NWRSA: Thursday Recap

Before heading to the conference (in Tacoma, one hour south of Seattle) I sent off my Dye-o-Rama yarn to my pal whose name is confusingly also Jessica. To reinforce my poolside theme I made a trip to Archie McPhee's. I was originally going to get some cocktail umbrellas to send along with the yarn but then I saw the Hula Shakers. Sold!

I ended up hitting the road earlier than I planned. Fortunately/Unfortunately the directions to the conference were really bad. No, they were super sucky bad. They sucked ass. I found the University of Puget Sound, found a map and eventually found the field house which got me there right at noon. The gymnasium was set up with huge circles of chairs and there were already lots of people there spinning. Melinda shot a good overhead view of it all. The vendors were setting up too. I spun and strolled and looked as the booths were getting set up. I ran into two Seattle-area spinners I know. They had their schedules a little mixed up and thought the market would be open. They hadn't brought their wheels. They sat and knit while I was spinning. One woman said she wished someone was selling a folding wheel since her only wheel was an Ashford Traditional; the other wished for a simple spindle. We decided to walk around together and found a booth selling a Fricke folding wheel with a lazy Kate, 5 bobbins and a bag of combed coopworth for only $125! That got scooped up by one woman. The other woman found a Cascade Little Si spindle and a nice bag of fiber. So we all got to sit and spin for a while. Slowly more knitters arrived and more booths got set up.

The accommodations at the event were a little Spartan. The rooms were bare dormitory rooms with rock hard mattresses and wafer-thin scratchy sheets. The towels weren't much better. And the food? College cafeteria cuisine. Blech. Molly arrived late that night in the middle of a downpour. We went back to the dorm. The room prompted a lot of jokes about prison cells and the Geneva Convention. I wanted a soda and we went in search of a vending machine. We found an air hockey table! We played for about a minute until Molly scored a goal on me. Someone had stuck a jar lid into the goal so the puck couldn't come out. We wiggled and jiggled it but no luck. We still stayed up way too late watching a movie on her laptop.

Next up: Friday.