Monday, October 29, 2007
Just dropping by quickly to say that the winner is... drumroll please... Tonyia! Yea!
I picked a winner using a random number generator at random.org. I assigned a number to each commenter using the order of the comments. Tonyia was number five, and random.org selected the number 5. So, congratulations Tonyia! Send me an address, and I'll send your fiber there!
In other news, well, there isn't much news. Life has been flying by me since I've gotten back from SOAR, and I'm just trying to keep up. I did sign the contract, the publisher counter-signed, so the book is a done deal. Wahoo! And also, ACK! Excited, but freaking out. That is me.
There's also some Other Stuff going on right now, but nothing worth whining about (yet). I'm trying to let hormone levels return to normal before I really worry about anything I'm worrying about at the moment. Sorry, I'm not trying to be mysterious, I just feel like I whine enough on this blog without PMS-inspired meanderings. So, now that I've wandered into some people's Too Much Information zone, I'll just call it a night. Here's a picture of a cute kitty to make up for the crapalicious post. Next time: actualy content (maybe).
Sunday, October 21, 2007
It's official: Rhinebeck is over and it happened without me. Wah! I know, I know; I JUST came back from SOAR, which I was very lucky to get to attend. But what can I say, I just want it all. I want to be able to live the wild rock star life of hopping from one fiber event to the next, leaving a string of broken-hearted shepherds in my wake. *Sigh* All of you lucky enough to attend Rhinebeck, I hope you had a great time and really enjoyed yourselves. And I hope that I get to see you next year!
Well, I think I'm close to full recovery from my week at SOAR. I'm (mostly) caught up on sleep, my apartment is (almost) clean, I've (nearly) caught up with everything at work. Now all that's left is to blog about it. Since I didn't end up following through with my day-by-day recount of events (wow, big surprise there, huh?) I thought I'd just do the whole she-bang today. But, as I started to write, I realized it would be the most gargantuan blog post of all time, so I'm back to my several posts idea so that it will be a bit more manageable to read. It won't be every day this week, but I'll split up my retelling of my SOAR experience into several manageable bits and hopefully I'll get it all written down before I forget it all.
For tonight, I'll stick to a review of my week back AS (after SOAR). First, very exciting-to-me news: I finally got a contract for my book. They gave me a copy the day before I left for SOAR, but there were some discrepancies that distressed me, so I just decided to leave it until I came back. I figured if I didn't ask questions, I could pretend that they were just typos or miscommunications and that I'd straighten it all out when I got home. If I found out before SOAR that "things had changed" I was pretty sure it would have ruined SOAR for me. So, once I got back, I sent the contract back to the contracts department with my notes and requested changes. Everything I red-flagged was set right, much to my relief. They had a new version to me by Friday, I took it home this weekend to review and I am turning in my signed copies tomorrow. Once they sign, it will be official: I will be writing a book. Unbe-freakin-lievable. I am still pinching myself over this whole thing. Although, to be honest, I'm still holding back a bit, feeling a bit over-cautious. I still can't believe this is happening. It seems too good to be true, and until it's legally binding, I still feel like it could all fall apart, because I find it hard to believe that I could actually be this lucky. I've been cautiously excited since the idea was first mentioned, and I can't wait until everyone signs on the dotted line so that I can let out this breath I've been holding and really celebrate.
In fibery news, I continue to spin (and spin and spin) the English Gardens bombyx from Treetops. The silk, it is never-ending. I feel the need for a break from it looming. I'm trying to avoid a break because it's taking long enough without breaks, but I've been working on it almost exclusively for nearly four months now (jeez, even I can't believe it's been that long) and I feel the need to branch out a bit. I've also started my holiday knitting.
 They're black socks for my mom. Black stockinette socks are so boring they've been known to induce comas. Send caffeine. Instead of the usual 2x2 rib I do on the cuffs of my mom's socks, I'll be trying a simple lace pattern, so hopefully that will bring some excitement to the mix. We'll see. I love my mom, my mom loves my socks, so... I'm knitting my mom socks. She deserves them. Next is something only mildly fiber-related, but I thought it was pretty funny, so you get to see it. Here's a Sweetest's Day card that was clearly made for me:
 Inside it says "I'm sweet on ewe."
And finally, onto the last item of this long, disjointed post (maybe I'm not as caught up on sleep as I thought). At SOAR, there was many a door prize. I, alas, did not win one. But, when Gwen Powell heard of my sad plight, she VERY generously gave me her door prize. She said it was fun to win, but it was even more fun to share. And I totally agree with her. The door prize she gave me was a beautiful spring-green batt of rambouillet-silk from Crystal Creek Fibers that is huge at 2 feet wide and 5 feet long. Much more fiber than I will ever use for a project. So, I thought I'd give away some of it (not all of it, I'm just not as nice as Gwen). If you'd like to win 125 grams of the batt pictured below (I think it is approximately 80% wool, 20% silk), please leave a comment on this post that includes your email address by noon EST on Sunday, October 28, 2007. I will pick a winner at random and send the batt your way. Good luck! 
 
Sunday, October 14, 2007
I am back from SOAR, tired, happy, and tired. It was a wonderful week, full of friends, fiber, and lack of sleep. Also, my brain is officially full. There is no room for new information until I process all of this. I hope nothing too important happens in the next couple of days because it will be summarily forgotten.
I was going to do a post a day starting today with a run-down of what happened each day, but I am not feeling up to doing it justice today. The short story of last Sunday was: get up early, pack the car, drive eight hours, arrive at Shanty Creek exhausted and elated, check into the hotel, be seriously disappointed by our accomodations (a situation which was later remedied), have dinner, meet lots of nice spinners that would become friends over the following week, go to the intro session, stay up way too late because of giddy joy from being at SOAR (!), and finally go to bed. There are a few more details that go in there, of course, but they'll have to wait until I'm coherent. For now, I leave you with pretty pictures of some of my many fiber choices from my workshop, Fiber Prep with Robin Russo.
Tomorrow, it's back to reality. Ugh.
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