In which I am Totally Famous and Don't Even Know It

Ok. Maybe this is not really 15 minutes of fame.  15 nanoseconds?  Who cares.  As I may have mentioned before, once or twice or twenty times, not that anyone should be counting, my girlfriend Deb and I make an annual pilgrimage to the New York Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck.  This year was no exception, although it does seem to us that the bus arrives just a little bit later and leaves just a little bit earlier every year.  Nonetheless, we went.  And, to boost the fun factor (especially important to me since I felt last year that I had approached the festival with a faulty strategy and mindset and therefor failed to extract the maximum fun possible from my one big day away) we added another Deb and a Jodi and spent the day alternately parting from and meeting up with each other, comparing notes on the different booths we had been too, and texting each other at a rate that would have made our teenage daughters' heads numb.  It worked like a charm.  We still ended up walking through most of the buildings, and we definitely became store-stupid and zombie-like from seeing far too much stuff for sale, but it was refreshing to have accomplished that by accident as opposed to tackling each building in order and making sure that we didn't overlook a single skein of yarn.

The second Deb (who is known locally as Knitting Deb, largely because I took some knitting classes with her, but also to distinguish her from Regular Deb- who was the first of my Deb acquisitions and is my usual Rhinebeck travel companion--and Spinning Deb--who, as you may have deduced, taught me to spin) has an 'in' with my favorite shameless-promoter-of-economic-recovery-through-discounted-yarn-acquisition website, The Dizzy Sheep. Dizzy offers a daily deal on a yarn (punctuated by an occasional holiday-related multi-deal frenzy) and K.D. used the occasion of her trip to Rhinebeck to take the website's eponymous mascot along for some photo-ops.  Now, normally, I would avoid author book signings and the evil, snakey lines that accompany them like the plague.  But Knitting Deb was determined to plunk herself in the line for the Yarn Harlot's book signing and I really really really didn't want to miss this because she was going to get a picture of the mighty Stephanie Pearl-McPhee with our very own Dizzy Sheep.  I thought this would be a memory in the making, and that is what led me to be wandering near the book signings at exactly the moment that would ensure my everlasting international stardom.  To appreciate the scope of my new-found fame, you'll need to pop over here for a minute.  Go ahead.  I'll wait.  Now, scroll down to the picture of the kid with the only kind of monster-butt I would ever want to have.   That's amazingly cute, isn't it?  But that's not what I'm all wee-wee'd up for.  Scroll down to the next picture below the monster-tush.  There is a woman there with her leg on a table, showing SPM her sock.  That's not me.  But, I remember seeing that woman hoist her sock up on the table because I was there.  I can prove it, too.  In the background of the picture, there is a woman in a blue sweater who is actually watching the sock-woman put her foot on the table.  That is still not me.  That is Regular Deb, and if she had known that this was going to be our international debut, she would have smiled for the camera.  But no one told us.  If anyone had bothered to mention that we were about to be famous, then instead of being the pony-tailed girl in the orange vest walking behind Regular Deb and not even looking at the camera, I would have been the pony-tailed girl in the orange vest mugging it up like an idiot for my big debut.  No matter.  I'm still in the picture, and I'll probably go back and look at it a few more times to make sure I haven't been edited out yet.   Excuse me for a second.

I'm back.  There isn't much else to report from Rhinebeck.  Knitting Deb had some good stories, one of which involved her being tracked down by a large man called Thor (yes, the same Thor who sold me free yarn a few Rhinebecks ago; could there really be more than one?), who had reported her --and more particularly the hand-knit shawl she was wearing--to the shawl's designer and wanted to know if the designer had managed to track her down among the thousands of hand-knit clad people in attendance.  But that's not my story.  My only story--and I use that term very loosely--took place on the ride home, where I was so tired that I began sleep knitting and dreamed (hallucinated?  it's a fine line, isn't it?) that someone had thrown a golf tee onto my knitting and just as I was trying to remove the tee from my project, I woke up and realized that I was actually trying to pull my Brittany DPN out of the mitten I was working on. Not much of a story, but that's OK because my picture is on the Yarn Harlot's blog and she's really famous, so now I'm famous too.


In honor of all this photographic excitement, I'll post a few pictures of my own.   The first pictures are Rhinebeck purchases.

One skein of STR mill ends for a pair of fingerless gloves for me to wear when my office gets too cold for typing. One purse strap, because I really am determined to knit that kit purse that I bought last year. One bag of dyed bluefaced leicester top.  The display at this booth was photo-worthy -- all sorts of colorful top and and skeins neatly displayed against a black background.  I had the most miserable time choosing because everything was beautiful.

One yarn bowl from Brier Street Pottery.  Isn't it pretty? The color is  teal blue, with a lot of blue-grey in it.  I also bought a little rose colored crock, but it is busy holding some of my spindles right now.

More roving from Hope Spinnery, which is a co-op that produces fiber and yarn  using wind power, and local purchasing, and natural dyes, and all sorts of socially responsible things.  I think I would feel wrong not buying something from this booth.

Next up are some things I actually finished.  First, my Night Fury socks.  I have a second skein of this stuff, which is good because I am not done enjoying either the yarn or the color way, which is named after Toothless the dragon in How to Train Your Dragon.  There is also a possibility that I'm going to take a dyeing workshop with the person who dyed this yarn, which would be too much fun for me.

Here is my Swallowtail Shawl.  Finally.  Finished.  Not sure what to do with it now.

Here are a pair of hats I made for a woman in the knitting guild who is collecting preemie hats for donation.  These were started and finished on the eternal bus ride to and from Rhinebeck, which isn't saying much because they are so quick to knit, but I also finished my Night Fury socks and knit most of a mitten on the same bus rides.  Just saying.

Emma, who had asked me a while ago to make her some hats for her pet gourds, was annoyed that they didn't fit her gourds properly,

although I think this guy looks fabulous.

That's enough for tonight.  The natives want dinner.  Again.  And I think I'm going to go make sure I'm still famous.  Again.