So Loretta and I went to Stitches West and met up with Meg and her friend Connie, though it turns out that trying to steer four people around 14 aisles of yarn while sticking together is kind of hard to manage, so we mostly gave up on that and just tried to reunite for lunch and a midafternoon break.

I took a lot of photos, which are over here.

I ended up buying the following:
(a) A skein of “The Full Monty” rainbow sock yarn, 400 yards, $35
(b) A skein of “Too Gay To Function” rainbow worsted yarn from Steven Be, $28
(c) A pack of rainbow gradient sock yarn, about 400 yards of that.
(d) A pin that says “Internet Famous” (someday, y’all) from Steven Be
(e) A rainbow lighting bolt patch, also from Steven Be
(f) A shawl pin with a beautiful shiny blue bead
(g) A crocheted shawl pattern from the shawl pin vendor.

I am pondering what to do with it all. I saw enough beautiful rainbow shawls to kind of want to do my own, and now that I have like 800 yards of rainbow stuff I could put together, I’m trying to ponder what else I could do with it...

I was also quite inspired by the aforementioned Steven Be. Who be this? A fabulous fellow from the Midwest who does crazy pieces. Now I usually go through his booth since it is rainbow-y anyway. But Meg wanted to go see some free workshops and noticed when they were going on. We went to a “Cables with Pop” talk (done by the lady I bought the shawl stuff from, she was cool) and then after that, there was both a mosaic knitting demo--I don’t know what that is but it sounded up my alley--and oh, Steven Be was doing a lecture on color usage. As the number of ladies piled up and Steven rolled over a portable rack full of wildly knitted goods, I was all “yeah, I gotta hang around to watch this.” There’s more about this in the picture link. It was rather inspiring to hear him talking about throwing random things into whatever pieces to jazz them up, like glitter or a random color that doesn’t “go” with the rest of it. I have been feeling kinda moribund about my work of late--mostly I am just doing toys because I’m not feeling inspired on anything big--but this is making me ponder what to do next.

He also said, “You’re kinda da bomb” to my guitar sweater, which I am remembering for life now.

When we were leaving Stitches, I saw what I can only describe as a hoarder car. The car was full to nearly the top in the back with piles of papers and crap. And the driver’s seat was totally filled with papers and crap. And at least a fourth of the windshield inside the car was covered in papers. HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU POSSIBLY SEE TO DRIVE IN THIS CAR? I suppose it’s entirely possible that the person was living in it, but there was no way you could sleep in the car or pack anything else into it to actually try to live--it was just a repository for more shit to be carried around and saved forever. Precious, precious papers that can’t be lost, again, sigh. Seriously, if a cop sees this I hope to god he tickets that person for not being able to see well enough to drive in all of that mess. Except it’s probably happened a bunch of times and they don’t care, would be my guess. Anyway, that’s really disturbing. Hell, even my mom hasn’t gotten that bad. Yet.

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