Spaghetti

In my last post about our trip to Poland I gave you a little sneak peek at the yarn that I had brought back with me. Remember this picture :)

While we were visiting my parents-in-law I had a sudden thought that there must be yarn stores in Poland too and that I absolutely can not leave there without visiting at least one. With my mum-in-law not being much interested in any kind of needle work, I wasn't sure she would know where I would find such a store, and so I turned to Google. Very randomly I stumbled across a blog by a Canadian girl studying in the Czech Republic and travelling around Eastern Europe. (I am sorry to say that I don't remember the name of the blog or the girl.) She had very kindly made a list of her favourite yarn stores in all of the cities that she had visited and one of these were in Bielsko-Biała!

The first chance I got, I asked to be taken to this shop and what a little treasure it was! Unfortunately I did not think to take my camera with me, and I still regret this lapse in photographer's memory. For now I can only direct you their website to feast your eyes on all of the goodies that are to be found there - Pasmanteria
After a good long while of yarn smooching, fabric fondling and general store browsing, my eyes fell upon a shelf full of this T-shirt yarn. As I have been wanting to try out this kind of yarn for some time now, and with the price of it being so good and the colour range being just spectacular I very quickly had a selection of it at the tills. As I had to get this back to the UK in a suitcase that already contained clothes for all three of us, I reluctantly showed some restraint and took only four skeins.

 As soon as we got home I (almost) immediately got to work on this beautiful mandala rug. I may have gone of the pattern around round 8 or 9, as I started just winging it after a while :) The hook that I had bought with the yarn is a bit of a monster, 12mm! and as a result I found that my hand got tired and sore very quickly and progress was slowing down. Luckily I soon discovered that if I hold the hook slightly differently (see photo below), this was no longer a problem and soon enough I was whizzing through the rounds again.

With the yarn being so bulky, it really works up very quickly and my rug was done and finished in just a couple of days.

 Here it is, adding some great colour to a rather bland corner of our bedroom.

It's not terribly big, measuring about 43 inches across, but then the space it was destined for isn't that big either. It also meant that I had some yarn left over to make a spaghetti bag. No pattern for this one, I just made it up as I went along and stopped when I had no more yarn left :)

 

Now, to fill that bag with a new WIP!!