Evergreen State Fair Photo Album 2011

Who is that cutie in the corner.....stay tuned!

The day started perfectly ~ amazing sunny, summer, DRY weather.  Free parking pass, free admission tickets for us knitters and half price tickets for the tagalongs:

First stop was Barn 500 to look for the Knitwits' entries and see how we did.......holy cow, it was wonderful to have so many people enter that we had a hard time finding our things!! 

HOORAY Washington Fiber Artists ~ what a turnout!!!

Kelli won a 1st Place Blue Ribbon!!!!

...and so did Melissa!!!!

What fun ~ blue ribbons at the State Fair.  How cool is that?!?!

Then it was off to the Knit-In ~ they provided us with a lovely windowed tent in a nice shady spot to sit and knit and visit for 3 hours.  It was great fun to see many from our Snohomish Knitters Guild, meet some new people from the Eastside Guild and run into a friend from my work.  We sat and knit and chatted and ate smoked turkey legs, curly fries and cookies, and had a smashing good time:

The knit-in was over before we knew it and we weren't quite ready to leave, so we strolled around and looked at a few things that we hadn't seen yet:

We had such a great time, from watching the 4H'ers enjoying being part of the fair to witnessing a woman in her 90's participate in the knit-in.  We are already looking forward to next year.

Oh yeah, and thanks, Kelli, for teaching me to knit (I don't think I've mentioned that to you at all in the last couple days!  Ok - maybe 10 times or so but I do mean it!)
~  Melissa

Estonian Knitting

My first official Estonian shawl ~ Miralda's Triangular Shawl ~ from Knitted Lace of Estonia by Nancy Bush.

I used Madelinetosh Lace in 'thyme' on US6 needles and replaced the nupps with size 8 matte metallic khaki seed beeds.  I'm in love........   ~Melissa

Travels

I spent last week in the Adirondack Mountains of NY with this crazy group of relatives:

this is with about a dozen of us munchkins missing from the picture!

It was the best trip ever ~ great flights, a free rental car upgrade, amazing weather (very warm and very little humidity), loads and loads and loads of food, discovered Yuengling Black and Tan (love it!!), got to plan-shop for-cook my first ever meal for 50 (don't ask - it was a lot of work but a lot of fun and the Mexican menu I chose was a hit!), boated, hiked, started to read Walden (Henry David Thoreau...what a great find at the bookstore while we were there...a perfect read for a week at camp in the woods), watched fireworks on the 4th, did a ton of visiting and had some much needed R&R.  I didn't get much knitting done ~ what I did do was mostly on the travel days ~ but I did get to sit outside and knit in the sun:

and then on the covered porch while a typical 10 minute thunderstorm rolled through:

We had a wonderful trip and enjoyed all the great scenery everywhere:

We were sorry to leave but we weren't as sad as my nephew was to be going home yesterday morning:

It was good to get home and see the pup.  It was hard to leave him for a week but he had a great time at Grandma Camp (thanks to Trudy, Sam, Molly and all the neighbors that came to visit him and make sure he wasn't too lonely without us!).  And now it's back to the crummy not-so-summerlike weather of the Pacific Northwest and the grind of work but regardless, it's still always good to come home.  Now I can get some knitting done on my Traveling Miralda...here's the NY portion of my latest WIP:

Madelinetosh Lace in Thyme

I'm loving everything about this project ~ the pattern is challenging and interesting and I love working with this yarn again.  I'm excited to get this one done and blocked (when am I not excited about this?) to see how it looks in a laceweight yarn on bigger needles.  What do you think?

~ Melissa