Hooray for Stitches West 2012! - Part 1

I'm so excited for this week's post. For the past two years since we moved to Santa Clara,  I've never made it to Stitches West. It is held every year in February at the Santa Clara Convention Center, which is 6 miles away from me. The first year I was attending prenatal classes and totally missed it. Last year I don't even remember what happened, but I know that I only realized it had happened after it was over. This year I was determined to make it! However, I am now working and couldn't really take off that many days. My kind supervisor gave me Friday off to go get my knitting on and I was excited!

Friday morning, I scoured through the online listing of classes and saw only two that I could take on Sunday afternoon because as usual, I was booked for something this weekend (I had to sing at church). No matter, I soldiered on, looking at the Weaving class and the Short Row Shaping class scheduled for Sunday. I was leaning strongly towards the weaving class, when the kind lady at the registration desk informed me that the Weaving class was an all day class, which narrowed down my class selection to the Sneaky Short Row Shaping with Gwen Bortner. I registered for this class, got my official looking badge, and headed off for the market, where lots of lovely yarn goodies and awesome people were waiting.

I got to meet Kristin Omdahl (Styled By Kristin) who regularly appears on the Crochet Corner of Knitting Daily TV AND has written a knitting book, and Michelle Miller (of FickleKnitter Designs) who designs the loveliest shawls in person. I was freaking out like a little knitting fan girl! And they took pictures with me!! I was excited to meet them both, and thrilled when Michelle recognized me because I had test knitted her Tree and Arbor Wrap pattern about two years ago (blogged here).

I bought a book from each of them, and they very graciously signed them for me. :) Woohoo!!

Michelle then pointed me towards Roxanne of Zen Yarn Garden. Now this lady's yarns are to-die-for! The colors are so vivid, and the yarn is so soft!! I've been wanting to get a few skeins for myself for years now, and the fact that I got to meet her just got me acting the fool. I think I was at her booth for almost an hour, and was almost late picking up my son!! She also let me take a picture with her!! 

Then I got down to drooling over yarn!! This is what I got from her! (I had to make the yarn picture extra large because it's just so yummy!!)

Wow! Can you tell how excited I was to go? This post is getting a little long now, so I'll end here and continue in my next blog post! Thank you for reading this far! :)