Central Texas Yarn Crawl

10 yarn stores, 2 days, lots of driving, lots of new found respect for Texas knitters.  :o)  In the end, I was very impressed by the stores on the crawl.  I can't wait to get to visit them again.

First off, the freebies.  You had to pay $20 to be an official member of the crawl.  This was different than any crawl I'd ever been on before, but in exchange you got a "passport" that you got stamped at each store and if you were a very lucky person, you would get a magical grand prize.  Each store also had 10 prizes that you had a chance to win if you visited that store as well.  In addition, even if you weren't a winner, you still felt like a winner because each store had a freebie you got to have if you were an official crawler.

My freebies!!

You got to choose colors for each of the freebies.  They were all pretty cool.  Starting from the left and going clockwise:  uber soft yarn and pattern to knit a sheep (!), a free pattern book (this wasn't an official freebie, but the store was giving them away in addition to the freebie), a beginning needle felting kit, a cotton blend (periwinkle) skein and they emailed me a pattern for little fingerless mitts, cotton pima (in the plastic baggie), official yarn crawl swag bag, ball of a yarn called "princess" (brown), ball of novelty yarn that makes one of those swirly scarves (red, tan, black), puppy snips and measuring tape, crochet stitch markers (you got your choice of crochet and knitting, I went with crochet since I have none of those), row counting bracelet, and a small kit to create a yarn necklace.  WHEW!!  Honestly, with these freebies, I feel like $20 was a steal!  I did not win a prize, but it was worth it either way.  :o)

In an effort to keep this post from being 50 pages long, I'm going to break up my posts.  Tomorrow I'll reveal my purchases... ;o)