Before leaving home I surfed the web for some reviews of other Berlin-visiting yarn lovers and came up with a number of stores. I'll discuss them down here. If you have any suggestions, or want to share your experiences in yarn shopping, please feel free to do so!
Btw, I didn't get to making any pictures, dumb dumb dumb. I know. I just got caught up in the awesomeness of all the yarn and of W not giving me a limit on how much I could spend that I totally forgot. :P
(Oranienstrasse 23)
This was my favorite shop. They have a wide variety of types and brands and colors.
One wall is filled from top to bottom with beautiful chunky yarns in all different colors. The women working at the store were very nice and helpful. I just had a really hard time choosing from all these tempting soft balls of goodness. ;)
Another something adding to this being a great place to go is the areas it's located. There are loads of nice boutiques, cafes and restaurant in Kreuzberg around Oranienstrasse. I would definitely recommend lunch or dinner at 'Green Rice' on Adalberstrasse, which is on the way from the subway station 'Kottbusser Tor' to the Oranienstrasse. They have lovely Vietnamese dishes for very reasonable prices. It's a rather small restaurant, but the food is awesome!
Handmade Berlin
(Monbijouplatz 9)
This is a beautiful store and coffeeshop, if the weather is good enough you should definitely have a drink on the terrace which looks over a small park.
The store itself is great aswell, although most of the yarns sold here are very expensive. It was great to see and feel them, and I totally got why people would pay that much for some yarn. They were the softest, shiniest, most beautifully spun skeins I had ever seen.
I just had to get the Blue Sky Alpaca Silk in three different colors (2 blues and one pink) to make the Inga hat for this winter. It's too bad you can't feel through the screen, 'cause they are soooooooo wonderful.
(Kantstrasse 145)
This store is a bit further from 'Mitte', but there are some nice coffeeshops and stores in the neighborhood which make the trip out there worthwhile. The yarns are sorted on color, which wouldn't be my first choice. Besides some widely available brands, they also have some really beautiful luxurious yarns. It's a nice shop with lots of yarns, and very friendly and helpful employees.
(Tauentzienstrasse 21-24)
KaDeWe is THE department store of Berlin. Just across the street from the main warehouse you can find the 'Idee Shop', which is full of everything you could think of to use for crafting: fabrics, paint, yarns, etc.
One entire wall is filled with yarn, needles, hooks and other accessories. I bought some glue-like stuff (sorry, don't know if there's a proper name for it) that you can apply under your socks so you don't slip. My hand knitted socks always are very slippery, so I was very glad to find this.
The yarns aren't anything really special, but it's a decent collection of different sizes and materials. I especially liked the amount of sock yarns, with solids and multicolors from different materials. The other good thing about going to the 'Idee Shop' is that besides yarns, they have lots and lots and lots of awesome craft supplies.
(Dircksenstrasse 105)
This store is next to Alexanderplatz, so I figured I'ld give it a go, although the website wasn't really promising. It turned out to be quite a dissapointment.
The employees weren't particularly unfriendly, but they didn't say much and certainly weren't helpful. The selection of yarns was a real letdown. The abovementioned stores have way more in store, not only in quantity but also in quality.
Do you visit yarn stores when you're abroad? Any suggestions would be great. I'm thinking of going around all the Amsterdam stores in order to be able to write a blog like this about my own LYS's. If you would like to guest-post about LYS's in your (home)town, feel free to send me an email at cakesencrafts (at) gmail (dot) com!
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