My inner Yankee is curled up in a ball in the corner of a dark room, whimpering
As the days hurtle by towards 21 September, Allison and I have been spending a lot of time trying to pull together some cool schwag for those brave folks who will be joining us on the Great London Yarn Crawl. And as she is currently on the North American continent, much of the recent outreach for donations over the past week has fallen to me.
This is, quite possibly, my worst nightmare. Ask people for things? People I don't know? You mean, send them an email completely out of the blue asking them to give me, some faceless Internet stranger, something for free? It gives me heart palpitations just thinking about it. This is so far outside my comfort zone, that I have managed to procrastinate for a surprising amount of time on some of these emails, only to be goaded on by Alli sending messages saying "Have you heard back from So-and-so yet?"
But here's the very cool thing I'm finding: for the most part, people are happy to help out, and very often quite pleased to be asked. It's such a lovely surprise to email one of my super-dooper fan-girl knitware designer crushes and have her agree to send us a signed book for a door prize. It's fantastic to email a local designer and have her offer to give us pattern coupons for the goody bags AND donate a pattern for a door prize. It's a serious thrill to see people getting excited about the event.
All of this is balm to my wounded knitter/dyer psyche because I've had a bit of a set back on that front of late. I've been working on a sweater, using some lovely Green Mountain Spinnery sock yarn I dyed a while back. At the time, I was paranoid about dyelots, so I did all the skeins at the same time, and felt pretty confident that I'd managed to get them close enough.
Except, well, no:
And in case it isn't glaringly obvious from that shot:
Excuse my French, but fuck me. And having slogged though the entire stockinette back of this project, my enthusiasm for ripping out and alternating rows to blend the yarns, or trying one of the other skeins to see if it works better is non-existent. This puppy is going on the naughty step for the forseeable future, and I'm starting something new. Something reasonable. Like a lace shawl...
This is, quite possibly, my worst nightmare. Ask people for things? People I don't know? You mean, send them an email completely out of the blue asking them to give me, some faceless Internet stranger, something for free? It gives me heart palpitations just thinking about it. This is so far outside my comfort zone, that I have managed to procrastinate for a surprising amount of time on some of these emails, only to be goaded on by Alli sending messages saying "Have you heard back from So-and-so yet?"
But here's the very cool thing I'm finding: for the most part, people are happy to help out, and very often quite pleased to be asked. It's such a lovely surprise to email one of my super-dooper fan-girl knitware designer crushes and have her agree to send us a signed book for a door prize. It's fantastic to email a local designer and have her offer to give us pattern coupons for the goody bags AND donate a pattern for a door prize. It's a serious thrill to see people getting excited about the event.
All of this is balm to my wounded knitter/dyer psyche because I've had a bit of a set back on that front of late. I've been working on a sweater, using some lovely Green Mountain Spinnery sock yarn I dyed a while back. At the time, I was paranoid about dyelots, so I did all the skeins at the same time, and felt pretty confident that I'd managed to get them close enough.
Except, well, no:
And in case it isn't glaringly obvious from that shot:
Excuse my French, but fuck me. And having slogged though the entire stockinette back of this project, my enthusiasm for ripping out and alternating rows to blend the yarns, or trying one of the other skeins to see if it works better is non-existent. This puppy is going on the naughty step for the forseeable future, and I'm starting something new. Something reasonable. Like a lace shawl...