Hi-Ho!

To Stitches I will go!

Through this long and challenging week, Stitches Midwest has been the light at the end of the tunnel. Knifty Red and I have been anxiously planning this weekend ever since the last Stitches Midwest.

Last year was the first Stitches outing for both of us. Because we knew nothing, we figured we'd go for the day Saturday and get our fill. Ha! Now we know that there is no way to ever get enough of this event. Your feet might give out. Your wallet may turn to dust and blow away. And still, you'll know that there's some incredibly cool thing around the next corner just waiting to be discovered.

Last year, for example, I discovered Shelridge Farms yarns. Love the stuff. Last year was also my first time fondling Socks That Rock. I had just learned to knit socks after about 20 years of basically knitting rectangles. The STR booth was a big deal to me.

This year, I feel more on top of it. I signed up for a class with Lily Chin (gasp! OMG! THE!! Lily!! Chin!! faint!) on short row shaping. We'll see if I absorb a single bit of information during that three-hour class. The first hour, I'll probably just be dorking it up and trying to absorb the fact that I'm in the same room with Lily Chin (faint!) and that she's, you know, sharing droplets of her ocean-vast greatness. The final hour I expect to spend in a near panic because the class is almost over and I wasted the first hour being too starstruck to say anything other than maybe uhrm and ack.

But the middle hour. Ah, the middle hour. That's the magical transition hour where I stand a chance of being able to learn something and maybe even speak a language vaguely resembling English. I'm hoping for some tips on short rows that will help me finish that Silver Creek cardigan. If that magically happens, that sweater will forever be known as the one I knit after taking a class with OMG! THE! Lily! Chin! (faint!)

Side question: Is it entirely too dorky to ask her for her autograph? I figure I might be safe asking for a picture of us together. But an autograph? Maybe on one of the ninety-eleven Lily Chin patterns I have laying around my house? I dunno. Might be too embarrassing even for me, and I have very little sense of embarrassment.

I blocked out the entire day Saturday to spend in the Market. I won't tell you how much cash I set aside for the market, but it's a lot. More than I've ever dreamed of spending in a single day -- hell, in a single month -- on yarn.

Will I spend the lot? We'll see. Recently, I've come to feel that I have enough yarn. This is a sort of cyclical feeling. I feel I don't have enough and buy like crazy. Then I feel sort of yarn-saturated and stop buying for a while. Gearing up for SOS07 made me take stock of my sock yarn -- I've managed to collect more than two dozen skeins in a year despite almost constant sock knitting -- and taking stock of my sock yarn made me also think about all my sweater yarn. There's a lot of it. And I want to knit it. I don't want to just buy it and store it.

That said, I know full well that I'll probably hit that market and get high on yarn fumes and want to buy everything in the joint.

So Saturday is for the Market, and Sunday morning is for me to make an ass of myself in front of one of my knitting idols. Sunday afternoon, I'll try to swing by Franklin's 1,000 knitters photo booth and do that. Then there's all the end-of-show stuff in the market, and that fills two days.

One final quick note. Thanks to all of you who have been so kind and supportive while the family has contended with Shedir Lady's illness. She's doing much better. The doctors are astounded by her progress. One of them, in trying to convey the magnitude of her recovery, revealed that only one in two thousand people survives an aneurism like the one she suffered. But she didn't just have the aneurism, she had all kinds of other things go wrong, any one of which could have killed her. Three surgeries later, and they're talking about extubating her tomorrow. She even regained consciousness briefly yesterday. It's enough to make you believe in miracles.