"The LYS Tour is a great way to travel around the Puget Sound, visit your favorite yarn shops, and maybe discover a new one. This is our second year on the LYS Tour and we have been gearing up with great new patterns by local designers and delicious yarns to share. We are looking forward to meeting lots of new fiber friends!" —Tara Roberts, owner of Stranded by the Sea, Edmonds Creative District

Think of the annual Puget Sound Local Yarn Shop Tour — LYST for short — as a five-day vacation for crocheters, knitters, and other creative, skein-happy fiber artists.

This year’s event, May 11-15 (business hours), features 20 local yarn shops from all over the region, including All Wound Up Yarn Shop in Perrinville and Stranded by the Sea at Salish Crossing.

Leslie Greenquist and Nona Davenport are the artsy mother-daughter team behind All Wound Up Yarn Shop on 18521 76th Ave. W. #109, between Lynnwood and Edmonds.

“Now in our seventh year of business, [we] feel enthusiastic and joyful with the yarn community we've created with our wonderful customers! We love showcasing the talents of indie dyers, and local artisans. And we've worked hard to bring you unique yarns, many that are exclusive in this area to our shop [About Us, website]!”

Stranded by the Sea is another local yarn store, open since Dec. 2018 and located in the Edmonds Creative Arts District on the Waterfront, sourcing and curating natural yarn and supplies for knitting, crochet, spinning, felting, and other fiber arts.

“We emphasize sustainable and artisan-quality materials, offering only natural yarns from animal- and plant-based fibers,” owner Tara Roberts explained. “Weekly socials and classes for knitting, crochet, and spinning allow makers to explore the entire ‘sheep to sweater’ process. Stranded colorwork is a shop favorite, so you'll find all 225 colors of Jamieson's of Shetland Spindrift in stock for fair isle knitting. We have easy kits for knitting and crochet projects or choose your own colors from the wide selection of yarns and colors.”

Roberts, a probate attorney who raises her own Angora rabbits and grooms them for wool-to-yarn, and her Stranded by the Sea staff have been getting ready for the LYST, prepping materials and supplies to thrill fiber artists of all ages.

"The LYS Tour is a great way to travel around the Puget Sound, visit your favorite yarn shops, and maybe discover a new one. This is our second year on the LYS Tour and we have been gearing up with great new patterns by local designers and delicious yarns to share. We are looking forward to meeting lots of new fiber friends!"

Participating yarn shops will be scattered from True North (Bellingham, Mount Vernon, Anacortes, Stanwood, Port Townsend, Coupeville) and the Central District (Duvall, Carnation, Lake Forest Park, Ravenna, Ballard, Greenwood, Edmonds), to the South End (West Seattle, Issaquah, Renton, Kent)…giving Tour enthusiasts plenty of opportunities to get their stitch on, and go a little off-roading to sightsee, hike, dine, and shop for provisions, souvenirs, and gifts.

It's a great way to take in the sights, that’s for sure, and Puget Sound is loaded with ‘em…vast, iconic beauty spots: Space Needle, Pike Place Market, Green Lake, Seattle Japanese Garden, farms studding the hilly, emerald-green countryside, sprawling suburban landscapes in storybook-cottage-mid-century-modern vestiges, high-rise, Silicon cityscapes — overlooking breathtaking waterways, highways and byways, via winding, mountain- and valley-decked roads.

One fateful day in 2006, yarn shop owners put together one humdinger of a party for their customers. Originally a three-day weekend affair, the Tour quickly caught favor and expanded to four, five, then 10 days to accommodate the pandemic’s virtual element last year.

Now, in its 16th year, one of the longest-running yarn crawls in the country will again feature all of the perks that made it so popular so fast, including brand-new knit and crochet patterns available for free, a 10 percent discount on featured yarns for the patterns, daily drawings, and a grand prize.

Simply download your passport (or pick one up from your favorite participating local yarn shop), plan your trip with family and friends, and go town to town, filling it up with stamps for a chance to win the grand prize.

While you’re in Edmonds, check out another exceptional fiber art shop called The Needlepointer in the Westgate neighborhood near PCC. Established in 1993, The Needlepointer (22811 100th Ave. W.) is the only exclusive, full-service needlepoint store in the Pacific Northwest.

Goods and services include hand-painted canvas, unique and vibrant fibers, books, accessories, expert finishing, classes, stitching excursions (Tiptoe Through the [Skagit Valley] Tulips with “Mary’s Whimsical Stitches” author Mary Legallet, April 12-15), and so much more.

Happy stitching!

Images by Matt Hulbert: Stranded by the Sea owner Tara Roberts (with one of the Angora rabbits she raises) and staff source all-natural fibers and all the supplies needed to spin yarn (pictured here) into fabric into lovely accessories, blankets, clothes, and more... Leslie Greenquist and Nona Davenport, the mother-daughter co-owners of All Wound Up Yarn Shop in Perrinville, invite you to let your imagination run free. Edmonds' Stranded by the Sea and All Wound Up are two of 20 participating merchants in the upcoming Puget Sound Local Yarn Shop Tour.