If you've been reading our blog, you know that we ordered lots of wonderful new yarns at Market in June, and now they have all arrived. To celebrate...and to give you a little taste of what it's like to knit or crochet on them...we have scheduled a Yarn Testing Party on Wednesday, Oct. 18, from 6 to 9.

Yarn Testing combines the best of a cocktail party, a fashion show, wine tasting, and a sit-n-stitch session in one. For just $15 you'll enjoy wine and cheese while you knit on samples of our luxurious new yarns with other yarn fanatics. You'll even get to take your samples home. We'll give you inside information about why and how we chose those yarns, project ideas for them, and there will be special sales available for that night only.

Here's a sampling of a few of the yarns that you'll be testing...

...Inca Cotton, an organic cotton that feels....well, you just have to feel it. Go ahead and hold it close to your heart.


...Soysilk. Yes--it's made of soybeans. It looks and feels like silk, but without the stickiness that makes silk tricky to knit.



Ellen Cooper's yarn--with colors that are so rich, so beautiful in person that they might make you cry.

Space is limited for this fantastic opportunity! Call today to sign up!

Congratulations to Kelsea Jo, who was randomly drawn from the people who correctly guessed "C," that when we told the front desk at our hotel that we never got towels, we came back to the room after dinner to find that we had

9 washcloths, 9 handtowels, and 9 bathtowels for two people. Our review? A good hotel would have just replaced them, but a great hotel will over compensate.

Kelsea Jo will be receiving a $20 gift certificate good toward any of our classes! Congratulations!

And the rest of you: Keep looking for more contests on our blog!

The last post had a chance to win a prize--a $20 gift certificate toward any knitting, quilting, crochet or felting class at Stitch Your Art Out. No one has guessed the correct number of towels yet. Keep those guesses coming! Send your guesses to stitchyourartout at yahoo dot com, and put the word "towels" in your subject line.

As we write this, we're at the Quilt Extravaganza in Harrisburg, PA, as vendors. This show is wonderful. It used to be in Fort Washington, but it was moved here this year. We love the location, we admit. So far, it's our favorite quilt show ever. The show has several groupings of exhibits--an international area...

Here's one from Japan:


and Australia:

(That one is so much better in person. The textures were unspeakably beautiful.)

.....an Altzheimer's area (sorry, no pictures allowed), several places for the different categories of Hoffman 2006 challenge winners (dolls here):

....and several other groupings of artists:

The classes were great (Kim got to take two while Cynthia watched the booth and Kirsten, Amy, and Hildegard watched the store):

(isn't her beginning of a quilt beautiful? This is from Robbi Joy Eklow's class).

....and we were busy in our booth, which had started out like this:

and ended up like this:


And so we have been enjoying ourselves.

We had one thing happen back at the hotel that we just had to take a photo of. We had called the front desk of our hotel and told them that the maid had forgotten towels. They delivered some to us. Guess how many there were when we arrived back at the room:

1. 3 bath towels, 3 hand towels, 3 washcloths.
2. 6 bath towels, 6 hand towels, 6 washcloths.
3. 9 bath towels, 9 hand towels, 9 washcloths.
4. 12 bath towels, 12 hand towels, 12 washcloths.

The winner, selected at random from the pool of correct guesses, gets a $20 gift certificate toward any class at our store. Start guessing. You've got until September 23 at 5:30. Send your guesses to stitchyourartout AT yahoo.com.