Stitchin' Bitch: Acquiring freckles

It's been a great big week of knitting and knitting related activities, and this post won't even cover the knitting part of it. It was World Wide Knit in Public Day on Saturday June 9, what did you do to celebrate? For the first time in a million years, I was actually free and available that day to enjoy the festivities, instead of rushing around like a crazy to fit it in when I was supposed to be going to work or doing something work-related. I headed over to Shall We Knit? for their day of fun. It was raining most of the time I was there, so there wasn't too much blatant outdoor in-your-face knitting. I wandered the shop half looking for an appropriate yarn for my pillow sham project, and half just looking around. Since the shop moved to Waterloo, I had still never fully explored it, and I went upstairs for the first time!

Everyone likes to hear about stuff I bought, so let me satisfy your craving:

My haul from Shall We Knit? during WWKIP day

Have you heard about Soakbox? I have, and I love it, and I think it's such a smart idea. I bought this little beauty partly because I was responsible for introducing the designer of the pattern included with these kits for the Knitters' Guild Adjudicated Show, and because I love pretty things. The box includes a baby bottle of Soak wool wash (convenient travel size), a coordinating bottle of Handmaid hand cream, Lorna's Lace yarn, and a pattern for fingerless mitts designed by Fiona Ellis.

I also got a sampler of Soak scentless for just showing up to the fun!

The boxes come in four colours, and this one is called Cuff Au Lait, and my pretty little fingies are wearing the polish as I type.

Sock yarn! I missed my chance to buy some indigodragonfly yarns at a Guild meeting earlier this year (ne pas de cash on hand), but I was quick to load up my arms with all indigodragonfly lovelies.

Sonic f**king death monkey

Slutty Thursday afternoon things

We gotta go to the crappy town where I'm a hero!

Oh Glenna and her lemongrass martinis

My Soakbox all out of the box

Very shortly after my fun at WWKIP Day, I was also responsibly for MCing the KW Knitters' Guild Adjudicated Show. How did I land such a prestigious role, you ask? Why dear readers, I was volun-told. At a Guild Executive meeting earlier this year, when we were discussing how to make the Show happen now that our Show Coordinator had stepped down with 2 months to go before the Show, I was informed that it is tradition for the incoming Guild President to be the MC. Neato, huh? I prepped my speaking notes in the week before the Show, with most of it being done the night before, well into the wee hours of the morning. With the actual adjudication of the show pieces done on Monday and the Show on Tuesday, I didn't receive all of Fiona's comments until Monday evening, and I had one of those completely-miss-the-tab-at-the-bottom-of-the-Excel-notebook moments, that resulted in me retyping information and looking back and forth between different copies of the information unnecessarily. Ugh.

Oh, and then there was the plumbing issue that came up on Monday/Tuesday at the church where our meetings are held. We had the church booked and reserved for the whole day on Tuesday for Show preparation, and on Monday I got several frantic emails from the nice lady at the church and other Guild members about how there would be no bathrooms available on Tuesday night. It wasn't a SUPER big deal. We were just, you know, serving drinks to 100+ people for 2.5 hours. After some back and forth phone calls and emails, we found out that the plumbing crew hadn't even started the work on the bathrooms at 2pm on Tuesday afternoon, so they would just hold off on the work until the next day. Phew!

Other than that hiccup, I think everything went really well. The biggest "oops" on my end of things was not communicating what I had done with refreshments before I left the church to grab dinner. I was super-duper organized - I filled three coffee percs with water (AND tested them all to make sure plugging all three in at once wouldn't pop a fuse), and adding coffee/decaf where appropriate, then left them in their respective corners, ready to be plugged in and turned on when I got back. I was held up at dinner since I went out with Fiona and another Guild Exec member, and when I got back I noticed that some kind person has started one of the percs. But just one of them. Hmm. The one that was blupping away was the one clearly labeled TEA WATER ONLY and I had left it filled with water and next to the tea supplies on the counter. The other two percs were farther down the kitchen, where they were ready to plug into separate circuits, and these were not on. "Curious" I thought, and then I plugged in the other two and went on my merry way. A short while later, soon to be past-president came up to me looking flustered and asked if the coffee in the blue plastic bin was ours. I told her it was, and said that was the extra coffee. She told me she just dumped it in to the perc and set it off because she thought the coffee should be on by now. My little heart sank, and I asked her which one she put coffee into. Yes, of course it was the TEA WATER ONLY one. Ugh. I unplugged it as fast as I could and poured out the half-brewed coffee. It was reassuring to note that I was clearly not the only one to brew coffee in the tea perc since the inside of it was mildly coffee-stained. Oh, and hardly anyone drank any coffee.

So the rest of the night was pretty uneventful, and went along without any problems. The pieces were modeled and walked around the room while Fiona read out her comments about each one, and then the top three pieces in each category were announced. I read out the winners and butchered my way through reading out the names of the prizes each winner got.

Oh, and I won some things!