Stitches Midwest 2005

My first visit to a Stitches event was on Sunday when I attended Stitches Midwest with my favorite yarn-loving friend. We had a wonderful girls day out wandering the aisles of miles and miles of yarn! It was overwhelming but not so much as to curb our spending and we made some really great choices and one not-so-good-but-very-expensive choice. Our first visit was the Mass Ave Knit Shop booth where we were greeted by a very friendly and helpful knitter and some gorgeous Berrocco Foliage. Had to have it and also the giant shopping bag that it came in! Very cool bag, by the way... We also managed to purchase a skein of gorgeous handpainted mohair from Three Waters Farm. Why only one skein? Well, they just happened to have a fun little pattern for a Ruffles scarf (much different from the Scarf Style pattern) that only required one skein...so why not? This little pattern flys off of three sets of needles and mine would have flown the coop the first night home had I purchased a large enough needle for the last increase. Hopefully, I'll get that little thing done today. Perfect Christmas present idea! Later on, I fell in love with a couple of fun purse patterns from Two Old Bags. We should have stopped there. Great yarn, fun patterns, and my friend even found the Scarves - A Knitter's Dozen book but no...we had to return to the Just Our Yarn booth. This company has amazing hand painted yarns in all kinds of fibers. It is hard to settle for any one color combination. However, they also had some fun yarn made with several novelty yarns tied together that they call Carnivale. The yarn came with a great mini shawl pattern and was not cheap. It was GORGEOUS in the tightly wound skein. The nightmare was in getting it wound into a workable ball. All of those little strands of different yarns just love to grab onto each other and we both ended up with a huge mess of knotted yarn until winning the battle at midnight after hours of pulling individual strands out of the heap. UGH. I just hope it knits up quickly and easily on the size 19 needles the pattern calls for (size 50 to cast off!). Live and learn, I guess. The Carnivale experience aside, Stitches Midwest was a lot of fun. Next year, I plan to take a class to add to the fun...maybe learn to switch to Continental or a finishing techniques class? I'll work on getting photos of my recently finished projects. That baby sweater is finished but needs to be assembled. Just waiting for the word that the baby is a girl afterall... (it is in fusia!). One day, I'll stop adding to my "On My Needles" list without touching the "Wish List"...maybe...