I spent the entire weekend at YarnCon here in Chicago - man, I sure could use a weekend to recover from my weekend! Tiredness aside, it was totally worth making the trip down to the West Loop three days in a row (I helped out on set-up day last Friday and all weekend long in the Bijou Basin Ranch booth). I met some folks I've previously only known via Instagram or Ravelry (i.e. one of the most recent Take 5 bloggers, Lucia Pane), saw many knitting friends, and came home with some awesome goodies.
This year's event was even bigger than last year - the entire marketplace was full of every imaginable yarn and fiber, not to mention the project bags and other related accessories.
On Saturday, I came home with a mondo skein (as in, 600+ yards) of BFL sock yarn from Leading Men Fiber Arts:
Some gorgeous spinning fiber from Yarn Hollow and CJ Koho (the concept behind this is really cool, so I'll be sure to talk about that more in a future post):
And these awesome buttons from Balwen Woodworks. Fun fact: the set of 3 buttons is made from upcycled hammer handles!
For the first time, I signed up for a class: yesterday morning, I learned Tunisian Crochet from a local teacher, Kathy Kelly. In an hour and a half, I learned pretty much all of the basics and made this swatch:
I was totally psyched to come home and give my new-found skills a try, and immediately wound off two of the four skeins I came home with on Sunday - a navy and grey skein of 100% yak sport weight yarn from Bijou Basin Ranch. Also pictured below are the mondo skeins of grey Targhee worsted weight yarn from Cyborg's Craft Room which I'll be using to knit a sweater from the upcoming Midwestern Knits book:
Speaking of Midwestern Knits, there was a trunk show on Sunday at YarnCon which featured many of the samples from the books (it'll be out in August). I'd better work on clearing my queue this summer, because it turns out that there are a lot of patterns I want to make from this collection! Here's Allyson and Laura at the table where they took preorders and sold their super-cute tote bags:
There was also a Gnome Creation Station where you could knit, crochet, and/or donate your gnomes for Anna Hrachovec's Project Gnome Diplomacy (incidentally, you can still donate gnomes by mailing them to the address listed here):
I think that's the fastest a weekend has ever flown by, and if I didn't have a big ol' pile of yarn and fiber to comfort me, I'd be incredibly bummed right now. I'm already counting down the months, weeks and days til YarnCon 2016!
Love this. I made a list yesterday of things to make me happier and knitting is on it. I (almost) finished up my Christmas elf and am going to plug away at one project at a time and really make time for knitting in the evenings.
ReplyDeleteI love yarn-y events like this. Glad you had fun!
ReplyDeleteOh! Thanks for sharing! I'm especially glad you shared the Midwestern Knits link -- I've been a long-time admirer of these two designers. I think this collection looks fantastic!
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