This post started as my TUSAL post, but despite several tries, my TUSAL photo simply refuses to show up in either Flickr or my email tonight. I’m going to hope it’s swimming in the ether and will pop up at some point this evening. If not, I’ll resend and post it in the morning.
It’s been a busy week here in my corner of the world. I had a crazy week at work last week for our largest client, which went surprisingly just as smoothly as it could possibly go. That allowed me to actually have my weekend free (hooray), which I hadn’t planned on because said client’s project is one that can turn into disaster very, very easily. I’d honestly planned on having to work all weekend.
The free weekend allowed me to finally go to Celebration of Needlework in Nashua, New Hampshire – an event that I’ve hoped to attend for years now. Although I couldn’t get the full experience due to my last minute attendance, I still had a great day. Nashua is just a bit less than two hours north of Providence in good traffic, so while it’s a somewhat long day trip, it’s still doable. I got up at 7, was on the road by 8, and arrived at about quarter to ten in the morning. Not bad at all. I spent the day with Lisa, her mom, and her sister. We had lunch, we did some stitching, and we shopped.
Oh, and there was much shopping to be had. Most of which was waaaaay out of my completely unplanned stitching budget. I was surprisingly good and stuck (mostly) to plan. My only goal was to kit out Book of Ink Circles (aka “BoInk”), using a personalized color palette. I brought a few pieces of fabric I had from my stash, and figured I’d do either a cool colors or an autumn palette. I settled on something a bit more autumn-ish against a piece of Lugana in my stash by Silkweaver called Thunderstorm. The picture to the right is the floss toss. I’m a little on the fence with the light blue, but I can always swap it out later if I don’t think it’s working. I’m looking forward to getting started with it sometime in the next several weeks.
I also picked up two fantastic Dinky Dyes “oops” grab bags. They were $14 each, and each contained several skeins, ribbons, etc. of randomly dyed threads – gorgeous colors, but probably not color consistent with the intended dyes. There were lots of different types of floss in the bags and some gorgeous colors – great stash for those samplers or pieces that could be done in a single overdye. If you ever come across them, I highly recommend them.
I ran into Sue and Deb from Stitcher’s Hideaway early in the afternoon, and caught a glimpse of a couple other stitchers from the previous retreats milling around the shopping area. It was great to see folks again – and even more fun to actually KNOW people at the retreat!
Lisa and I chatted with Theresa Venette of Shakespeare’s Peddler for quite a while. She was doing a “make it/take it” kit event in the main shopping area. Both of us purchased a kit (she had many different ones available), and then chatted for a little while. It started with stitching and quickly went into sharing stories and photos of our furbabies. :)
I also had a couple of newly purchased charts signed by Michelle Lutzen of Stitchy Kitty. It was great to finally meet her after passing tweets back and forth on Twitter. Her Halloween Kitty Moon and the Toadally Pirates charts are now mine.
The Rosewood Manor booth was absolutely gorgeous – all of Karen’s models were wonderful, and I’m now coveting several of her patterns. (Next year… next year…) Next door to her booth was Needlework Antiques, which had several gorgeous samplers from the 1700s and 1800s on display – and on sale! Far, far too expensive for my budget, but it was wonderful looking at them.
The evening brought a large dinner shindig in the main dining room. Because I was only there on a day pass, I didn’t have a ticket to attend it. So Lisa and the girls headed to the dinner and I grabbed some cheap food before heading up to one of the reserved stitching lounges. I got quite a few stitches into the Mira RR while I was there – and a couple different stitchers recognized the piece (*waves to Erin, who’s hopefully reading so I can get her blog address*). Lisa joined us later in the evening and we stitched until just about midnight, when both Erin and Lisa were about to drop and I still needed to make the two hour drive back home.
It was a great day. I hope next year my schedule’s free so I can make my plans in advance. I’d love the opportunity to take one of the classes while I’m there. Now that I know how extensive the shopping area is, I’ll also budget appropriately. There were many other booths there, but my budget was so limited that I kept myself focused on floss. Of course, I still went over my budget, but nowhere near as badly as I could have. This was definitely one of those weekends where I could get into a ton of trouble. Whole paycheck and then some trouble!
