Stitches East!

I’m a bit late in posting, as usual!

On Friday, October 11 at 5am I slid out of bed and onto a train headed for Baltimore. I had worked out the connections so that I had only a short wait at each of my transfers. The whole trip down went like a dream. I arrived at Penn Station in Baltimore around 10 am and Jill was waiting for me. She surprised me with a gift!

2 Skeins of Salsa. -A DK weight Mohair/Wool from Dancing Leaf Farm.

I was already feeling pretty worn down and we had not even gotten to the convention center.

I was truly thankful that Jill has a good combination of familiarity with Baltimore and a decent sense of how to figure out where she is even when we did get just a bit lost. We managed to get to where we needed to be and it was good to have access to a car.

The convention center was open and roomy. I wandered around on day one with a pretty glazed expression and I’m not sure that I can give many details of the day. We took that day and scoped the place out, got our bearings and made a few carefully selected purchases. The highlight, I think was stumbling upon the Malabrigo table. They were not selling anything but they did have free samples of the Malabrigo Laceweight. They are like squishy little pets. Jill and I kept pulling them out again and again.

Here is what I ended up with at the end of Day 1.

A full bag of Noro Transitions and 2 Skeins of Hemp For Knitting AllHemp6. The plan is to make a Lady Eleanor Stole from the Noro and a market bag with the hemp. I felt good about having been disciplined in my buying at the end of the first day.

At around 1:30 Jill and I agreed that we were pooped and we headed back to our car and then to the hotel. It was a nice room at the Tremont Plaza Hotel. I bit too far from the convention center to walk but it was a nice place. We had a microwave and a fridge in the room and Jill had brought homemade curry and bread and a bottle of wine and we had a lovely meal while we considered our purchases and planned for the next day. We ended the day with an episode of Dr Who on Jill’s laptop and called it a night pretty early.

On Saturday morning we had plans to meet Wendy and L-B for breakfast at their hotel. We left our hotel in good time and walked to our car. As we went we noticed clumps of people and lots of traffic cops. Then we looked at each other and realized that we had both completely forgotten about the marathon! We got out of the parking garage just in time. The hotel we were at was right on the marathon route. We ended up parking a bit further away from our destination than we planned due to streets being blocked off but we managed to get to the Marriott for breakfast and we had a really great time! It has been referred to as the “ Wendy and L-B show.” They have one of those special friendships that involve a lot of teasing and jokingly suggesting that they hate each other but you can clearly see that they just enjoy being around each other.

We arrived at the marketplace a little before they opened. We made our rounds and sought out all the things that we had missed the day before. Jill had swatched a cone of yarn that she had gotten from Webs and I decided it was a deal I couldn’t resist. 1.75 lbs of awesome tweed for $35?!? This also happens to be the same yarn that the Yarn Harlot has been talking about this week..

We brought Wendy and L-B to the Malabrigo booth so they could get their own little pets. Then I made a list of everyone that was supposed to be selling the yarn and we spent the next chunk of the day sniffing out all the lace weight we could find. In the end we had each purchased 3 skeins of lace weight.

I didn’t want to leave without something from Blue Moon Fiber Arts. The booth was starting to look pretty thin but I managed to grab some SR Lightweight

I also wanted to be sure that I got something for my husband. Naturally he didn’t really like it. But I did make the gesture.

And then there were these

At that point my budget was exhausted and so was I. We spent some time hanging out in the concession area until it was time to get me up to the train station.

I managed to miss out on most of the celebrity spotting being a bit slow in the head. We did stop and observe as Wendy stopped to talk to Carol of Black Bunny Fibers. She had Veronik Avery with her. And then Eunny Jang stepped up and joined in on the conversation. It really was a fun thing to witness. The best part was when Jill stepped forward to show Eunny her Print o the Wave stole. A great moment for Jill. How many of us get to actually share our interpretations of patterns with their creators?

Jill got me back to the train station with plenty of time to spare. I toyed with the idea of switching trains but it was going to cost more so I decided to stick with my original plan. The train left and we were cruising along. A little while past Philadelphia all the reading lights went out, the a/c died and the train came to a very very gradual stop. In the middle of nowhere. The train had broken down 20 minutes away from my stop. It was still a little light out but my car was half way in a tunnel and it was about to get dark. Everyone stayed really calm but it was quite awhile before an announcement was made to let us know what was happening. At first they said they were trying to fix the train. Then they were sending another train. It was about 1.5 hours before we were transfered to another and smaller train. Apparently they told the passengers on the other train that it would take 10 minutes to transfer us. It was more like 30 minutes. So my plans of getting home before my kids were in bed were shot.

I managed to get onto the commuter train that would get me to my town. I learned, then, that I would not want to be a train conductor on a Saturday night. See, you don’t need a designated driver if you are taking the train. Most of the drunks were quiet. There was a group of 20 something guys, though, that were singing, what I am guessing to be, songs of victory in French very loudly. Now, I don’t speak French but I swear It must have been a Hockey game, I suppose. I’m pretty sure they left one of their friends passed out when most of them got off the train. Nice, huh?  The good news is that I got 7″ into a sock on the way home!