Designing Lace with Evelyn Clark

What a fabulous long weekend. On Friday morning I loaded up my car with yarn and needles, picked up two friends, and headed north. We visited four yarn shops, had lunch and strolled through the town of Mount Vernon. I tried out a Majacraft Rose spinning wheel and I do believe I am in love. My other great discovery of the day came at the Red Apple Market in Mount Vernon. (They had Mexican Coke! Coca-Cola in the US is made with corn syrup. In Mexico it's still made with sugar. Wes and his co-workers have been buying it by the bottle at a local restaurant and have fantasized about finding it by the case. The clerk at the store looked at my like I was crazy when I lugged a full case up to the register.)

We arrived at the "cabin." It's less of a cabin and more of a gorgeous summer house. Thirteen knitters in all including Evelyn and the organizers. We were fed, we sat and knit and took in the sunset.


Sunset on Friday night

On Saturday we has a leisurely morning then class began at 10. Evelyn has a new book which should be available soon from Fibertrends. The book gives a mix and match format to create a triangular shawl using four lace patterns. We were given all the materials from the book but also given the opportunity to design our own pattern.


A Rose-Kim Original

Evelyn had mentioned to me a month or so ago that she hoped some people would use handspun for their shawls. I was a little concerned that I did not have time to spin a shawl's worth of yarn. Then, while organizing my stash, I found that I had already spun a shawl's worth of yarn. Bingo! Dazzle the llama coming right up.

Then we started knitting.


And knitting.

I knit over 100 rows before we left.

I also started a new Baby Surprise Jacket with my leftovers from Retro Prep the Third.



The house where we stayed was called Eagle Point. There were sculptures of eagles everywhere. I fully expected to see an eagle while there. I didn't. As I complained to my traveling companions on the way home that we hadn't seen any eagles I had to screech to a halt.



There was an American Bald Eagle standing in the middle of the road in front of my car eating a flattened possum. I managed to grab my camera and snap this picture before he flew away. The sucker was ENORMOUS. Note his size in relation to the hood of my car. And he was at least ten or fifteen feet away from me. It was kind of amazing.

We took our sweet time heading home, stopping at few more yarn shops, touring the city of Mukilteo trying unsuccessfully to find a yarn shop that turned out to be closed on Mondays, eating lunch in Edmonds and toodling through the shops.

I got home just before five and in time to pick up the boys from childcare. I called out to my oldest son, who looked at me and said, "I thought Dad was picking us up." "It's great to see you too, honey." Then I called out to my younger son. "I thought Dad was coming." "I missed you too."