Leiden and other progress

This weekend found us in Holland, attending a friend's beach wedding (absolutely lovely, if rather chilly, on the North Sea coast at the Hague) and I did, of course, manage to fit in some yarn shopping as well.

Ribbels is situated in the centre of the pretty, bustly university town of Leiden, and features an exquisite wall of yarn which I found hard to drag my eyes and hands away from!  However I did manage to long enough to discover some Dutch hand dyed yarn - dyed in Holland, yarn from Slovenia.  I purchased a generous skein of laceweight in the colour "Mittenacht" (middle of the night), with thoughts of the star shawl I have heard about on the Knitmore Girls podcast.

There was clearly a history of wool trading in Leiden with street names like this:

(Wool Alley), and fantastic decoration (a little hard to see in this photo, but they are skeins of yarn!) on the old wool trading building:

And much inspiration generally in the pretty Dutch towns we visited (Gouda, Leiden and Den Haag):

And what projects did I have in tow?  One of my newly cast on ones, since blogging last - the Rustling Leaves Beret from Coastal Knits.  Nearly complete, its combination of soothing repetition with just enought to do to be interesting is perfect.  I have chosen a vintage-look dark green and plan to complete it in front of the TV tonight.

Other knitting?  Well, on my few days off before travelling to Holland, I worked some more on my Rocky Coast Cardigan - spinning up a little more yarn on my drop spindle - here is a small skein ready to be wound:

 and working another few inches of the body:

My self-imposed deadline on this project is this autumn (2013), and though it goes quickly when I work on it, my progress is in fits and starts.

I also cast on a Gatsby-inspired project - this is the beginnings of Stella, a Berrocco gold lace cardigan design, and I am using Deep Stash from the dawn of time - unmarked gold aran weight yarn which I think is Patons.  I am in two minds about it; the yarn is not nice to the touch and I was considering donating it; it might still end up at a charity shop, but the pattern is easy and rather addictive so I keep adding repeats.  Also, someone at the wedding was wearing a gold lace cardigan and I thought it looked rather nice, so that has inspired me to keep it in a project bag for occasional picking up and working on...

Although I have been relatively monogamous lately with my projects it is a nice feeling to have a few on the go!