Holiday Fun

My brother lives in San Francisco and Mom and her friend and I came out to visit him for the holidays. We had a lovely Christmas dinner, and them a day of rest, and then we drove over to Berkeley to go to Lacis. Luckily Mom is also interested in threads and things, so it didn’t take much to convince her to go, and friend wanted to visit a Japanese tool store also in Berkeley, so it was all around a good thing.

It was my first visit to Lacis, and if you are interested in textiles and needle arts, you MUST go there. I got stuck in one corner of the store and it was several hours before I put my head up and realized that they had two more *rooms* to explore. Needless to say I couldn’t take in everything. They have lots of obscure books, which demanded my full attention, and lots of great tools that are hard to find. I got two sets of steel knitting needles, #00000 and #000000. I found a spanish lace-knitting magazine that has some fantastic patterns in it, and a couple of the Christine Duchrow reprints, all full of old German lace knitting patterns. My second focus was tatting, because I can’t seem to find tatting anything around where I live. I found some challenging books and thread and shuttles. If you are looking for tatting shuttles, this is a great place to go! They have everything from basic plastic to tiny mother of pearl to long slender bone to celtic patterned silver-plated shuttles. They also have tons of historic dress patterns, corset makings, hat forms, ribbons, lace, embroidery canvases, silk floss, books on just about anything textile related... It was a fantastic afternoon. I even got to stop in the small museum in the back of the store, where in addition to lots of lace examples they have a small Peruvian gauze weaving displayed.

Go there. Or go to http://www.lacis.com/.

Comments

[diana]

Wow, what an amazing place! Thanks for the link.