In Stitches

Your faithful correspondent is writing to you LIVE from the beautiful Santa Clara Hilton, conveniently located across from the Santa Clara convention center, where the annual Stitches knitting convention is underway.

Woo hoo! Yippee! And other assorted noises of wool-induced bliss!!

The Knitting Olympics have definitely taken something of a backseat. I had an all day class today, with a two hour lunch break. Sure, I could have spent most of that time knitting on my Olympic project, but instead I went to lunch and then um, well. I may have gone into the yarn market. Just purely to, uh, see if…they had…um…coffee. Yes. That’s it. Because the five coffee stands outside the marketplace and the coffee machine in my room and the free coffee offered to class attendees right outside the classroom were, uh, not…coffee-ish enough.

How the $60 (!) in hand-dyed sock yarn got into that bag I was carrying, I have no idea. None. Somebody paid for it and their signature looks an awful lot like mine, but it wasn’t me. (Curse you, Lisa Souza Knitwear! I could resist all the prefab sock yarns, but you just HAD to throw in some vivid hand-dyed bits of soft superwash deliciousness…)

And I must say – it is both nice and a little alarming to be among so many knitters. We are all talkers! I swear to Dog, we can collectively outtalk Congress! We’ve never met a stranger and we just talk-talk-talk-talk-talk.

Whew. I’m exhausted from all the chatting. But having a marvelous time. I’ve met more splendidly nice ladies today than I think I’ve met in the last several months – if not years.

My class today was in Finishing. Now, my finishing work has bugged me for years. It isn’t exactly bad, but I’ve always felt it was a pretty far cry from good. Today, Nancie Wiseman taught us how to make invisible seams, sexy buttonholes, tubular cast-ons and cast-offs and a few other choice tidbits of amazingly cool stuff.

It was frightening how cool we all found this to be.

My swatch was made with white yarn. I used a dark brown yarn for contrast when doing the seam. She said trust her, if I did this seam correctly, it would vanish.

I doubted her. I carefully followed her instructions, and then I pulled that dark yarn taut expecting I’d be the one person in the class to hold the thing aloft and whine, “Naaaaaancie, this doesn’t woooooooork!”

It.
Vanished.

A perfect, smooth, lovely seam was left, almost imperceptible.

I let out a long, low “Oooooooooooooh!” of wonder and delight.

I wasn’t surprised by my own geeky behavior. I’ve become accustomed to the fact that I am both a geek and a dork. Oh well. I also have been known to start talking to myself, out loud, while walking down the street or in the supermarket. Or walk into cement pillars because I was trying to get my mail to sync on my Treo. Like I said – both a geek, and a dork.

But to hear it echoed all over the room by 20+ other women…that…was a little weird.

I got about three rounds done on the sweater, and that’s it.

Tomorrow, I have a class in crochet for knitters, and sock cuffs. Not socks. Sock cuffs.

It does not get much geekier than that, my dear friends. It just really doesn’t.

And I really mean this: tomorrow! I am going to (mostly) avoid the yarn market, and spend (at least a little bit of) my free time working on my Olympic project!

I really, really, really mean it.

Really.

Stop laughing. I’m right here, I can totally hear you…