I was baaaad

Rhinebeck was not really what I had expected. I'm not sure really what I expected, but what I expected wasn't as large as what I found. I found barns and barns and barns and barns of yarn. An unfathomable amount of yarn really. It's quite mind boggling to me that there would be so much yarn there for people to do things with, and that there is even MORE yarn outside of that festival is even more astonishing. I'm still blown away by it. Michelle and Jessica walked through with me. They kept me sane and enabled me throughout. I tried taking pictures of my newest additions, but they didn't come out well, and I wasn't sure how to arrange them, so you'll have to deal with seeing it in the FOs when they get to that point...

Even though I walked in wanting only sock yarn (as I didn't realize just how big this festival was), I came back with a 500 yard hank of Brooks Farm Harmony which is a mohair, wool-silk blend and is so luxuriously soft it was needed. There are a lot of colors in it, mostly with the same tone, so I'm excited to see what it will knit up to be like. It will become a shawl to keep me warm at work. I think I'm just going to start with a triangle at the bottom and increase stitches to make it triangular so I won't worry about running out of yarn, and maybe I'll do some fancy edging or something.

I actually did end up getting just a bit of sock yarn - 2 hanks of Sherbridge Farm Soft Touch Ultra. It's hand-dyed and has all these awesome purple colors in it from a pastel-bluey purple to a real bright OMG this is PURPLE color. It's really soft though. I just need to get some of that special soap to wash wool in so I can wash these socks in my sink when I need to. I might need to do that with the Over the Knee Socks that I will be making presently (that bar over on the side is moved up only because I'm counting the swatch!). Jessica assures me I can find this at any yarn shop, so that's promising.

Remember the Lobster Pot Mohair? Well, I found some brushed mohair at the booth for Mohair in Motion. This was the last bit of the day. Unfortunately, we ran into Katy, Ruth and Jill (Happy Birthday Jill!) and a few other SNBers after I found the mohair. I was thinking of going back to it a couple of times, and then I didn't. And then Katy and Ruth made me realize that yes, 1,000 yards of mohair can really be made into a sweater with the right tension. So I took that for what it was worth and decided to get it. It's a great dark green/teal with bits of deep red running through it. I told myself I wasn't going to get anything that required a check - and I was only going to use my credit card, but I really did NEED this yarn, and so I found myself running to and from the ATM at the very end of the fair getting the money to pay for the gorgeous mohair. So I came back with 1,000 yards of that as well. I'm going to use it to make a sweater. I'm going to design it I think. Katy has a book that will help me figure out how to do it, and I'm pretty excited about it (only 4 ends to weave in!!!).

All in all, I think it could have been worse. I could have completely depleted my savings. I survived though! I did, however, have to get Jess and Michelle back for enabling me so (moreso Michelle than Jess, really). So I did:



We also wandered around looking at all the animals. most of which we found quite adorable. Although there were quite a few sheep that looked just so cold because they were probably shorn for the festival. I wanted to hug them to keep them warm, but I controlled myself. :D Alas, we didn't quite find an alpaca Michelle and I wanted to come home with us, but we did find several bunnies, really cute angora bunnies. I watched as a woman cut the hair off of one, and it leaped into the air and came tumbling down again into the woman's arms. I think it was a bit skiddish because it had never been cut before, and there were all these people around watching as its hair was being cut. There were tons of rabbits though, and they were all so adorable. The llamas, I think, were the best though. The alpacas looked like fraggles, and they were wicked cute and all, but I kept finding myself attracted to llamas. Like the one below:



I think its name was WiFi or something. It actually had a really long name, that I'm pretty sure was shortened to WiFi, and if you look closely, you can see that on the tag on its neck. This is by far the best picture I took while I was at Rhinebeck.

I left Rhinebeck with a yarn induced (fine, maybe fatigue played a part!) stupor and got to my apartment with a yarn hangover. I'm not kidding, my head was pounding! Hopefully next year I'll be able to afford more yarn than I was able to. Also, next year I think I'll go easy on the French fries before the artichoke hearts, as most of my order of artichoke hearts is still in the fridge, and I waited in that line for forever!

The weather was gorgeous the whole time we were there...it stopped raining as soon as we got to the fairgrounds, and then it started again right as we were getting in the van to go home. The foliage was brilliant on the way up and back, and we could see clouds coming out of the hills and gathering in valleys. What we saw of the town of Rhinebeck was adorable and reminded me of Rhode Island (Wickford mostly). Greg IMed me this morning to tell me that Rhinebeck is really close to where he used to live. He "hoped I payed attention" to it. Which I find interesting since we're not together anymore, and thus I have no responsibility to pay attention to things like that. But I'm pretending that him saying that doesn't bother me by knitting myself into oblivion. Which is good, the knitting part, because I have about eight projects in my pipeline...

Oh and I'm so upset that I didn't get a picture of the nuns!

MINOR TECH UPDATE: I have a button now. It's under my blogger button at the bottom of the sidebar. Cool how this is turning into an awesome sort of website thing! I'm excited about it!