Stitches West 2008

I am back from my weekend at Stitches West, with less money but more yarn and fiber. Yay! I had a great time. When I arrived Friday morning, the convention center looked like this:

The staff closed one of the lanes going in to the parking garage and routed us around through the garage to the outside overflow parking (”why?” still comes to mind, as there were many spaces available in the garage). I despise driving in 1 mph spurts but the reward was this:

This is what two days at the Market will do to you. I came home with the really bright blue flowered bag I’ve had my eye on in years past, a shawl pin, great spinning fiber from A Verb For Keeping Warm (camel/silk, cashmere/silk, and yak) and Chameleon Colorworks‘ Optim (mechanically-stretched 100% merino that will not felt; website is up and coming and will be ready in a few weeks, they told me),  fun new sock yarns that may or may not end up as socks (including my first-ever skein of Socks That Rock), a Strickwear kit, some Handmaiden Sea Silk (yum), and a selection of yarns from Tess’ Designer Yarns (it all smells strongly of fabric softener but still, yum). Mmm… big pile of new yarn.

My friend lives only a 10-minute drive from the convention center so we had two nights of knitting slumber party fun with six knitting ladies and a cat staying in one small apartment. Our hostess knitted us each a fuzzy scarf to wear on Saturday. You can see mine at the top left of the photo.

This was my favorite funny typo this year. I risked taking a photo despite the no cameras rule. My apologies for the blurriness; I kinneared this one:

Only 2.5% cretin? Darn, I like my yarn to have much more cretin than that. Or is that the usual ratio of cretins to non-cretins in the general population? Ah, the joys of spell-check gone wrong. They also had “chetin” and “chretin,” and, finally, “chitin,” the fiber made from shrimp and crab shells.

Ravelers were everywhere, all of us wearing our Ravelry name buttons. I did not recognize anyone since I haven’t been on Ravelry much, nor did anyone recognize me by my Ravelry name (not surprising). I did have my own personal celebrity sighting. Or at least knit-blogger sighting. I saw Yarn-A-Go-Go in the aisle outside Yarn Barn of Kansas. She posts photos of herself relatively frequently so I recognized her on sight. I said hello, although since I’m an avid reader but very infrequent (or possibly non-) commenter I’m sure she has no idea who I am.

Mr. MmmYarn wasn’t too lonely since he busied himself with both work and the laundry. He kindly took and emailed me a photo of the linen washcloths to show me they weathered the trip through washer and dryer:

The weekend was lots of fun. I am off to finish the February Baby Sweater I started Monday. Only 4 rows left on the second sleeve. It’s amazing how much you get done even with all the red wine at a knitting slumber party.