Yarn Store Yatra, Part I: Stitch 'n' Bitch Berlin!

At the moment I'm kind of reminding myself of the immortal Lorelei Lee as she remarked of her visit to Paris: "And when a girl walks around and reads all of the signs with all of the famous historical names it really makes you hold your breath [...] When we stood at the corner of a place called the Place Vandome, if you turn your back on a monument they have in the middle and look up, you can see none other than Coty's sign." Today was my first visit to Berlin-Mitte or the center city, and there were a LOT of famous museums and historical monuments and impressive architecture that had to be ignored in order to fit in all my needlework-themed activities. Well, I'm sure I'll get to the tourist highlights another time!  


I had plotted out a one-way route of about 20 km on Google Maps to bike from our southwestern suburb of Dahlem to the main Berlin yarn stores that I'd found on the internet:

Yes, German shops are closed on Sunday, but that seemed like a good safety precaution: I could go and check out the shop windows and learn where all the stores are without being tempted to spend buckets of money. However, just as I was finishing my route planning, I serendipitously discovered that there was a weekly stitch'n'bitch taking place up by Prenzlauer Berg in the northeast, starting in a bit more than an hour.  

So I got ready and put my project bag on my bike and dashed off to head for the meeting site as expeditiously as possible, without any windowshopping on the way, but it still took me about an hour and a half, counting getting lost for a while up by Torstrasse. Now that I've ridden in the city center, I think I have to revise my estimate of the proportion of Dutch-style biking to Indian-style biking in Berlin to more like 55% vs. 45%.  

But I got there and had a good time, although I didn't get any German practice because all the participants spoke English. Here's the cafe table with various participants' works-in-progress:

Schlüsselkäfer says, "My Tineidae cousins in the Lepidoptera could eat all this yarn in less than a week!" Shut up, Schlüsselkäfer.

It was a good meeting but not very productive in terms of project progress, because it turns out that even after all that packing I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH CROCHET HOOKS. One of my thread-crochet patterns calls for steel hooks in a weird sizing notation so I thought I had covered all the possibilities, but according to my gauge swatch the smallest steel hook I have is still too big. Hope I can find some others at a craft or needlework store here! I left the gathering about 5:30 so as to bike home while it was still reasonably light out, but on the way back I stopped to check out a couple additional yarn shops that had been mentioned. Here's "Loops" on the Wörtherstrasse:

"Angebot" means "sale", and at 2 euros per 50-gram skein it looks like a pretty good price. (Of course, I didn't actually see the yarn in person, and anyway I've got enough stuff to work on that I brought with me.) "Knitknit" on Linienstrasse looked a bit more chi-chi:

You can see the reflection of my bike in the window (and not much else, unfortunately). There were a couple other shops I looked for in the Mitte, but one I couldn't seem to find and the other appeared to be more woolen goods than yarn. I couldn't take too much time looking around before the light went, but I couldn't resist snapping a shot of this display outside the Legoland Discovery Centre in Potsdamer Platz:

If that giraffe looks kind of pixelated it's not because of my crummy-ish camera, it's because it's made out of rectangular Legos! (Schlüsselkäfer sulked because he didn't get to be a reference scale object in this photo, but he would have been way too small to show up.)