What a week!

It's a bit difficult for me to believe that Friday has finally arrived, and I'm still more or less in one piece (barring my still-injured right hip, but the less said about that, the better). It started with a lovely Mother's Day, marred by bad news (more on that next week), then the build up to a shop update (always tiring), then a lovely trip to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Olympia yesterday, and culminating in a fabulous morning doing a spinning demo at the Campaign for Wool's Wool House exhibit at Somerset House. I'm exhausted!

Since there has been so much this week, I'm going to spread out the events over several posts, otherwise this post will be waaaaay too long. Let's start with the easiest first:

The Spring Knitting and Stitching show at Olympia Kensington, running from 14th-17th March

.

I went to the Ally Pally K&S Show

in October, 2011, but I had an even better time this go around. Maybe it was because I had company, maybe it was because I managed to find some goodies to take home. In any event,

Alli

and I had a fabulous time.

We arrived promptly at 10:00, and headed inside. First up were the quilts. Many, many amazingly fantastic and glorious quilts. Here are a few of my favorites.

Olympia 2013 quilts
Olympia 2013 quilts
Olympia 2013 quilts
Olympia 2013 quilts
Olympia 2013 quilts
Olympia 2013 quilts

More pictures in

this Flickr set

. After the quilts, we did a strategic walk through of the entire show. Which is to say, we wandered up and down the aisles dreamily for a couple of hours.

I first fell off the wagon at the

Textile Garden

button booth. Alli actually wandered off for a while because I was so obsessed. I came home with plenty of buttons for at least 5 sweaters...

Buttons

That's ten buttons each of five different styles.

Buttons

I love the jumping sheep (hello baby sweaters!), and the others are all slated for various sweater designs.

Next falling-down point: a pile of bagged yarn at

Black Sheep Wools

. And Alli actually did fall down in it to reach a particularly fetching shade of red (sadly I was not quick enough on the draw to snap a photo).

Yarn pile!
Yarn pile!

Bags and bags and bags of wool. I ended up with three bags (oops). Two bags of Rowan Wool Silk DK in a lovely pale lilac.

Rowan Wool Silk DK

And one bag of orange (!!!) Luxury Cotton DK - Alli insisted it was my color.

Rowan Luxury Cotton DK

I keep telling myself that my fascination with orange is a recent thing, but

clearly that is not the case

. It might be time for me to actually make myself a freakin' orange sweater just to get it out of my system.

Final purchase: an alpaca dress (!!!!) from Toft Alpacas. No picture taken at the time, but you can see me wearing it today at

Wool House

 and babbling on about my miniSpinner. More on that next post...