Sunday 2 August 2009

Baltic souvenirs

I am back from my short trip and am back to spinning and listing new yarns. But before I forget, here are some of the things I brought home.

First up some gorgeous latvian yarn bought in a small souvenir shop in Riga. I absolutely fell in love with those mittens and have since purchased this amazing book and am planning on knitting at least a few of them. Before I got to the cities I researched the shops online and for Riga I owe my thanks to this blog post. In Tallinn I seem to have missed a good few of them, but found some and bought some lovely wooden hand crafted buttons as well as some thin pencil roving (third picture).
In Helsinki I stumbled into Marimekko! Of course I knew the name, but only from really cool patterns in the 60s, so I was genuinely surprised to see that they are still going and thriving with lots of gorgous shops! They now sell pretty much everything from clothes to bags, to napkins, umbrellas or mugs. However, they also sell fabric by the meter! Most of it was thin cotton fabric at a really high price. As nice as the patterns were, I really wasn't convinced by the quality (think IKEA) and didn't buy any of these. On the other end they did sell some of the heavy weight (bark cloth) fabrics which they also use in their own bags. The patterns weren't quite as exciting, but I still carried home a few meters, including this bright polka dot fabric!







Next up is a shot with a linen fabric as well as cotton and linen lace, the thin pencil roving and the wooden buttons.





In Vilnius (probably my favourite of the cities) I found a linen shop chain, where they sold all types of linen fabrics as well as absolutely stunning linen lace, so I had to get a little collection. :)

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