Stitches West is held the last weekend in February in Santa Clara, CA every year. It’s a chance for knitters, crocheters, spinners, weavers, and other fiber artists to get together and salivate over new yarns, new patterns, and new fibers, meet old and new friends, and take classes to expand their skills. The truly dedicated can stay in class from Thursday afternoon to all day on Sunday. But mostly, they come to feed their fiber addiction shop. From laceweight to rug yarn to unspun roving, from delicate silks to sturdy Irish wool to super-soft qiviut (musk ox yarn), from undyed alpaca to rayon in every color of the rainbow, whatever your pleasure, you’ll find it. You’ll also find all the yarn you didn’t know you were looking for. Just like Las Vegas, people have various strategies to prevent spending the mortgage. Take cash, leave the credit cards and checks at home, and when the cash is gone, you’re through shopping is the most popular. The other method is to hell with the mortgage, I’m buying whatever I want. You’re a lot less likely to end up with a fiber hangover with the first method, though.
I signed up for classes as soon as they opened up. Registration sells out for some of the “rock star” teachers as if they actually were rock stars, which is to say, within minutes. I got into my first choices, Fine Finishing with Nancie Wiseman and Short Row Bust Darts with Lily Chin. Finishing is often the knitter’s bane, which is why so many of us have assorted sleeves and fronts and backs hiding out in the back of the closet. Or Frankenknits, pushed even farther back in the closet. After 6 hours of practicing various finishing techniques on Friday, I can honestly say that I understand how to finish most garments.
Sunday was for placing bust darts in your knitting. This was actually fun, and we took lots of measurements (no one was brave enough to get down to their skivvies, though). We learned how to use graph paper to plan a sweater – no math required, just count the squares! (Knitters are oddly math-phobic, considering just how much math is involved in knitting.) I feel a lot more confident about modifying patterns, and knowing , instead of praying, that they’ll fit.
Oh, I went shopping, too. I had a short list of fibers to fondle, if not actually buy: yak, musk ox, Sea Wool, small farms who only sell at fiber festivals, etc. I am extremely sensitive to lots of fibers (not wool, though), so it’s always nice to find out that I can’t tolerate a fiber I can’t afford anyway, like yak. Yak is itchy. Qiviut’s not, but it’s not all that and a bag of chips, either. At $70 for a 50 gram skein, I want a little more than a soft, dark-brown yarn. A massage would be nice for starters. Alpaca is quite nice, and feels very soft, right until I get it up next to my neck. Ouch! All the mohair made me sneeze and wheeze on Thursday, so I made sure to take all of my allergy medications the rest of the weekend. And the silk! How can people stand that stuff? It reeks to high heaven. It smells like something died. Well, something did, but properly processed, that horrid stench is removed. Since the most popular fiber combination right now is mohair and/or silk, I ended up with a lot of Merino, mostly superwash (wool treated to be machine washable).
Fleece Artist Sea Wool, though. That’s nice stuff. This was its US debut (Fleece Artist/Hand Maiden are Canadian companies). It’s the companion yarn to the extremely popular Hand Maiden Sea Silk. Sea Wool is 70% superwash Merino wool, 30% seacell (algae) and it’s really, really soft. It takes dye beautifully, too, almost like silk, with a beautiful silken sheen. I’d be addicted, except that it’s $25/skein.
I bought 2 skeins of bright pink solar dyed superwash Merino, 2 skeins of locally dyed superwash Merino in blues/greens, some really brilliantly dyed superwash Merino in 8 oz skeins, sock yarn, and some wool/camel laceweight/light fingering weight in a forest-y colorway . I also bought a sweater pattern, and I think I’m going to use this yarn, which I didn’t buy at Stitches, but it came in on Thursday, so it counts as part of the yarn haul for the weekend.
Skunk was jealous of Smokey (he’s a camera hog), so here’s a self-portrait with cat. The Princess, luxuriating on new sheets. The project I cast on last night.
I’d heard so many good things about Socks That Rock, though, and they don’t have a local distributor, so I snatched up some of those. They’re always resalable. I bought the laceweight in a fit of madness over the color, so I guess it’s going to be lace. Now I have to find a simple pattern that won’t be too obscured by the variegation in the yarn. The Sea Wool will be socks (the ball band pattern is for Bordello socks!?) The hot pink skeins will probably be a multi-directional scarf. The rest are just to admire for the moment.
