Just a few more days

Good morning and happy Saturday!

Before our two canine house guests went home last Saturday, we acquired a new foster dog. This new foster dog has a relatively short stay here with us because he gets to go to his forever home tomorrow. This last week has been fun, but it has also been a bit challenging. I had been looking forward to reclaiming my craft room when our friends’ dogs went home, as that is the only room we have space to set up an extra crate. The arrival of foster dog meant that I would have to sacrifice that space for just a little longer. We knew he would only be here about a week, so I was okay with that. I will be able to remove that crate later today.

The pile of stuff in my craft room that has to go up to Easton Mountain for the first North East Fall Men’s Knitting Retreat will get loaded into my car on Wednesday, allowing me to reclaim even more space. I try to make it my goal to bring less stuff home from the retreat with me than I bring there. Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn’t. This year I have all the project bags and some of the stuff for the bags that all of the guys attending the retreat will be taking home with them, so there’s at least one large box of stuff that I will not have to put back in my car on Sunday.

We will have a tag sale table at this retreat, but I pretty much cleaned house before the spring retreat and unloaded everything I was willing to donate to the scholarship fund then. I will still take one last dive through my stash and see if I can come up with anything. I came home with ten skeins of a beautiful black and gray worsted weight yarn from the tag sale table at the spring retreat which was still less than I put on the table.

I will not have a spinning wheel to sell this year, but my brother will. He is parting with the Ashford Traditional that he bought a couple years ago. He has enjoyed spindle spinning, but has struggled with wheel spinning. I am convinced that this wheel, lovely and capable as it is, just isn’t a good fit for him. He has tried my Lendrum too, and maybe we will revisit it again sometime in the future. For now, he has put all spinning on hold and is planning a project for my rigid heddle loom which he brought home from the spring retreat.

Our group field trip on Saturday is to the Adirondack Wool and Arts festival. I don’t think it’s possible to leave a fiber festival empty handed. There have been occasions where I haven’t bought much, but there have also been occasions where I have justified the use of a credit card beyond the usual cash budget I limit myself to, and probably should not have. We will have to wait and see what next weekend brings.

Our knitting retreat begins in just a few more days and I am really looking forward to it. For the remainder of the weekend I will be finishing up a few last minute bits of retreat related things. I need to finish preparing my opening “speech” for the first night, finish outlining the topics to cover in the demonstrations I’ll be presenting, and tidy up a few things here around the house in advance of not being here all next weekend.

That’s all for now. Have a great weekend!