Yarn Shopping Paris Style by Hazel

 

Yarn Shopping Paris Style

On my recent journey to Paris, I looked up the local yarn shops. What would a trip to any foreign country be without a stop at the yarn store? I follow this particular one on Facebook and decided to find them in person. The store is called Le Comptoir (meaning the counter). I wrote down the address, set out with my trusty girlfriend, and hopped on the Metro.

Finally, when we located the store, we immediately noticed some differences in American and French style yarn shopping. This shop was very narrow and long. There appeared to be very limited quantities of yarn, but upon asking I found that there is one representative ball of each color on hand. Most of the yarns were also out of my reach. The lowest level of yarns shown in the photo above was just about eye level. Imagine shoe shopping instead of yarn shopping.

Another difference was there is no room for social knitting in the store. It just isn’t done. The biggest difference I noticed was that they had not one single skein of hand dyed yarn in the entire store. None. I was maybe hoping for some German yarns like Wollmeise or anything we lust for that are in short supply on our side of the ocean. But, alas there were none. The girl told me it was few and far between to have hand dyes. Also, pattern books are tough to come by unless they are books for the yarn in the store. No individual patterns. Boo!

Next time you walk into The Yarn Club, imagine if the experience I described is the one you are about to receive. No touching the yarns, no pilfering in the bins of delicious colors and fibers, no place to sit and get a bit of help, no hand dyed delights. I couldn’t wait to come home to my yarn bliss in our own store. I feel bad for the yarn shoppers of Paris not having this fun.        

~Hazel~