Paris for fiber artists, part 1: Shopping

I'm back from my holiday in Paris, and it was an incredible time. I went with my boyfriend and we did all the major tourist things, the monuments, the museums, and whatnot.

Since I only had four days, and I was with a decidedly non-fibery man (despite his having made me two scarves in the past), I didn't get to do too much crafty stuff. For one thing, I didn't visit any Paris yarn shops. There were several that I considered visiting, including La Droguerie, which has its own line of yarn and patterns, and L'OisiveThe, a tea room which also sells hand-dyed yarn imported from the States. But the truth was there simply wasn't enough time for them, and most of the yarn in Paris was stuff I could buy either locally here in the UK, or online. Maybe next time I'll do a Paris yarn crawl, who knows.

However, I did do some shopping while in gay Paree, and one of my quests was for Japanese knitting books. I found two Japanese bookshops in Paris: BookOff, which specializes in used books, CDs, and DVDs, and Junku. Both are fairly close to each other - BookOff is just a few streets off the Place de Opera, and Junku is on the Rue des Pyramides.

Junku didn't have a lot of knitting books (their sewing book selection was huge, but there were only about a dozen books in the knitting/crochet section), but BookOff had a great selection. I was especially in search of those famed Japanese stitch dictionaries, which I couldn't find, but I did pick up a great little book chock-filled with interesting patterns.

(if anyone can read Japanese and tell me the title, let me know! It's apparently book 6 of the 'Let's Knit series'.)

The patterns in here are beautiful, with some totally new stitch patterns to me, and some interesting constructions. There are both knitting and crochet.


The best thing about Japanese knitting patterns? Totally charted, with detailed schematics. So you can knit these with no knowledge of Japanese.


~Joyuna