Stitches!

Two and a half hours.  Stitches West.  Disneyland for knitters, totally filling the large Santa Clara Convention Center near here.  I’m exhausted.  (I know, we all knew that was going to happen.) But I’m so glad we went!

First, before we left, though, another box arrived on the doorstep: they were so tightly closed up that Sam’s first reaction when we opened the box, was, what are these?  I told her, just give them a few hours.   They’ll open up very fast.  They’re daffodils.

They have already begun to and to perfume our family room.  Two dozen flowers in a hefty vase from Kelli, a friend of mine at Purlescence, the friend who already gave me her old camera.  Goodness! That LYS (that’s Local Yarn Store in knitter’s lingo, Don) attracts very giving people.

I debated what to wear this morning, and decided blue with Chris J’s socks to match would be just the thing. I hadn’t seen her in ages, and one could only hope.  Which is how, it turned out, I got to show off to Chris J how happy my feet were and to watch her face light up, which she’d totally earned.

Sam and I of course kept running into lots of people I knew, and very occasionally one or two she did, like Karen Brayton-McFall of the old Rug and Yarn Hut.  People stopping us and they and I throwing our arms around each other.  Over and over and over.  I was mentally thinking in the direction of some of the hospital personnel of two and a half weeks ago or more, you see why I couldn’t miss this?!  You see why I had to go?!  Some of the friends there I only get to see once a year, at Stitches.  I might admit that well, there were a few times I was really glad this person or that was wearing a name tag.

You might forget a person’s name. But you never forget how they make you feel. I felt well loved, and they I’m sure did too.

Rosemary Hill of designsbyromi.com came up to me and tucked her heart shawl pin into my shawl and gave me a hug.  I wondered out loud why she wasn’t wearing Muir (which I happen to particularly like); she was wearing jewelry she’d knitted,  wire earrings (free patterns at the links) and a necklace, which makes sense, given the recent release of her book on the subject.

Gracie Larsen of the Lacy Knitters Guild asked me to come sign books and we agreed on 2:00 pm Saturday.

Sam used that as a carrot to get me to let go and give in to being tired and go home, on the grounds that I’d miss out totally on tomorrow if I overdid it today.  “You’re more tired than you think you are.”  Wise woman there.  She was right; I knew as soon as I stopped moving I would be ready to crash.  And so we came home.

And a good time was had by all.