i have a solid excuse for being so quiet lately. two solid excuses, actually.

the first one is, i’m freakishly busy these days. they turned me into a full-time dyer at work recently, which is awesomely nice, but also awesomely time-consuming.

the second one is, i’ve been getting me some. feel free to speculate over that one. i’ll wait here in the corner giggling while you do.

giggle giggle.

despite all this i’ve been churning out FO’s like an ambidextreous monkey on LSD, but again, the quality of my photography is so abysmal with the equipment i have that i’ll just rather keep you all squirming with anticipation for now than post pictures that make me look fugly and untalented.

so, to distract you for a little while longer, here’s a recap of our recent trip to vogue knitting live in seattle.

in short, it was awesome beyond all human expression. even with the thoroughly magical plane of day-to-day existence i’m lucky enough to occupy in my life right now, i want to go back and curl up in the fluffy cloud of creative energy, sheer talent and white angora bunnies that was bellevue that weekend and never come home again.

THEIR LITTLE NOSES WERE TWITCHING

i took classes in two-colour knitting, steeking and knitwear design, which were all taught by people i never ever expected to be allowed to occupy the same temporal space with – such as gudrun johnston, who’s so nice and charming and cute that i just wanted to take a piece of her with me and place it on my mantelpiece (that did not come out right).

in addition to spending lots and lots of quality time with the best knitterly friends a girl could ever have, i met a whole bunch of new people and generally acted nothing like the awkward, socially disabled trainwreck of uncomfortable silences that i once used to be. what an empowering feeling to find yourself talking to a complete stranger and not want to curl up and fucking die of embarrassement afterwards.

on friday we caught a jeff bridges show in downtown seattle. oh, what a long wavy gray hair he had, and a stage presence that made me really really like country music.

and of course, i bought some yarn. a little bit of yarn. not that much. 12 skeins is not that much. one skein of hazel knits artisan sock, a few skeins of BT loft, some shetland spindrift for colorwork practice, two skeins of icelandic laceweight and a few local sportweight columbias. the purple knitted wit skein made me especially giddy since through some cosmic miraculous coincidence it’s the same color and dyelot of featherweight rambouillet i got at TNNA, so now i have enough yardage for a proper shawl.

i bought my first pair of signature circulars too. and a whole lot of tea. but it’s really quite challenging to go all the way to bainbridge island and churchmouse and not buy a whole lot of tea. it could’ve been a lot worse. that’s my excuse and i’m sticking to it.

also also, at some point during the weekend, well, uh… this happened.

receiving this plastic trophy the size of my production manager’s baby basically meant three things:

a) me being called up on stage during a stupendously expensive gala dinner, which i was completely and utterly underdressed for, to knit as fast as humanly possible with terror-stricken sweat-clad hands and a digestive system ready to burst into a diarrhetic dungfest of comically exaggerated proportions while being gawked at by 200 people who obviously were not familiar with the many perks of continental knitting;

b) me actually being the fastest of the final three and therefore receiving abovementioned trophy and a whole buttload of free stuff as well as an unexpected additional round against the likes of amy detjen and lily chin which, in some post-orgastic knitting euphoria i also totally dominated;

c) random people coming up to me in a semi-continous stream for the next two days to congratulate me and casually touch my seemingly magical hands, which was extremely weird and uncomfortable, but also kind of cool in a LOOK MA I’M FINALLY SOMEONE kind of way.

what also happened later was me standing in line to pay for my churchmouse purchases when somewhere from my left a hipstery form of pure magical talent, lovely body odour and general swoon-inducing awesomeness emerged, and it was jared flood, who had specifically sought me out to congratulate me and tell me how very impressed he had been with my performance, and i stood there staring into his beautiful eyes and mentally masturbating myself and it was all very very not-uncomfortable.

in fact, after having my entire purpose of existence fulfilled in such a way the universe promptly expanded to an extatic mushroom cloud of yarn and bunnies and unicorns and then collapsed in on itself, leaving behind nothing but faint memories and this black and white hologram of wobbly knees, heaving chests and unsurprisingly retarded smiles.

retard… with a trophy (photo: melissa)