wool-gathering

Yesterday Casey said he wasn't going to run my corpus test for me until I posted to the blog, so you may hold him responsible for the following installment.

I mentioned that last weekend I was in upstate New York for a big sheep and wool festival, but mainly it was just an excuse to gather together as many of my MEOW kitties as possible (we managed to get seven, including me, which is exactly half) and sit around and drink wine, gossip, knit, and also drink wine.

Two of those MEOWers currently have infants, so they came along too. (Disclaimer: No children were harmed by drunken knitters during this event.) Henry and Alex are quite the little charmers.




I am a bit afraid of the terror they will start to wreak once they become mobile, however. Alex is already the size of a mini-fridge and clearly on his way to a successful career with the New England Patriots (much to his father's delight). Not that I know anything about baseball.

The thing about fun, hard-drinkin', hard-knittin' chicks after they have babies is...well, see for yourself:


(Update for certain mentally challenged readers anonymous trolls who need to be slapped: the kids were asleep. This thingamajig happened to serve well as a temporary side table. No one was leaving any kids with glasses of wine in front of them. No one was drunk. There's this thing, called hyperbole for comic effect? Look into it.)

The wool festival was beautiful in that it was crisp, cold, clear, and surrounded by fall-colored foliage, as you can see in the previous post's photos. What wasn't so beautiful was the sheer volume of knitters (and spinners and crocheters and felters and weavers and their spouses and their children) who descended on the Dutchess County Fairgrounds in search of lanolin-infused fiber crack. We were clever enough to arrive a little before it officially opened, and to head directly to the booth where they were selling Blue Moon Fiber Arts yarns, in particular their immensely popular hand painted "Socks That Rock" line.

By the time we arrived at their booth you already had to wait your turn a little to access the Wall of Yarn, and by the time we'd chosen our skeins there was not only a long line to shell out a week's hard-earned salary purchase, but also an even longer line just to get to the merchandise.

My friend Tiffany regarded this spectacle with an expression of mild disbelief and said, "It's like the Beatles, but with yarn."

The truth is, you can easily buy Socks That Rock online, but what you can't get online is their special edition "rare gems" colors and their discounted mill ends, of which the MEOW kitties picked up quite a few examples (mixed in with some standard colors):


By noon we were well ready to escape and head back to our lodgings, roll around in our new yarn, and declare that it was 5:00 p.m. somewhere. And so we did.