On a Mission for Yarn and The Mission

Part of the reason this trip to San Francisco happened was because Becky said she wanted to go a trip that had a knitting/yarn component.  So, of course, we needed to hit up the San Francisco yarn scene for at least a small part of our 3 days together.  Luckily we had the address for Artfibers otherwise we would have easily walked right past it.  It is in a beautiful, sunny space on the 3rd floor of a building in a very nice area nearby Chinatown. 

The wonderful and special thing about this shop is that you can buy your yarn by the yard.  The major bonus of going to their store is that they let you swatch as much as you want to.  All of the yarns are there for the swatching and they let you keep the swatch, too.  The store/staff was very welcoming and even though most of their yarns are a little too fancy/novelty for my knitting taste, I did come away with Ginko, a beautiful bamboo silk yarn that I plan to knit into a shawl.

After the yarn shopping, we dropped off some stuff and had a little picnic in our room as the sun started to get lower in the sky.

We then headed out to the Mission/Castro area to check out the beautiful buildings and park of Mission Dolores.

The Mission Dolores park was packed!  It looked like everyone had gathered for an event, but the event was just that people had a space to gather.

We enjoyed a walk through the park and the dramatic lighting of the afternoon-becomes-evening sun.

The view from the park is stunning.

To bookend the yarn experience, we went from the park over to ImagiKnit, which was a really well stocked store.  Unfortunately by that time in the evening, I was so tired the only yarn I was interested in buying was a giant skein of undyed cotton yarn because it looked like it would make a good pillow.  Since I didn't trust my judgment, I left the buying at that store up to Becky.  She bought some beautiful Madelinetosh yarn.  I think she chose well.

After we finished at the store, we headed to a cafe where we recharged with dinner and relaxed into some solid knitting time.  Yarn portion of the vacation = mission accomplished.