Want to get your favorite yarns, fabrics, or notions for the holidays this year? It's easy! Just sign up for our Holiday Wish List!

Here's all you have to do: Stop by the store, and fill out your heart's desires on our form. Put a name and address at the top for where we should send it. Your work is done.

We'll send out a note to your shopper, and we'll have a special shopping night in December for friends and family. That night, we'll cater to them too, to make their shopping experience as easy and quick as possible.

And the happy ending is that everyone will have a great holiday this year!

We'll be open Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday of this week our usual hours of 10:00-5:30, and we'll close only for Thanksgiving Day.

Have a great holiday!

Okay. Here's the scoop. We're having a sale. It lasts for one week, through Saturday, Nov. 18, at 5:30 when we close. We are announcing it only to blog readers. To get your discount, either print this page or write down the specials that you want on a piece of paper, and, when you're buying your sale item, say, "I read your blog!" (Feel free to say that you enjoy it, too.) It is your secret password to get the sale price.

We are having the sale on both knitting/crochet and quilting items, as follows:

KNITTING/CROCHET
All knitting or crochet books, 30% off.
Vibe yarn, 40% off.
Any yarn containing alpaca in any form (Misti Alpaca, Berroco Ultra Alpaca, etc.), 20% off.
Anything else you want, 15% off.

QUILTING
All books, 30% off.
All Robison-Anton thread (great for embroidery and decorative stitching!) 50% off.
All Christmas print fabrics, 40% off.
Anything else you want, 15% off.

Stop by and grab your bargains!

We're back! And we're tired but happy. So we have decided to have a little fun next week. For only those of you who read the blog, we are having a special sale all next week. We will post the details over the weekend. Be sure to read all about it!

Thursday was the first day of Stitches. Setup lasted from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m, and then the market opened at 7:00.

First thing in the morning, Rick Mondragon, the editor of Knitter's Magazine, announced over the loudspeaker that the vendors who turned in their fashion show garments first would have the best outfits to go with the garments. Our garment was not finished being knitted, and so we immediately resigned ourselves to having the ugliest outfit.

But we did have the booth set up by about 1:00 p.m. We were happy with how it looked:


Our mascots, Franco the Flamingo and Hedgie the Hedgehog seemed happy:


(Their tags explain what pattern was used to knit them.) It would have been logical at this point to go back to the hotel and finish knitting the garment. But we had worked on it hard the night before, and it was almost done. We decided that the aquarium would be a little more fun. Besides, our hands were still sore from knitting from the day before. We needed the break--right? We saw all kinds of cool creatures, including puffins:

And a croc, who sat with his mouth open for a long, long time:


Don't worry, the puffin was in another tank.

Around 4:00, we decided we'd better get back and work on the garment, since it was due in at 7:00.

Cynthia and Mare each had been working on half of it:

And at 6:30, it was finished. Cynthia was relieved:

(Okay, we know it was kind of silly to be that dramatic about finishing something that we could have done instead of going to an aquarium. ) We delivered it at 6:43. The XRX staff knew who we were because there was no one else who had not dropped off their garments. We do not have tickets to the fashion show, so fortunately, we will not witness just how ugly the outfit is.

We finally finished up the signs for the Stitches Booth:



We loaded up the trailer:


And the 8-foot grids fit with less than 1 millimeter of space to spare:


And we drove to Baltimore, and we spent Wednesday until 6:00 setting up the booth:


It's not done yet, but we're hoping to finish it up Thursday morning. We spent Wednesday evening knitting on the fashion-show garment, and it looks as if we'll make it, if Kim and Cynthia finish up the booth, while our faithful companion Mare keeps knitting.

We're making progress with Stitches. We are almost finished making signs for the booth. We've been knitting a lot of samples, and lots of them are done, so while Amy watched the store, we had quite an exciting day yesterday, with a trip to the laundrymat to felt:


And then today, Kyle hooked Cynthia's car to Deb and Kyle's trailer:
When she got home, her Kevin helped attach the electrical system. It was a great relief to know that cars behind would be able to see turn signals, brakes, and lights.

Now that we have the use of a trailer, we can load it slowly over the week, and unload it a little more slowly too. At other shows, when we rented a truck, we had to load it and unload it in a single day. It will be nice to have time to think a little more about what we're doing!

Now it's time to go back to knitting. There's a shawl to finish. Two sleeves of a sweater. Several patterns to finish writing. Several signs to finish. A brochure to write. A hedgehog to felt. And our fashion-show garment isn't... well, it isn't started yet. We keep telling ourselves that it's a quick knit and that we have until Friday morning.