SSShh...I don't do all my shopping at the Wizard shops..

I don't do all my shopping at the wizard shops for a number of reasons: price, availability, quality, and my mother not being great at math and sometimes crying when she has to convert galleons to pounds to American Dollars before she can figure out to her own satisfaction just exactly what something is costing her.

Today, for example, I went shopping at a number of shops, and none were in Misterius Alley. All of them yielded fun fiber stuff.

The first one is a little thrift shop in the dungeon of a Muggle Church. The ones we go to don't have these, generally, so this is a different kind of Muggle Church but the ladies are nice, and Mom figures in this day and age anyone whose trying to be anything like decent needs all the help they can get and we shouldn't be too picky who they are getting it from as long as it works, so we shop at all of them. Anyway, I got a bunch of stuff there, but two things were especially knittery and one crochetty. One is a salad spinner, which I can use when I wash fleece, or yarn, or knitted items, to get extra water out of the washee. I think this one is strong enough - the last one kept jumping the track and having little nervous breakdowns, but this looked, I don't know, sturdier somehow. Three American Dollars. I also got a BIG cotton sweater from that Muggle GAP shop - a dark green, with gold edging, and four really nice buttons, all in cotton - should be enough for something, don't you think? Probably something, and a market bag or two as well. Fifty American cents.

Fifty cents.

I can barely get over it.


I also got a dozen crochet hooks - the tiny ones in sizes like 12 and 14, which are hard to even find thread small enough for - sewing thread is too thick. Yes, I said, too thick. But anyway, a dozen of these little beauties, for four American Dollars. One just cannot complain...


And of course, there was a sale at Smiley's. I love Smiley's. It is...magical in its own way, and this was the best sale they have had in a while. All the bags of yarn were twelve dollars. The ones I got were A Nylon Ribbon from Nashua, 148 yards to the ball, ten balls, 4-4.5 stitches to the inch. Should be enough for something, eh? A nice cotton sportweight in scarlet (Well, I AM a Gryffindor...) A ribbon yarn from some fancy company in hot pink, a different ribbon yarn, again from fancy company, in turquoise, and a bag of fancy sock yarn - grey with black shiny stuff and silk - that goes with everyone's robes unless you go to Bauxbatons and then you have more trouble than your socks. I also picked up three balls of Bamboo in cream for a baby sweater and two sets of double points. Oh, and one ball of wool.

There was SO MUCH terrific stuff - I mean terrific - this hot pink Rowan wool, a fantastic periwinkle wool, two different fantastic colors of boucle, worsted weight wool for two dollars a one hundred gram ball...

AND I met a woman mom worked with in 1985. Lord, to think I wasn't even born... she hadn't even met DAD yet... yikes. Seriously, she is always saying that Smiley's is the place she has run into the most people she knows from other places of any in NYC, and that is saying something pretty wild...