Anyway. This weekend I have mostly been travelling on the Bakerloo Line (or the Brown One, as I know I'm not supposed to think of it). I'd allowed about an hour to get to Olympia on Saturday morning and the plan went well until I got to Earl's Court, panicked that there might not be a train in time and bought a massive A to Z so I could find Olympia myself. So my best-laid plans for travelling very light were a little dented.
The queue at the Stitch & Craft show was on a surprisingly epic scale and quite chaotic, though I did find myself behind a woman with a lovely entrelac coat that I would very much like to find the pattern for.
I did quite a bit of fretting about whether I'd get inside before the workshop began but only because I'd convinced myself that it was starting at 10. Once I was inside and realised it was actually 10:30, I had enough time for a very quick exploration of the venue. Good job too, because it was packed before long. I'd hoped to get a photo of the sheer scale of the event but I never found a good vantage point.
The ground floor was mostly fabric and miscellaneous. The basement was workshops and card making. By 10:25 I'd only found two yarn stalls and I was beginning to worry that I might have planned a whole weekend in London in order to get only acrylic and generic brand yarn.
Fortunately I was proved wrong when I followed some slightly lost-looking people to the second floor and the extensive "Knitting Zone". With only a couple of minutes before I had to dash back down to the basement, I did a super-quick loop of the stalls frantically stroking exotic yarn and trying to work out how not to blow all my money in one place.
When I got to the Colour Wheel Workshop I'll admit that I was a little disappointed to discover that it mostly involved sticking bits of fabric to card. But, once we'd done our cutting and sticking, we moved on to colours that work together.
I've never really understood colour and I'd hoped that this might help. To a certain extent, it did but there was also a fair bit of: "...and if you take these three and add in the colour opposite on the wheel, see how it really works?" And I didn't. But maybe I'll never really get it.
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| Apparently this combination really works well. I'm not convinced. |
Following the workshop, I pushed my way through the packed crowd of crafters and headed back upstairs. I was particularly keen to find Nimu Yarns and any other smaller-scale producers/dyers. In the end I gave up searching and forked out an utterly ridiculous £4 for the show catalogue only to find Nimu right next to a stand I'd been to three times already.
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| A knitted village. Obviously. I suspect crazy challenges like this might be why non-knitters think we're a bit strange. |
I refuse to add up exactly how much I ended up spending but I do know that I set a new record for how much I'm willing to pay for a skein when I succumbed to some stunning yarn called Pixie Dust from Yarn Collage.
I'm going to have to wait for some good daylight to get some proper pictures because only natural light will do justice to most of my purchases. In the end I came home with:
- Colinette Roving (because I'd like to try some felting)
- Nimu Blea Lace (beautiful coloured laceweight silk)
- Nimu Sizergh (because I'm just not happy with my plans for the current skein I've got)
- Yarn Collage Pixie Dust
- A beautiful button made from the bowl of a silver spoon (Stealth bunny!)
- Fabric for a new knitting bag
In addition to all the yarn on the second floor, there was also an exhibition of quilts but that'll have to wait for another post.
All in all, Saturday was a great day and it ended with suitably large quantities of sushi. I only wish I hadn't spent several hours extremely preoccupied by the fact that I'd entirely forgotten the word "demographic".
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