Hi, All! All Kinds of Updates

It's a Saturday morning, and I have my coffee and the weekend break from my busy office. 

Well, I haven't blogged in just a little while, and yes, I did miss y'all.  Here's what I've been up to -

I was very excited to finish "Best Baby Blankets," which I featured on this blog.  Initial sales are good, as is early feedback.  I did a "baker's dozen" really good baby blanket patterns, with lots of gauges (bulky, mid-gauge, standard), ways to use scraps, and new techniques and time-savers.  I had to finish this sucker - John was after me to have it done, because at seminar, people were picking up the multicolor tuck stitch blanket made from scraps and asking for the book!

Last weekend I taught at the Fingerlakes Machine Knitting seminar in Cortland, New York.  They hold a big seminar at a nice hotel and a good-sized crowd of knitters attend.   I believe everyone, from beginners to wizards, felt welcome and had a good time.  Charlene Shafer, Michael Becker, and I taught, plus they had a study group working through Cheryl Jiles' videos.  I keep telling ya, if you haven't attended a machine knitting seminar you are missing something wonderful!

Highlights of the seminar for me: 

• An INCREDIBLE people's choice fashion show with so many entries and so many professional-looking items, that it was hard to vote.  An extremely talented beginner, Francis, won second prize for a gorgeous light green sweater with a lace yoke. 
• Raffles and prizes for knitters.
• Incredible shopping - lots of terrific yarn, a bunch of nice machines for sale, and plenty of hard-to-find machine knitting tools and accessories.
• Hanging out with some of my favorite knitters.

On Sunday afternoon, after the seminar was finished, John and I got into our rented car and headed for Niagara Falls, which I had never seen before.

Now, you have to understand, our kids call John the "Uber Tourist," because he has to go everywhere possible and see everything possible when we travel.  Of course, we went up the Cave of the Wind decks on the side of the falls and got soaked!  Of course we rode in the Maid of the Mist boat right up to the middle of Horseshoe Falls.  Of course, we stood in the front of the boat and got drenched!

I am very happy to report that now that I'm slim, I was able to hike all over at Niagara Falls, have lots of energy and no pain in my feet!  It was a beautiful, sunny day, and I did get a pink nose.  Read about me getting slim here, and if you want more info, email me (there's an email icon on the left-hand side of this blog, but scroll down a ways). 

We hurried to the airport to catch a flight home and got caught up in that air traffic control problem where nothing was getting through Chicago.  Our plane, which came from Chicago, arrived almost three hours late, but John and I got lucky.  Our flight home, which was a two-hopper, Rochester to Baltimore and then Baltimore to Austin, did not involve a change of airplanes.  Most of the other passengers got off in Baltimore and had no connecting flight because of the mess.  They had to spend what was left of the night in Baltimore and fly out in the morning. 

John and I had dinner with one of our church's pastors, John Harrington and his wife Angela, this week and talked about Hill Country Bible Church's new project, "One Mission."  This excites me tremendously, because we are going to reach a whole lot more people in our growing city, plus Christ Together network (churches with different denominations in big cities teaming up to promote the gospel), and also to support global outreach.  Our fellowship has gotten humongous, so one of the big ideas here is to have "satellite" fellowships, that is, churches in local neighborhoods with their own staffs but who worship with us. 

John and Angela are also our bus leaders on the Holy Land trip John and I are taking in December. I have always, always, wanted to visit Israel.

In October, a group of us Austin knitters are going to the Dallas-Ft. Worth knit seminar, always terrific, where Ileen Levy is teaching.  There might still be room, knitters - I don't know, but you can easily find out here.

In November, my buddy Barbara Deike and I are arranging to demonstrate machines all day Saturday at the Kid 'n Ewe fiber fair in Boerne, Texas.  This big event, held in the country at a county fair facility, has spinning, weaving, dyeing, knitting, etc., plus those fiber critters like alpacas, angora bunnies, mohair goats and sheep.  Mr. Stotts of Stotts Ranch is going to show his incredible mohair, and ol' Diana here has treated herself to a gorgeous two-pound cone of the lace weight stuff in a lovely cream color.  Mr. Stotts helped set up the demo opportunity for us Knit Natters. Believe it or not, his super-high-grade mohair is soft as a kitty.  I learned from Mr. Stotts that mohair is graded according to the size of the hair, in microns, and his goats have the really thin, silky stuff.  He even gave me some adorable goat pix.

Ah, too much running around and not enough time to knit...I intend to fix that this weekend!