To answer KC’s question: yes, there are prizes for filling out the bingo card, including a large basket of yarn and I think more, but I never paid attention to the details. You get one entry for a single line filled out, three tries if all 25 are, and the Crawl continues this week.
One well-thought-out part is that you can choose the bingo card that matches the route you want to take; it does not force you to drive 150 zigzag miles each way to fill out a single line.
We’re talking north of San Francisco to south of San Jose and from the coast to over two mountain ranges to the eastern side of the Bay. That’s serious road tripping and carpooling. It’s taken us all three years that they’ve done this for us to make it to–I think we finally made it to?–every single shop.
For that kind of driving it’s about spending time with the friends you’re carpooling with, with the bonus of running into people again and again doing the same sequence. If we can’t have Stitches anymore, with how all its faces became familiar over the years, we can make our mini version.
The prizes are lovely (but just make sure you wrote your name on that card, the first year whoever would have been the winner wasn’t because they hadn’t and nobody knew who to give it to.)
But Nina and I agreed we rather hoped we won’t be picked: we have a goodly amount and the means to buy more, but for so many people it would mean so much more to their ability to access really nice stuff that would motivate and keep those needles going. I remember those days. We want them to have it.
Those two days happened and we made the time to catch up like the old friends we are because someone out there knew that not only would knitters want to buy yarn, we would want a reason to find the time to spend the time with each other in pursuit of what we love to do anyway and hey, they could certainly make a buck in the process. Cool.
Sometimes you just need a thing scheduled.
I drove to Andy Mariani’s farm in December in part to buy small containers of his best specifically so that Nina could snack on her favorite dried apricots this weekend from a container that fit in her console.
Hey wait, did we get to that Redwood City place we missed last year? Maybe we’re not quite done….