Friday, January 25, 2008

Thread Shopping


I had the opportunity to visit a lovely little shop in Woodbridge called The Enchanted Needle looking for some tatting threads. The shop

has supplies for all kinds of needlework including Cross Stitch, Tapestry and Knitting as well as Finishing and they have a room for classes. I had a chance to talk with the store's proprietors Christiane and Julia whose work in all manner of needle arts, adorn the walls of the shop.

Their spring class schedule is filled up, but Christiane has my card and may need me to come back and teach tatting in the fall.

I went looking for Valdani thread and a brief search of the internet indicated that they were the closest store that carried these threads. Apparently someone else had the same idea and had come in last week and wiped out their stock. That's OK, I managed to pick up a couple of balls in colours I like, so I'll have a play with them later.

The other things I went looking for were balls of perle cotton thread for a project I have been dying to try out for a while. I want to do a petit point design in tatting and it requires specific shades of colour. I didn't find the shades I needed, so I bought the embroidery floss instead. I hope one skein of each colour is enough. I hate having to rely on stores like WalMart and Michaels because they never seem to have what I need. They carry a lot of materials for general purpose crafting, but if you need something like a specific shade of thread, you have to go to a specialty shop.

O yeah, the other balls of thread? They were just sitting there in the thread drawer next to the Valdani thread and they were just such pretty shades of DMC perle cotton size 8 in the same pink/plum colour I felt I had to bring them home and of course I needed a contrast colour, didn't I? Besides the blue went nice with the variegated Valdani. And the red? It's DMC Perle 12. I seem to use up red faster than I bring it home and I'm down to half a ball of red perle which isn't enough to make much of anything with. I mean really, how can you NOT tat red hearts when Valentine's day is fast approaching.

I don't stash thread, I use it, a lot of it. I showed DH another empty core from a ball of size 20 Royale I don't see a weight on it, but I'm guessing about 50 grams and it's 400 yards of thread. I'm blessed with a sweetheart for a husband. His only words were, where do we get more. Gotta love him.

Now that I have my thread I'd better get tatting.

2 comments:

Jeff Hamilton said...

You are so lucky to be able to get Valdani threads locally. All the stores I could find that were remotely close enough to me either don't sell Valdani threads anymore or they carry some of their other products. The Michaels store here carries a lot of DMC floss, I wouldn't be surprised if they carried all if not most of the colours available.

Jeff

Melissa said...

Ooh a tatting class! I would be so take that (even if it is in Woodbridge). I just (yesterday) taught myself to tat so I would love to learn from someone who actally knows something.

Thanks for the shop link - there's not too many embridery places around.