A couple of weeks ago I ran into the gals from Blackbird designs at my local needlework shop. They were in town for the wholesale quilt market and stopped in for some shopping because even designers shop!

(I’m the vertically challenges one on the far right).

Then, there was the Stitchers Village (1st annual?) Big Texas Get-Together. We also had company visiting, so I didn’t get to play the whole weekend, but here is some of what I saw:
First, I met the gals for lunch on Saturday – here is Jo of Dinky Dyes presiding:

Then we all went off to 3 Stitches for some shopping (Anita and Chris are serious about their shopping):

Sunday was an Aussie bar-b-que at Jo’s:

Not quite a 360 view, but I didn’t want to stand on the table.
And the indoor group:

Also, the winners from the Needlework Show doorprize were:
Cathey from Canada
Nikki from Michigan
Leigh from Illinois
And Heather from Georgia won the Twitter prize!

I spent part of the weekend printing up orders so prizes and orders should ship out tomorrow (I hope). That’s the unglamourous side of this business – standing in line at the post office!

September 12th found us driving from St. Charles, MO, to Jefferson City. My previous trip to Missouri had been on the edges: driving from Baton Rouge to St. Paul, MN, (that goes along the eastern edge of Missouri), stopping to see the St. Louis Arch, a business trip to Anheuser-Bush in St. Louis, a trip to the SWE conference in Kansas City, and driving from Houston to Iowa (this goes through Kansas City and just a bit of northern Missour). Visiting Jefferson City was my first trip to the interior of Missouri.

They have a strange obsession with Lewis and Clark in Missouri:

The water in this monument contains water from all 21 waterways Lewis and Clark crossed on their way to the Pacific.

Did I mention that I took this stage of the Tour of Missouri?

Ok, not really, but I did get to stand on the podium which was pretty cool.

After seeing the sights, we settled in to watch the finish of the stage:

Yes, I’m in that picture, although it is a bit “Where’s Waldo”. Notice the incline of the street. That’s about 100 meters from the finish line, and the riders did a circuit around the capitol building three times. That’s a pretty killer way to end 100 miles of bike riding!
This is what the race looks like when it goes by:

Seriously, if it isn’t a mountain stage, you get to see the riders for about 10 seconds, so it was nice to have them go by three times!
I managed to get this picture with a couple of big name riders in the middle. Trust me, they’re there.

Getting a flat tire at this stage of the race really sucks – there’s no way to catch back up to the front in time.

It is required to be as noisy as possible when the race goes by, so cowbells and clappers are given out before hand:

After the race, we got to see the Govenor of Missouri (the guy with the microphone), the dude in red is the Lieutenant Govenor, who helped organize the race:

I thought I’d never seen the Texas govenor in person, but I have – he rode at the end of the MS150 a couple of years ago.
Here is a picture of all the race leaders together:

Christian Vande Velde is in yellow, and he goes on to win the race. Mark Cavendish is in green and is winning the sprint competition. The guy in the white jersey is winning the best young rider competition, the guy in red was voted most aggressive rider for the day, and the guy in blue is the King of the Moutains. So there are many ways to “win” a bike race. Also, none of these guys won the stage that day.

On Saturday, the race was ending in St. Charles, mere miles from the hotel where the Needlework Market was. So, we got everything set up and then went and explored St. Charles.
We spotted this in the window of Stitches, Etc.

An actual stitched model of “Ribbons” spotted in the wild! Very exciting!
We also saw this:

Which is at a dog bakery – I’m presuming they make treats for dogs and don’t actually bake the dogs, since we didn’t go inside.
Mark Cavendish won the stage, although George Hincapie made a break for it late to try and take the overall lead from Christian Vane Velde. Winning the stage meant that Cavendish kept the green jersy overall. That probably sounds like a bunch of nonsense if you don’t follow bike racing, but just imagine someone talking about baseball players, football or NASCAR and you get the idea.

I spent the rest of the weekend trying to convince shop owners that Cross Eyed Kat designs are awesome:

I also tried to keep tabs on what was happening in Houston due to the hurricane and I did some stitching on a new design. That new design is part of a new series, and I’m very excited about it. I’m hoping to come out with the first two parts in February. Currently I’m about 25% done with backstitching the border (it has a very intricate border), and I’m probably about 70% overall done with the stitching. I really should keep track of when I start these things – I think I started stitching it in early August, and I’ve had a few interruptions, so it is going much faster than I origianlly thought. Here’s a blurry sneak preview:

Ok, I hope everyone joining from the Needlework Show enjoyed looking at the new designs in the show!

It was rainy when we arrived and while meandering around, we found the lot with all of the team cars. So we hung outside of various buses waiting for autographs. Levi Leipheimer finally came out:

As did George Hincapie:

That’s like hanging out at Pebble Beach and getting an autograph from Tiger Woods before a PGA tour!

After that, we went down to see the race start and all the team cars take off. We toured the expo area set up in Centennial Park. I met the Jelly Belly:

We watched the bike race go by:

I got pictures with two team managers, first Michael Ball of Rock Racing:

And then Jonathan Vaughters of Slipstream Chipotle:

We walked from Centenial Park to Georgia Tech and then back to see the finish sprint. All in all, the trip to Atlanta and the Tour de Georgia was tons of fun and we hope to do it again.

In the meantime, it is just over a week until the start of the Tour de France. Anyone want to join in a 23 day stitch along?

That’s a gen-u-ine Orange County Chopper there, so I’m down with OCC!

Someone came to the blog by searching on “how to knit false seam knitting round” – which means they came by way of these pictures:

I also had a hard time finding information on false (or mock) seams – I finally resorted to my Vogue Ulimate Knitting book. So here are some (hopefully clear) directions from actually doing the false seam:

1. knit in the round until the piece is as long as it needs to be. Technically, you don’t have to be knitting in the round, but as I understand it, false seams are used to do some stabilizing magic on pieces that are knit in the round (and therefore don’t have seams).
2. At the garment mid-point, drop the mid-point stitch. This means take it off the needles and unravel it all the way down to the cast-on edge. Since I was knitting with wool, I had to undo all the purl stitches all the way to the bottom. You will end up with a “ladder” where the undone stitches were.
3. Get out a handy-dandy crochet hook. At the bottom of the ladder, hook two of the ladder stitches together and pull up as if you are fixing the stitch. Then hook one ladder stitch through that loop. Repeat this all the way to the top and then put the last stitch back on the needles. You will have made a vertical column of knit stitches.
4. Rejoice that the false seam is done and don’t think about having to do the one on the other side!

First my dad was in town for a business meeting, which meant we were able to get together Friday night. We stuffed ourselves at our fabulous local Lupe Tortilla’s and had a grand time. Dad had to leave early Saturday, so we waved goodbye and then I went out to Yarntopia to meet Laurie Perry a.k.a. Crazy Aunt Purl! The event was totally awesome (especially since traffic was light, the I-10 overpass wasn’t closed, and I was able to make it into Katy in near-record time). There was food, drinks and alot of yarn. Laurie was very cool and sat and chatted with everyone, signed books, and looked fabulous!

Here’s my obligatory meet the author photo:

I gave Laurie a copy of “With Cat for Comforter” because Mocha and her cat Sobakowa are near twins (both being Tortiseshells).
Here’s Mocha (looking peaceful, but ears are open and she’s ready to strike at a moment’s notice):

Soba can be seen here, along with Crazy Aunt Purl’s other cats.

After the event, I drove back home and even braved the crowds at Walmart to get goodies for the game. We won’t mention anything else about the game. A couple of friends had come over for the game, and afterward, we decided to move the fun to one of their houses. Now, this is Houston, so when I say “He lives across town from us” means that it may technically be in Houston metro area, but might have a different city name and may take 45 minutes or more to get to. We had a fun time hanging out, meeting the kids, and learning about Guitar Hero.

So a recap on Saturday driving: NW Houston to Katy (40 minutes – great time) and back; NW Houston to SW Houston (45 or more minutes with no traffice) and back.

Sunday was a bit more peaceful, and there was more football watching invovled. This enabled me to (1) frame one model of “Nina’s Sampler” (2) finish my virtual booth for the Online Show and (3) learn to do a false seam in knitting.
Here’s the before picture with 5 purl stitches:

And here it is with a knit-looking seam:

Finally, with the warming weather and it really looking like rain, I took a tour of the back yard and found these:

Limes growing on our lime tree! Now, this little tree puts out a bunch of flowers every spring, which then turn into itty-bitty lime looking things shortly thereafter. I go out to check on the progress of the itty-bitty limes a couple of weeks later and they are all gone! I don’t know whether birds get them, or they just die or what. So imagine my surprise when mystery limes show up months later! Maybe there is enough for one glass of limeade.