Rhinebeck

Whoa... did anyone get the name of that festival that hit me? Before I start blogging, I want to say in my defence that I was under the influence of fiber... I'd like to apologize in advance for any bad/missing photos, forgotten names, and so forth.

First I met Ina (Jersey Knitter) and another blogger, but my head wasn't screwed on right... I didn't get a photo of either with Swatchgrrl, and I forgot the name of the second! Sheesh. Plus I forgot that Ina made the amazing candle tree out of incredibly fine yarn. I was kicking myself several hours later when my brain woke up a bit.

I think we came in a back entrance or something, because the first barn I ended up in was apparently out of the way. I met Amy of Knitty.com, but she was alone, so I couldn't mark my square. (Again, no photo!) There was another blogger who's name and photo I didn't get at the time, but luckily I bumped into him again later.

J kept wandering off to see other things, then coming back to check on me. After a couple of hours, when I had made my way through about three quarters of the barn, he said "you know, there's more barns of yarn like this one." "More?" "Lots more. Let me give you a tour."

He took me briefly into the building labelled "crafts", and explained that it was mostly food, plus some people spinning. "Is that fudge I smell? Do you want fudge?" We left that building with $5 of chocolate fudge. Mmmmm!

"First of all," he said, "if you need to use the ladies room, follow the yellow lines on the pavement." Although I later proved spectacularly bad at following the yellow lines ("Where are you going? The washrooms are this way... follow the line!"), I did get to use the washroom. Both then, and several times later.

"Now I'll show you the marsupials," he said. Marsupials? Aren't those kangaroos, and other things with pouches? Doesn't he realize sheep aren't marsupials? Sure enough, there were marsupials:

There were some non-marsupials there too:

But by now I was able to tell this wasn't all the animals... especially since they were such an odd collection.

Then we headed off to the next wool barn. We passed a man making brooms (neat!) on the way:

This next barn was two levels, and J had to pull me away. "Yarn!" I said. "There are more," he said. "More"? "Yes, more. Many more."

At this point we ran into Togbean:

She's fun! And friendly! And all together and collected, and stuff. She even had stickers to mark herself on other blogger's bingo cards! Some of it wore off onto me, and I managed to get my first photo of Swatchgrrl with a blogger. :)

After this, J frog-stepped me past something like *three* *ROWS* of fiber barns! *whimper!* At the far end I introduced Swatchgrrl to a friendly llama:

And then we hurried over to barn 39 to meet Stitchy:


Okay... to prevent this post from becoming too monsterous, I'm going to break it up into several.