A Tardy Report on Stitches West

Since I failed every single day last week and yesterday to write up my annual report on Stitches West, I finally forced myself to drop what I was doing and just do it. Especially because this year was awesome.

The awesomeness actually started the day before I even attended the event, when I got to meet up with orata of Feather and Fan, who was in town visiting family. She is an extremely cool person and we had a lovely lunch. So lovely, in fact, that I completely forgot to take a picture. Arrgh!

The following day, I headed back down the Peninsula with Brenda, Sophy, and Erica in tow. I have to say, the three of them were looking especially adorable that day.



The marketplace was as vast and overwhelming as usual, full of amazing yarns and knitters. I always find one of my favorite parts of Stitches to be the "knit watching" -- almost everyone is wearing something they've made. Some other especially awesome highlights:

1. The Tess' Designer Yarns booth. OH MY GOSH do I love their yarn. And even though the owner had given me a heads up that they were going to knit some samples of a couple of my patterns in their yarn, it did not lessen my excitement at seeing two Citrons, two Safires, and a Trina hanging in the booth. I couldn't believe it! After much petting of yarn, I left with this:


some Bella (chunky merino, silk, and alpaca)


and some superwash merino.

2. When standing in the checkout line at the Webs booth, a very nice woman approached me and asked what pattern I had used to knit the sweater I was wearing. Well, it happened to be a sweater from last year that I made up as I went along, was really stoked about, tried to write a pattern for, couldn't decipher my notes for, couldn't reverse engineer, then banished to my closet until it decided to behave properly. Anyway, this very nice woman told me, "You should definitely write the pattern for that -- the world needs to see it." And I was speechless. I gave her my little blog Moo card and told her to check in (her kind words had given me the boost I needed to tackle this project again), and....she recognized me. Speechless again, I thanked her and completely forgot to ask her name (note to self: work on social skills!!). So, very nice lady from Stitches, if you happen to be reading, thank you so much for coming up to say hi. It was wonderful meeting you.

3. The Wabi Sabi booth. Such gorgeousness!!! And such nice people in there! Lisa, the owner, is just lovely. There was another Citron in there, too, knit in their amazing Lush Lace yarn. I immediately found my own Citron to be completely inadequate and picked up some of that laceweight in the Peacock colorway:


it's a bit more green-blue in real life...but isn't it preeeety??

4. I got to see Chris again!

5. As we left, there were alpacas outside bidding Stitches-goers good-bye. We wanted to take one back to San Francisco, but it was a no-go.



Can't there be more than one of these per year?!