Long weekend in Portland, OR

Just returned from a fun weekend in Portland, OR with cute husband. I must say, he was a saint to put up with being dragged to ALL of my fiber-related follies over the weekend. Stayed at a great B&B in a great area, Portland's White House. The house was a huge and fabulous mansion built in the early 1900's. We stayed in the Canopy Room---gorgeous! Lots of great pics of the rooms on their site. The breakfasts were fabulous, served in this dining room---homemade waffles and baked Swedish apple pancake with fresh, local fruits, all served on fine china. Now that's what I call breakfast! (Is it really worth waking up that early otherwise...:) It was hard to get up and out of the huge feather bed in our room, but it was worth it for such a nice breakfast.

Then it was off to the Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival in Canby, OR. Spent a few hours there roaming through vendor booths, shopping, watching spinners (including some men!), and best of all, looking at all of the fabulous fiber animals!

Found these Washington spinners having a great time, and one of those spinning men I mentioned....The alpacas are my favorites.

This one even came home with me.....I know he's not a live one, but he also doesn't need to be fed or cleaned! Actually, he is needle-felted with unprocessed alpaca fur, very cute. Here he is getting acquainted with Mochi, the technocat...

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*WARNING*---Next section contains material some might find offensive. If that's you, click the scroll button really fast...
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Yes, the alpaca is anatomically correct to include gold "family jewels"......(unfortunately, can't say the same for the technocat....meee-ooooow!)




And finally, a technocat and his alpaca enjoy a quiet, new-friendship-kinda moment before the alpaca leaves to fulfill his duties as guardian of the stash....(Stash Alpaca??)...

Overall, the OFFF was fun and a new experience for me----haven't seen that many bags of fur since I tried to felt one of the cats!.....(note to PETA: JUST KIDDING!).

Later that night, had a great dinner at one of the local downtown Portland restaurants, then back to the room to rest up for the great Yarn store tour on Sunday.....more about that later! Overall, it was a great weekend and had lots of fun to celebrate my upcoming **th birthday!

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Sheep and alpacas and goats, oh my!

I'm so excited! Leaving for a long weekend trip to Portland tomorrow, to celebrate my upcoming **th birthday. (** = a decade marker too hard for me to admit to yet...). While I'm there, I'm going to drag poor cute husband to the Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival in Canby, OR. I love the smell of fresh roving in the morning!

There will be all kinds of vendors (selling hand-spun, hand-dyed yarns....oh, yeah!), and all types of demos on spinning, weaving, raising fleece animals, and other things fibery. I've never been to one of these events before, so I'm hoping it will be fun....and,...um....not too wallet-denting, if ya know what I mean....

I'll let you know about it when I return. Gee, I hope the fumes of all of that gorgeous, hand-dyed wool don't overcome me and cause me to buy more than I should----(insert evil laugh)---

ps---Thanks and hugs to Rachel for her help! :) (she knows what I mean....). Check out her blog and look at her impeccable knitting.

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Knitting obsession?.....this could be you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6ZjMWLqJvM

A tale of obsession....you'll laugh.....you'll cry....you'll become very afraid it looks something like you.....

Fun with dishcloths!

I joined a monthly dishcloth KAL recently, and it's been fun so far! There are two KAL's a month, and here's the first one I knit from mid-August. I know that some consider dishcloths to be on a low rung of knitterly society and can't be bothered to make them---but I say they are fun to knit, inexpensive to make, provide quick FO gratification, allow you to try new stitch patterns without a big risk, and also serve a useful purpose! They also provide me with a fun and satisfying bit of knitting that I can take along and take a break from bigger projects for a while. I really find it fun to have a small, colorful FO so quickly....

Here's an illusion snowflake dishcloth---this one was very fun to make. Hard to see in the pictures, but the snowflake really does 'appear and disappear', depending on the viewing angle. I've been interested in trying out illusion, or shadow knitting for a while, so this pattern was perfect!

Sometimes the high-speed highway is gridlocked...

Yipeeeeee! I'm on the high-speed highway.....um, ..after sitting in a major traffic jam for a while! No wait, not a traffic jam---I couldn't even get on the actual highway. Received the equipment with easy as 1-2-3 installation instructions. Then cute high-tech hubby installs, checks, rechecks.....nothing.

Called phone technical support, 10 more rechecks....nothing. Finally, real human being tech-guy shows up from telephone company today. Only took him 2-1/2 hours of replacing lines outside and inside the house to get it working....at the lowest speed available....but working. Poor guy, hope he's getting paid by the hour and not by the job. So now I'm cruising on the 300mph highway at about 75mph, but for that, I'm grateful. At least I'm actually ON the highway now!

Next, trying to upload pictures.....can't wait to see what kind of havoc I can create with that!

New day, new blog.....

It's so nice to have a new little cyberspot to call my own!....Um,... now what do I do? This blogging thing is a whole new experience for me. If someone would have told me a year ago that I would ever even consider starting my own blog, I would have laughed....really loud. But never say never, cause here I am.

Turns out that I've really started to enjoy reading all of the posts and looking at all of those pics posted by many knitters who have boldly blogged before me. They all look like they are having so much fun, and knottykitties really hate to feel left out of anything---especially if it's fun!

Anyway, welcome to my little blogspot~~I hope you find something you like here, or something to make you smile :) In the meantime, I will be having lots of fun trying to figure out how to do all of the technical stuff, exposing a little more of my life than I probably should, and making merriment whenever possible about just about anything (hey, I can't help it, I'm a born wise ass...).

But best of all, I can post pictures of my knitting, and talk about my knitting, knitting in general, and only think about buying yarn (especially if my husband is reading this, who knows that I would never, ever actually purchase any more yarn...). Perhaps I'll even have time to blog about any of the other stuff that occupies my life here....

Thanks for peeking in, and stop by any time.....:)