Friday, October 7, 2011

Truant

This week somehow totally got away from me, but it has been productive. This hasn't, of course, helped with the backlog of as-yet-unblogged projects, but there you have it. Sometimes life gets in the way of the whole blogging thing and that's just how it is.

Yesterday, I played hookey and took myself off to North London to Ally Pally, aka Alexandra Palace, the home of the Knitting and Stitching Show. I hadn't realized the show was coming up until my spinning group on Tuesday night, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go. The girls had an after school club yesterday, so I took them to school and marched myself off to the train.

On the one hand, it was the kind of event where you pay for the priviledge of going in and spending more money on stuff that really, do you even need? But, in addition to loads of booths of stuff to buy, there were the most incredible displays - tapestries, textile artists, design students' final projects, various guilds displaying samples...It was just such an amazing variety of the things people do with fiber in all its myriad incarnations.

Silk guild

Silk Guild

Ally Pally 2011

Ally Pally Knitted birds

There were beads, miles and miles of beads...

Ally Pally beads

Ally Pally more beads

There were clothes, of various degrees of wearability,

Ally Pally 2011

Ally Pally Yale dress

and yarn, lots of yarn (this is just one example).

Yarn

Have paid my £14 to get in, I wasn't too interested in spending a lot more. I spent most of my time wandering around just looking and taking in all the colors. But I got sucked in by a new-to-me local magazine (to which I now have a subscription),

New magazine

a gorgeous orange sketchbook,

Sketchbook

and a cone of mohair boucle to use in some core spinning, which I've been dying to try for a while now. I managed to make it out without getting a new sewing machine (though it was very tempting), or with any yarn. I was on a mission to find some DK weight, dark grey-slatey blue handdyed yarn, but by far the vast majority of the yarns available were sock and lace weight. Bah! Any UK-based indie dyers up for producing some heavier weight gorgeousness? Please?!!!!

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