Wollmeise!

I can’t believe I never posted photos from my trip to the Wollmeise shop this summer. I have often admired Wollmeise yarns online, but had never encountered them in person before. There are no yarn shops in my area of the states that carry it, and sometimes I am nervous about buying yarn online if I have never touched it, or at least seen the color in person. Not that you can’t just tell from photos that this is some extremely exceptional wool.

Fortunately, this summer I made a really wonderful new friend, and she took me to Pfaffenhofen for the Wollmeise summer sale. (!!!)

It was packed! Outside, people were admiring their purchases, looking at colors in the natural sunlight, and eating treats.

It was absolutely packed inside, but I did manage to sneak a few quick shots of some of the shelves when they were not flocked with humans.

I could have easily spent the entire week there, drinking coffee and examining the minute color differences from skein to skein. But of course, I did have a job back in Salzburg, and I had already taken one day off to go yarn shopping (fortunately my supervisor was also a knitter, and understood completely). So I had some difficult decisions to make. I ended up mostly buying lace, and because I am me, mainly solid colors. Still, let it be noted that I bought actual COLORS and only three gray skeins. And now please enjoy some glamour shots of my purchases:

For those of you who are not already versed in Wollmeise skeins (as I myself was not), let me explain. The grays pictured above are the 575-yard 100% wool sock-weight skeins. The lace skeins are the really amazing thing though – 1740 yards to a skein. That’s bonkers! That is any lace weight project I want to make, all in one perfect bundle. I’ve started knitting Jared Flood’s Bridgewater shawl in the red-orange color. For scale, here is a picture of that skein wound into a ball (will definitely be using a winder for future skeins!) and as you can see, my hand is nearly eclipsed by it. And I do not feel weird telling you that I have sort of abnormally large hands to start with. On many occasions, upon seeing them, people have told me that if I do not already, I should really consider playing the piano.

I am actually kind of glad I waited so long to post these photos – it gives me an excuse to look back over them and remember this really fun day. I’ve been feeling awfully nostalgic for my time in Austria this summer, and it’s nice to get to relive fun parts of the trip whenever possible. And in the meantime, I’ll just hope I make it back there, and back to the Wollmeise shop, too, before long.