Rhinebeck Report

Would love to have gotten this up sooner, but life has been crazy. We had a great visit to Rhinebeck. We left very early in the morning from NYC:The drive up was a bit foggy

But we got there just before 9am and the sun had come out and there was no line at the gate!
I went right to The Fold and picked up a bunch of Socks that Rock
and some roving
Wait, what is a knitter going to do with roving? Well, my mom and I headed over to The Wool Room where I received some great instruction on how to use a Lendrum. It was so natural, I bought the weel.
After some more wandering around, I saw this lovely pumpkin
Guess this guy had some of the fried pickles. There was some damn good chicken pot pie, much less disturbing than lamb chops. And speaking of food, this was good year for some organic purchases, such as some locally made cheese and Organic Flour and Cornmeal
How about these cool glass pins from Moving Mud?
There were a lot of other goodies, but best of all is seeing the goats
and the sheep!

Feeling Better

Hi, Frances the cat here. Just wanted to tell everyone that I'm feeling much better these days. Things were rough for while, but my parents took good care of me, and I keep hearing them grumble about their savings account. I'm not really sure what that is, but it sounds like theirs is smaller than it was and it has somthing to do the nice people at the vet. My feeding tube came out last week, and my mom and dad have been shoving pills into my mouth twice a day. This is really annoying, and I'm going to have to get sneakier if I want them to stop. But its better than when they were shoving food into that tube thing. Well, must go eat more now (and then hide - I think they are going to give me another pill soon).

Rhinebeck here we come

Only a day until Rhinebeck and I can hardly wait for the fiber frenzy to begin. My mom and I are leaving NYC first thing Saturday morning, with all intentions of arriving by 9 or 9:30am. Since neither of us are particularly good in the early morning, hopefully we'll get there by noon. Our prep has included the following:

• A thorough review of all vendors and a preprinted map with key locations highlighted
• A set of rules for both of us - no yarn for Liza, no roving for Caroline, no new hobbies for either of us (oh, but how I'd love to hook a rug with a primitive sheep design, and my mom would be quite happy with a loom...)
• Scoping of "events" like the blogger/Raveler meetup at noon, and visiting Clara Parkes' book signing
• Prioritized purchases - i.e. spinning wheel for me like a Louet or a Lundrum

I'm not quite sure I can get lunch at the lamb booth again this year. It may be a bit too cyclical for me. Yes, they are a different kind of lamb, but it seems kind of wrong to be munch on a lamb chop while holding a big bag of wool.

There are a few things about Rhinebeck I don't quite get - planning your outfit around your most recent knitted accomplishments, the whole lamb for lunch thing, and the sheer volume of people who attend. There was actually a whole discussion on ravelry, with a ton of posts, about outfits. My outfit hadn't gotten much further than danskos... comfy feet are key.

So I'll be the one in the non-knitted objects, lugging around a crapload of roving and wool that I didn't plan to buy, chowing on lambchops. Just like everyone else there...

Embossed Leaves Progress

Continuing in the trend of the past few weeks, travel is ever present in my life. Over the past week, I've been to West Virginia, Cleveland and Boston (not Quebec) which means much knitting time. The latest project on the needles in a pair of socks, Embossed Leaves, knit in Socks that Rock from Interweave's 25 Favorite Socks.



While I was knitting on a flight from Philly to Charlotte, I sat across from a woman who told me that when she was first married, she knit one pair of argyle socks per week for her husband. The evolution of knitting from a necessity to provide clothing, to a leisure hobby is a fascinating one to me. What people once did to save money and clothe themselves, has become, for me at least, a way to make really expensive socks and sweaters. I bet the nice woman on the plane would not spend $20 on yarn for a pair of socks!
This pattern is great, although notice the nice little hole at the top of the gusset.
One sock down, another to go.

Things I'd Like

• To know exactly who thought it was acceptable to use my credit card number to buy $400 worth of jewelry in Quebec last week
  
• To sleep in my own house for more than 3 nights in a row
• To get to Rhinebeck early enough to get to The Fold before all the Socks that Rock sells out
• To find some time to get to the gym, which I joined two weeks ago and have not been to yet
• For my brain to be a bit more functional right now....
  

Uploading Loser

For all the knitters who read my blog, I'm sure you know (or have heard) what a great thing ravelry is. For those who are not knitters, its basically a site that you can use to organize all of your yarns, log your projects, and share ideas with other knitters about projects, etc. Its a great tool, but I do feel like a bit of a loser having spent 2 hours on a Saturday night loading photos of yarn and baby sweaters onto Flickr and Ravelry. I mean, as great as this tool is, it does take a lot of time to get yourself organized on there. Maybe it is faster once you've gotten all of your stuff loaded.
I'm thinking about going to Rhinebeck again this year, which will be on another weekend when I'll be a photographer-widow. Maybe I'll play Rhinebeck bingo.