Yarn Shopping in Baguio

My family went to Baguio last weekend for the Holy Week. We left Manila on Friday, thinking traffic might be better then, since most people already left on Thursday. But it was still a 6-hour road trip to Baguio (On a good day, you can reach Baguio in 5 hours I think). We saw a lot of these when we passed Tarlac:

I will not post photos of those other guys who beat their backs bloody with some sort of whip. The images might be disturbing for some and I try to keep my blog with a GP rating (General Patronage). And when I say we passed a lot... I do mean a LOT. Like every few kilometers, the entire time we passed through Tarlac.

Anyway, when we finally did reach Baguio, we did the usual stuff tourists do:

For P15, I was able to sample Baguio's strawberry-flavored taho. It was delicious!

We were supposed to go strawberry-picking at the strawberry farm but it rained a few minutes after this photo was taken so we passed on this activity.

We visited Tam-Awan Village in Benguet. After all the times I visited Baguio, this is my first time to visit this place. It was COLD. See the fog? We could barely see the road in front of us on our way here and my mom kept asking the driver to turn back... Only, there really was no space for us to turn back on the steep, twisting roads.

For P100 (approx $2.50), I had a local artist do a sketch of Andrea. The finished sketch doesn't look a lot like her, but you have to give the artist credit for trying considering Andrea was moving and talking and squirming for the 20 minutes she was being sketched *sigh*

Since it was Andrea's first time here, we took her boating.

Someone had a lot of fun shopping...

...and playing dress-up.

And though we were all tired, only one certain small person had the space to put her feet up in the cramped van.

And since we were there, I decided to pay a visit to this place I keep reading about: Hangar Market. It's supposed to be the place to buy yarn in Baguio City. Hangar Market is a building located at Hill Street, and it's near the Baguio Public Market. One small tip if you plan to go there... parking anywhere near Hangar Market is non-existent. Our van had to park illegally outside another building some distance away. So if you are coming from another hotel... walk. Or take a cab.

Anyway, I wasn't able to take pictures. It was starting to rain and we didn't have an umbrella, and our mom was rushing us so my sister and I had to run from the van to the nearest entrance to Hangar Market, which was called Vegetable Alley. From this alley, we went straight until we saw the stairs to our right. My sister said that she saw the yarn stall featured on TV and it was on the 2nd floor. Good thing she told me that. The market was quite big and I had no idea exactly where the yarn stall was. Up to this point, all I saw around us were vegetables.

Up the stairs we went and there it was... YARN. A lot of yarn. In huge plastic bags piled on top of each other. I was a little disappointed with the price. The guy there told me it's P300 per kilo or P30 for 100 grams. It cost more than the yarn being sold at that bodega in Pasig. I was at that yarn bodega in Pasig a couple of months ago and yarn was being sold at P250 per kilo... well... after sizing me up in my office attire, the guy there told me it was P280 per kilo, but others who went there said it's only P250 per kilo.

Anyway, since I was there already, and since there were more colors available here than the one in Pasig from my last visit, I decided to buy anyway. I just grabbed balls of yarn in the colors I wanted and piled them on the weighing scale. This is still cheaper than buying yarn at the mall. The yarn being sold here are not labeled and each ball is not the same length. I'm not exactly certain but I think I was able to get yarns of weight 2 and 3. The guys selling them calls them 'ply'. They kept telling me it's 2-ply or 3-ply (you know, like tissue) and upon closer inspection, I think they are referring to the number of strands of thread twisted to make the yarn. Anyway, those I got are thinner than the standard weight 4 Red Heart or Monaco yarn you can get at the mall.

My new yarn stash

That big bag, plus the 4 balls my sister got, cost us P900. Not bad... Not bad at all! Considering 2 of those balls are what those guys at the stall were calling "velvet" yarn. They are like this soft and fuzzy yarn and those 2 big balls only cost me P77 total. To illustrate how big each ball of yarn is... I made Andrea pose beside my plastic bag:

And all this yarn got me excited to start crocheting again! I actually have an unfinished blouse I started in December... and an unfinished cape I started a month ago... maybe I'll finally get to finish those.

I have a few other crochet projects finished after that mushroom hat. I made a couple of pom-pom hats, without using a pattern, for Andrea and my niece for our trip to Baguio (only we don't have pictures of them wearing them... aaarrgh! I'll just make them pose for me this weekend), and a couple of simple dresses for Barbie and Dora from some leftover yarn I had. Pictures of those some time soon.

EPILOGUE: We left Baguio on Sunday afternoon... the trip back took us a good 8 and a half hours.