Our preparation for Stitches East continued. We took an afternoon "off," and went to Wegman's to work. (Hey, big corporations have offsite retreats. There must be something to it.) Cynthia's mother kindly watched the shop. We wanted to have an unbroken stretch of time to think about our booth.

For this meeting, we decided to think about three main things:

1. How will we describe our fashion-show garment?
2. What yarns do we want to take?
3. How do we want to lay out our booth?

Fashion Show Garment
We started with the garment when we were freshest. And because the deadline was ... well, that day. It absolutely had to get done. We are making a shrug out of Crystal Palace yarns, as you know from the last Stitches entry. We needed to find a name for it, and then to describe it for the fashion-show booklet.

First, we described it. We decided to use the names of some of the yarns (Splash, Party, and Stardust) as a play on words in the description. We wanted people to know that this was a quick knit. We also wanted them to know that it would look good on them, and that we had a bunch of colors to choose from. After much revision, we finalized our copy:

"Make a Splash at your next Party, as you dance under the Stardust in this quick-to-knit Kimono shrug. Random stripes of Crystal Palace yarns create a flowing silhouette to flatter any figure. Choose from one of five colorways to suit your spirit!" A little corny, but fun. We liked it. So if you go to Stitches East and are at the Friday night fashion show, you will see this description in your program booklet.

Now we needed to come up with a catchy title for the garment. What would describe it? Somehow, this was harder. The brainstorming began:

The Intuitive Shrug.
The Western Kimono.
Waves of Texture.
Flow.
Soul.
Spirited.
The Spirited Wrap.
Spirit of the Kimono. (This one was the best so far, but it did not match the spirit of our description even slightly. We did not want to rewrite our description, so it was rejected.)
A Knitter's Kimono.
Wings.
Wings of Sleeves.
The Dancer's Co... No.
Soul.
Spirited.
A Spirited Kimono. Hmmmm....

We finally settled on "A Spirited Kimono." We liked the idea of the Kimono being spirited, and we liked how the word "spirit" can be either ethereal or fun. Time was pressing, so we went with it and moved on to booth planning.

Yarns to Take
That was easiest. We took the list of all our yarns, figured out which were the most show-worthy, and which ones of those we had already made samples from. These yarns included Berroco's Hip Hop, Cherry Tree Hill's Oceania, Manos Del Uraguay wool, Mountain Colors Bearfoot (along with other sock yarns), and many others. We also wanted some fun things, like bags, socks, pins, and other goodies.

Layout
Then we had to figure out how to lay out the booth. We calculated how many bins the yarn would take up and how much would hang. It was time to make a layout. We had brought paper and scissors, but not a ruler. Since we were at Wegman's, Cynthia ran over and bought one. When she got back, we looked at our papers and realized that we needed tape too. Some days it would be nice to be able to think more than 1 second ahead.

Kim ran and got tape. The cashier said to her, "This is getting really strange. About 10 minutes ago, I had a ruler come through here."

After an hour or so of playing around, we had a booth layout, thus:


Yes, we know. It's hard to believe that a few taped-down pink squares that look as if they were made by a second-grader could actually take a full hour. But keep in mind that as we worked with the paper, scissors, ruler, and tape, we were mentally placing all the yarn into bins, making sure that we had enough planned for the amount of yarn we wanted to bring along. Unless you are a large store, booths are only 10 x 10, which is a very small amount of space to work with. You have to plan what to do with each corner. On paper the booth looks huge in the center, but in reality, there's probably only room for a few people to stand comfortably.

We're still trying to decide whether we want to decorate the booth with any special theme at this point. Probably the deciding factor will be how much time we have to devote to (1) thinking of the theme and more importantly (2) executing the theme. We tried one theme for another show, and it looked stupid. (Warning: Do not attempt to cut out colored paper and tape it to popsicle sticks with any hope that this will resemble lolipops.)