Clarification... and some AP extras

Was listening to the podcast by Lixie earlier - not just because she said she was going to mention the blog and the shop, you understand, but that did get me listening to it when it came out this afternoon, rather than sometime in the following week as I usually do! I liked her comments on the Garnstudio/DROPS people particularly (they were absolutely besieged when I got there, and although I could see they had lovely stuff and the prices looked good, I just registered that and moved on, so a review was great... Have bookmarked their website not just for the free patterns...) but it was interesting to hear someone else's impressions of the same show on the same day, particularly when it's someone you've bought yarn with....

One clarification: a couple of people (including Lixie but she wasn't the first) have said there was a lot more stitching than knitting... And I realise that every time I go to Ally Pally, I'm comparing it with the first few times I went (I think the first time was 1996 or 1997, the year before I started City and Guilds Embroidery). As a new stitcher and inveterate knitter, I had genuinely thought that something called a Knitting and Stitching Show would have some, you know, knitting in it. I believe there were about FIVE, or possibly SEVEN suppliers that year - Colinette, the Wensleydale people (from whom I scored my first pair of Brittany needles and felt very guilty about spending £5.50 on a pair of needles), 21st Century Yarns (when they were still 20th Century Yarns; oh dear... I bought yarn, and also 125g of embroidery silk from them which I'm still using...), Black Sheep, and Uppingham Yarns. Shilasdair may also have been there, I'm not entirely sure. Elizabeth Gash was selling her beautiful knitwear and there were one or two places doing quite exciting machine-knitted garments. Texere were there, but catering exclusively to embroiderers. And there was the Handweavers' Studio (notably MIA this year), but as a strictly knit-from-the-pattern-and-shut-up sort of girl at that point, I was a bit intimidated by their off-piste-ness... At the time I was actually grateful for the lack of knitting, as well as fazed by it - the list of supplies needed for the C&G was so extensive and consisted mainly of non-fibre-related articles like sketchpads, paints, brushes and so on, that Art Van Go got most of my cash that year, with a sideline for Oliver Twists (sadly and incomprehensibly still without a website) and Stef Francis (someone in their wisdom put those two stands opposite each other this year! Your two major independent, long-established, family-run, British hand-dyers for embroiderers and you put them head to head? what on earth? Surely you need to give people time for creative justification and amnesia between stands?). OK, that's the folksingerish bit where I go on about the old times; but it's a kind of Show of Hands folksingerish thing where I can also acknowledge that the olden days had their entirely crap elements, and certainly the total absence of acknowledgement of knitting through most of the 1990s was one of those...

So I was just completely stunned by what was available this year. There was qiviut (once fondled, never forgotten! and you have to love a yarn which doesn't put a u after a q); there was yak (from a supplier who'd run out of cards...); there was a lovely bamboo/wool/cotton blend from Teo's handspun... I did miss Pavi Yarns, but I don't know whether I'm thinking about the Harrogate show, having been to that the last several years as well; they may never have done Ally Pally... The two suppliers which were completely new to me were Knit n Caboodle, who were very good fun to talk to (as described in previous post); and Socktopus. Both the people on the stand were talking on their mobiles while I was there, so I can't comment on their general friendliness otherwise, but they had several of the sock yarns you see regularly on Knitty or Ravelry. None of them felt quite as nice to me as the sock yarns I already had in my bag, so I passed, but took a card anyway for future reference...

The photo at the top of the post is completely gratuitous (except that it's the colour Lixie mentions on the podcast, see link above). Not only can I not blog what I'm knitting at the moment, but I've spent four hours on it today and have knitted up 8g of yarn. That's EIGHT GRAMMES, or a smidgeon under a quarter of an ounce... I'm a reasonably speedy knitter, and I've sat down, at a table, with a decent light and a good audiobook, and I've knitted up about half of the grammes in yarn that I've consumed in sugar in my tea while knitting, which, given the name of the pattern, is ironic. Anyone on Ravelry, you'll be able to guess easily which of the WIPs this is (I'm greensideknits over there, the blog name doesn't fit into their name criteria)...

I suppose the overwhelming thing about all these shows is that great reassurance that You Are Not Alone. For the first several years I went to them, I was a member of RCTN (rec.crafts.textiles.needlework, for the young) but most of the members there were from the US; it was so immensely reassuring to realise that there are All These People Here Who Do Stuff. And in the wake of the recent Yarnstorming, it still is...