Oh my goodness where do I start? The best thing about the Houston Fiber Fest for me personally were the face-to-face conversations I had with so many folk who are just as passionate about fiber as I am. I could fill several posts with all the wonderful people I met up with and what we spoke about. I will have to limit myself!!
First up was Beth Bower from Inner Loop Dyeworks who had provided me with yarn support for my sock design. How kind! I left samples of my leftover crochet sock at her booth. And yes I am seeing pattern sales on Ravelry appear in my in-box since I released it last week!
Then I visited Karen at Round Table Yarns. She provides yarn support to Karen Whooley who as you may know is one of my favorite crochet designers. I wore one of her shawls Violaceous both days from her latest book "Garden of Shawls".
I had a fascinating conversation with Stacey and Penny at the Brazen Stitchery booth about sock blanks. I'd just found out about these from my friend Claudia in the latest episode of her Crochet Luna Podcast Sock it to me! and I had to buy one to see how it worked up in crochet.
My friend Diane had saved me a seat at the Crochet Meet up Table and there I met my two fellow crochet teachers at the event: Kristi Millsap who was teaching an Introduction to Tunisian Crochet and Carole Fitzgerald who was teaching Crochet Fingerless Gloves. They were both great and we compared notes on what we were teaching.
Jessica from Houston Fiber Friends had arranged a meetup for us too. We sat at a table inside the foyer and shortly afterwards starting shopping together. Yes I did shop as well!! Listening to one of our group, Mel, talk about the joys of spinning led me to purchase a drop spindle!
At the Foggy Hollow Ranch booth, farmer Lynda sold me fiber for my new spindle from Demetri the highland sheep who is not only sweet natured but has fleece that is easy to spin, so I've been told. Fun times ahead!
And finally I just loved my twelve fantastic students at my Crochet Sock Techniques class - they were all sooo lovely, had great crochet skills and worked extremely hard.
Anyway I hope you enjoyed my brief round up. I am now off to the UK this week to visit my family so I'll be taking a little blog holiday for a few weeks. I will return at the end of July. Have a wonderful summer everyone!!
My own pattern The Leftover Crochet Sock is now available for purchase. Please note that if you're searching for it on Ravelry it's called "The Leftover Sock" because the word "crochet" is a keyword. This is what I found out when I submitted my pattern name last week. I'm such a newbie! But I'm still calling it the Leftover Crochet Sock anyway. I launched the pattern this weekend at the Houston Fiber Fest from the Inner Loop Dyeworks booth (lovely Beth at Inner Loop Dyeworks gave me yarn support - beautiful Valentine and Electric Blue sock yarn).
I designed the sock for the class that I taught at the Fiber Fest on Crochet Sock Techniques so that it wasn't just me talking for two hours straight. Although I am sure I could probably ramble on about the back story of my crochet sock addiction for two hours and show them my sock samples and tell them all about the best designers etc......I used some very simple sock techniques in my pattern - short row heels and extended single crochet stitch. It's small and very quick to make. It comes in three sizes: 6-12 months, 1-3 years and 3-5 years. And I've called it the Leftover Crochet Sock because you can use up your leftover sock yarn - if you're anything like me you have leftover yarn and it's a problem!!
I need to say a big thank you to all the people who helped me get this pattern out. There are A LOT of people who go into producing a pattern. First Marie Segares for her Creative Yarn Entrepreneur podcast for telling me the proper way to do things in the Designing and Publishing Patterns mini series... And my super tech editor was Sam of A Simple Melody She was wonderful - and I really thought I'd picked up every little error and typo after reading it a approximately a million times but no - she pointed out a lot of mistakes and also made suggestions. She also checked it again after my test crocheters had tried it out Diane, Ilse and Cat. Diane went above and beyond taking step by step photos for me to give out to my students, without me even asking her to. Diane did get me into all this sock business though - she was the one at my Nimblefingers workshop who said she wanted to learn crochet socks... And then I had to get it looking pretty so Leah made it into a very good looking pdf.
I am running an introductory half price offer on my sock for a month until July 25th - it will be 50% off if you enter the code #houstonfiberfest2017 So if you fancy using up leftover sock yarn, have a little person in mind to make it for and are OK with a written pattern why not try it out and buy now
Hope you have a wonderful week. I'm going to do a write up of the Houston Fiber Fest for next week's blog so be sure to come back then!
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