Stitches 2009
8:39 a.m. - 2009-03-02
This year was a double feature at Stitches. On Friday I drove down to Santa Clara with Melissa and Melissa, my daughter and my sister. Sometimes parking is pretty awful in the parking garage at the convention center, but this year, in spite of missing the 237 turn off we got there in plenty of time, and we found a parking space easily. Unfortunately, the whole 'buy a ticket' thing was completely disorganized the way they had the lines set up, and the ticket takers were less than skilled. We were easily in line about an hour in contrast to the 10 or 15 minutes it takes at most other events. Some Stitches lady with a professional video recording crew, etc., came by to record the people in line, and I just told the camera that there were not enough ticket takers and the whole thing was disorganized and ridiculous, so now I am down on record for being the crazy ranter at Stitches. However, within a few minutes they brought out another cashier to help with the crowd. While I was ranting (politely but sternly) my sister and daughter assumed that 'we're not with her' facial expression while looking in the other direction. Stitches tends to bring out the ranter in me; I do believe I was less than polite to the parking attendant last year.
We finally made it into the Market, and started to do what we came for: shopping. My sister wants to start knitting socks, so she bought sock yarn, but I wasn't so inspired the first day and just got one pattern booklet by Norah Gaughan which you can see here, not a link because I don't know how to do that, but you can cut and paste:
http://www.berroco.com/ng3/ng3_photoview_pv.html
I especially like Eastlake, Loppem, and Calvert (my favorite).
My sister had to get back to my dad's house to visit before going home up north, so we did not stop at the Japanese store that day.
The next day, Saturday, my other sister was going to meet us at the convention center, so I picked up my Melissa and off we went again. This time I made the correct exits and we got there 15 minutes early. We did not have to hassle with the line because we had purchased two-day tickets, and I had also already bought January's ticket a day ahead of time (which totally freaked out the ticket taker and practically required a dispensation from the Pope). We just sat around the upper lobby and watched the sweaters walking by. I saw several February Lady sweaters and some lovely Fair Isle cardigans. It was much less stressful seeing the stuff in the Market for the second time and we noticed things we had overlooked the first day. I got several patterns from White Lies Designs, some Addi Lace Turbo circular needles (a present from January) and happily found a booth where they had the Sockotta sock yarn for $5 a skein. Since the skein is big enough to make a pair of socks, that is a great price. I bought 3 skeins for socks for Melissa and Abby.
After Stitches, Melissa and I headed for Kinokuniya. I knew my wallet would soon be empty as soon as I saw the craft section. They had about 5 new issues of those fabulous but expensive stitch collection books. Some were for crochet which I skipped, but I was forced to buy three of the knitting issues, so wonderful were they. One is full of Aran cable designs.
The yellow cardigan is finished and has already been worn, and I finished the blue cardigan and hope to photograph it today. It is still a little sturdy, since the yarn needs a good wash and tumble dry to soften up, but I am pleased with how it turned out. I am already working on the brown cardigan and got a good idea for a narrow cable to use from the newly purchased stitch dictionaries.
