As always on my travels, I keep my eyes out for yarns stores. Normally, if I’m traveling to the US (or even Europe or Canada), I can look up on the internet the location of Local Yarn Stores, or at least whatever form they take in different countries. For India, I really didn’t have the capabilities to look up local yarn stores, both because of the language difference, but also because directions can be rather uncertain in India, with none of the streets being labeled in any way that I noticed.
Still, I lucked out one particular time in Shimla, when we were wandering one of the Bazars. I came across a yarn store. Well, actually Michael saw the yarn store and pointed it out to me.
Inside was one of the most interesting yarn stores I’ve ever been into. It was just wide enough that my hips passed between the shelves in places, and contained two rooms: A front room where yarn was on the shelf, and a back room that you entered by passing through a narrow opening crowned by a clock.
There were just bags and bags of yarn lying around.
As for content, the yarn was mostly acrylic and acrylic blends – much more on par with what you’d find in a big box store like Michael’s rather than a Local Yarn Store. Not bad stuff, just rather lacking in things that weren’t acrylic, nylon and rayon.
Once I got back home I did some digging to see if I could find out more about Vardhman. They’re an Indian Textile company that does a little bit of everything. They mostly cater to India, but they do export yarn to Japan and thread to the United States, among other things. They’ve got a whole listing of their yarns here.
What struck me the most about the store (and the fabric stores I went to)? Yarn stores have just yarn. Fabric stores have just fabric. No tools. Now, it might be that it was just the stores I went to, but could you imagine going to a yarn store and picking out your yarn, only to have to go to another store to get your needles?
