(no subject)

[camwyn]

Found a very, very dangerous store yesterday, on Harrison Street. It's a little over a mile from my office, and the nearest mass transit is the Silver Line, about three blocks away. If you don't take the Silver Line you walk through Chinatown and over an overpass over I-90 and past Pine Street Inn to get there.

That is not the dangerous part.

The dangerous part is that this store is Boston Bead and Fiber, and about half of it is devoted to yarn and knitting, and the other half is devoted to beading and jewelry-making. And it is open until 6 most nights, 8 on Wednesdays. Walking a mile takes me twenty minutes.

Reaching any other store that sells yarn requires me to rent a Hubway or take the Red Line out to Cambridge. Reaching any other store that sells beads requires equal rigamarole. This one may not sell Lion Brand, which is cheap enough and decent enough in quality to be my usual fibrous poison of choice, but they sell other yarns of good quality at about the price I'd expect to pay anywhere else. And they have sparklies in half the shop; I've just started getting interested in beading, and now, look, I can walk to a source....

I would say the only shop I've found in Boston that's more dangerous is the LUSH I usually go to, since they're directly above a yarn store, but the yarn store in question is Newbury Yarns and they sell things like baby alpaca/musk ox blend at prices best denominated in foreign currencies so you don't think too hard about what you're paying.

Comments

[genarti]

Oh dear. That is perilous.

There's a store like that in my hometown in Vermont, and it's already dangerous enough when I'm only near it every few months. It's both good and dangerous to know about this one! Mind's Eye Yarn near Porter is dangerous enough, and they don't have sparklies.

[attractivegeekery]

Oh man, Newbury Yarns scares the dickens out of me.
I guess it's a good thing I never know what I'm making with it when I buy it, because I'd probably get sucked in there a whole lot easier.

But this Bead and Fiber place...that I fear.
I fear it almost as much as I fear Michael's and Blick.

[camwyn]

When I got there yesterday there was one woman on the premises. I asked about certain beads; she admitted she didn't know all of them, because she was the knitting teacher, but showed me where they kept the bugle beads. I got two strings of those, two strings of another kindo f bead, and two skeins of lightweight yarn to see about knitting a hat that'd keep my hair out of the way during summer flight lessons. She rang me up and I realized as I checked my receipt that she'd forgotten to ring up one of the strings of bugle beads. I'd paid with a credit card and didn't have cash on me; the bugle beads were $5 a string, which is impractical for small businesses to put on a card.

She told me I could pay the next time I came in.

[leeshajoy]

The first hit's always free, that's how they get you.

[silveraspen]

This sounds like an AMAZING store. And yes, very dangerous!