Settle in for a long one...

Finally, time to report on my Stitches adventure. I have the morning off work today, so I have time to settle in with a mug of coffee and just ramble to my heart's content. First of all, why do I have a morning off? One day this summer I came home from work and found two huge, gigantic, enormous, really, really big piles of stones at the end of the driveway. Mom & dad had their driveway re-done, and they had to have a good portion of their driveway stones removed to get down to a solid surface, and since they just live right around the corner, and since my driveway has been looking a little skimpy in the stone department (where do all of those stones go? seriously - they just seem to disappear over the years), dad had the guy dump them over here. Yay! Free stones! All I had to do was spread them around a bit. No problem, because I have dad's old 1940-something Ford tractor. Woo Hoo!



Looks pretty cool, huh? Well, it's not. It's an evil, vile beast of a machine. If your legs happen to be a little too short to comfortably reach the clutch, and if you are moving stones around for three hours straight, it will take your left knee and chew it up and spit it out. Technical diagnosis? Torn meniscus. I had an MRI this morning to see the extent of the ass-kicking injury my knee has suffered.

But I digress. This post is supposed to be all about.... STITCHES!!!
PattyAnn and I had a great time. The shopping, the classes, it was fabulous! I met the lovely Nancy, which was great, but missed Chan, which was a huge disappointment. I took two classes, one with Jane Slicer-Smith on Mitred Square Socks. Here is my little tiny sample sock:Cute, huh? Tara doesn't think so. She's saying, "Please, someone, send help. My mommy is making me wear a sock!"

On Sunday morning I had Ginger Luter's class on Modular Triangles. That class was fantastic. I have so many ideas floating around in my head after that class. Here are the mini samples we made.
Quilters will immediately recognize that green & tan one as the "Flying Geese" pattern. Love it!

Now for the shopping. I made a solemn vow to myself not to buy anything that I didn't have a project in mind for and could cast on before the end of the year. Unless it was on sale. Or something I had never seen before. Or something that maybe I've seen before but might not ever see again. Or something that I really, really, really liked. Or something that... well, you get my drift.

In order to have more money to spend on yarn, we decided to skip the expensive convention-center-hotel type breakfast and bring our own food. I brought my trusty-old Breakfast of Champions - Carnation Instant Breakfast. I carefully packed milk in an insulated bag with lots of ice, and as soon as we checked into the room, I put it in the mini-fridge. Sunday morning, I got ready for my nutritious breakfast... ...and found that the milk was frozen solid.

OK, time for Plan B. Some nice rice cakes... ..and some delicious hotel coffee!

What are those floaty bits? I'm sure it's fine... just try it. [Siiiiipppp] Eeeeew, eeeeew, eeeeew! The hotel is trying to call that vile liquid "coffee"? Blech! The frozen milk goes into the mini microwave, and after several "zaps" and lots of breaking apart milk chunks with a spoon, in goes the Instant Breakfast, and viola! A frozen concoction! It looked a little nasty, but it was pretty good!

To reward myself for being so thrifty, I might have gone a teensy bit overboard in the sock yarn department:
Maybe not, though. Can one ever have too much sock yarn? I think not. Most of it was on sale, too. The four 100-gram skeins of Sockotta were just $5.00 each. How could I pass up a bargain like that? I couldn't! The only non-sock yarn purchase was some of that recycled silk stuff.


Hey, we all could be a bit more "green", so I was just doing my part by buying recycled yarn. It was my duty as a citizen of the earth!

Whew, that was a long one. Unfortunately, I have to get ready to go to work now.

Happy Wednesday!