Stitches West

This weekend was Stitches West in the Santa Clara, CA, convention center. As usual, it was a busy and exciting day. Our weaving guild has a booth where we teach people to do drop spindle spinning. I usually have a 3 hour shift that day, and 3 hours seems like 20 minutes. It is so busy, that sometimes there are 3 people deep waiting to get a spinning lesson.

Almost at the end of my shift, a lady walks up to the booth giggling, and she giggled, for the first minute or so that I was talking to her. She had on a badge, so in curiosity, I looked down at her name at it was THE 'Cat Bordhi'! Amazing. I talked to her for a few minutes and her excitement was infectious. She was really excited about something coming up called the "Socks Summit." It's August 6-9 in Portland, Oregon. There are an unprecidented number of fabulous teachers going to be there. Go to this website and look: http://www.socksummit.com/ She said there will never be another place where this many fabulous knitters are going to be in one place including Cookie A, Nancy Bush, Judith McKenzie-McCuin, Barbara Walker, Lucy Neatby, Meg Swanson, et al. I'm trying to figure out a way to find a place to stay in Portland. My son in law's wife's parents live in Portland. It would be so much fun to just go. Cat Bordhi said, it doesn't have to be expensive, just go and not even take classes. Just go and hang out with these amazing knitters.

Another highlight of my day was spending some time with Dr. Gemma from the CogKNITive podcast. I was in one of the isles of Stitches talking to a lady that I had met in the spinning booth. Anyway, I was talking to her about Webs and how they had a podcast that I listened to and someone walking by heard me talking about podcasting and stopped. She said she heard me talking about podcasting and wanted to know who I listened to. I recognized her voice - it was Dr. Gemma! I said "I know you." She wanted to know how I knew her and I told her that I listened to her podcast CogKNITive. I hugged her and told her that I felt I knew her. She mentioned something about wanting to learn to spin better. I asked her if she would like for me to give her a couple of tips. She was very excited about meeting someone who, not only followed her podcast, but also was a spinner. So I took her back to the spinning booth and gave her a few tips. She was 100% better spinner when she walked out of the booth. She was so excited, and I was excited for her to be so successful. She also wanted to play with spinning wheels so I took her over to Carolina Homespun and we played with wheels for a while. She also had in tow two other podcasters: Bellitrix and Stasymama. I even had the opportunity to go out to eat with them but had to beg off. I had waited too long to eat and already eaten a huge plate of food. Great fun.

I didn't buy much. I went by the Brooks Farm Yarn store and wasn't all that excited about their yarns this year. I also hit several other yarn stores, still no excitement. It was probably just me. I went by Webs and it was mobbed like usual. Stitches can be very overwhelming. The way I buy yarn is by project. I just don't go there with no ideas, just buying yarn. I need to have a specific project in mind so that I don't buy too much or too little yarn. And since I was so lame as to not bring any project plans, I got what I deserved, very little yarn. I did buy a beautiful little shawl stick for $11 and one skein of beautiful purple and green sock yarn - that was all.