca was lovely, and the sock yarn will be cool. But I kept coming back to this lace yarn. After the 4th or 5th fondling, I said, "Oh, shit." Kelly's not used to my using that language when I'm not knitting, so it got his attention. "What?"

In my joy of finding the store and finding the yarn, and in my haste to check out, the only question I asked the lady was "how much is here?" There are no labels on the yarn - no fiber, no colorway, no brand, no nuthin'. All I know is (a) it's beautiful; (b) there are 600 meters of it.

See? Isnt' it pretty?