Trade Show N Tell

This will be a long post with lots of pictures.

Debbie, Karen and I went to the TNNA (The National Needlearts Assoc.) trade show in San Diego. We stayed for four days.

We stayed in a Sheraton high rise hotel. The first 11 floors were the parking lot. This picture looks un-scary. But, that corridor seemed quite snug and it was ELEVEN... curvy ...swooping...tightly turned...floors to the place where we had to park. Karen was our driving hero.


We ate many of our meals in a cute retro-rock-n-roll restaurant called Mary-Jane's. The wait staff was young and tattoo cute. The food was terrific. In this pic you can see that Debbie and I had a TV dinner. It was a little salad, spaghetti and brownie in an aluminum foil tray. Kitchy but delicious.

We took classes from Knitting Rock Stars.
This is Cat Bordhi in a class covering the book "New Pathways For Sock Knitters" I think no one would dissagree that this woman is a genius. She is also generous and funny and a great teacher. Cat gave me a few tips on teaching the Mobius cast-on too!. She said we should all try knitting standing up occasionally for our health. You might want to try it! We got gifts of yarn and a pair of Addi Turbos in this class.

This is Stefanie Japel. (the last name rhymes with apple) Her class was all about knitting a fitted sweater from the top down. It's her specialty. She is young and pretty and very nice. I enjoyed this class except for the fact that the two people sitting next to me chatted the entire time.

This was my second class with Sally Melville. She gave out fabulous notes so I could refer to them later. The class was called "Learn to Love Intarsia" I did learn a lot and I think I will make an intarsia sweater for the shop and teach others to love it too! She pulled out sweaters that are pictured in her book, the one that is on the cover of her "Color" book is spectacularly beautiful.

On Saturday we began walking the miles of booths in the convention center. Every booth (they don't allow photography) full of beautiful yarn! There was lots of fondling and ooohhs and aaahhhs. Some of the folks there had non-yarn items. Bags, Buttons and Baubles. Oh ya...I'd say 1/3 of the vendors were needlepoint purveyors.


I did sneek one picture inside the convention center. This is (right to left) Mary-Heather, Jess and Casey of Ravelry fame. I was less of a ninny than last year in which I gushed shamelessly. They are shy and sweet and it was cool to see them.









I was wearing a Ravelry t-shirt that Jess noticed.



Here she is posing with Karen and I.








It was an exhausting four days. We ate well. Learn a lot. Saw kaboodles of YARN. After getting up at 5:30am every day and walking miles, we got a bottle of wine and took a soak in the hotel hot tub




It took half a dozen attempts to get this cute shot of us pool side.


That ends the tale of my time at Yarn-a-palooza!