Toronto!
1. I am tired. Very, very tired. 12+ hour days, most of them spent on a concrete floor, will kick your butt. You have no idea. Then drive home and get back at 1:30 in the morning on top of it…ugh. Each day I would hobble back to the hotel (another tip: don’t think you can go from wearing open-toed shoes all summer back to closed ones just like that…my baby toes are one big blister).
2. I am fruited! (Is that even a word? I’m saying yes). Mel helped me find fresh mangosteen in Chinatown when we went out to dinner with Denny last night. Yay! You can only get them freeze dried here, as far as I can tell, and they are TASTY.
3. I am yarned. Unpacking, I find that the WIPs were taking up as much space as the clothes in my suitcase.
4. I got to see people in person I normally only “see” online… Laura, Denny and the Lettuce Knit gang, Wannietta, Mel, David, etc. And I also met some cool new ones — look at Odile’s felt work (Etsy shop here), I am in awe!
5. Joe from SWTC and I were working a booth together — we technically had 2 booths but we knocked down a wall Berlin-style and just sat together in the middle. Hands down the most popular patterns from the booth were the Therapi Braided Wrap and the Mariposa shawl. The drape on the Mariposa will just make you cry, it is so beautiful.
6. My students were fantastic, and we had a lot of fun.
7. There’s something super-hilarious about spreading out a giant whack of Canadian money on your hotel bed and pretending to be very, very rich when really, those kit fees are just reimbursing you for the huge amount of money you spent on the supplies in the first place. With the increased cost of supplies, believe me I was just breaking even. It’s fun to pretend, though.
And this time I remembered to get rid of my dollar and two-dollar coins before crossing the border. The bank gives you quite a look when you try to exchange them here. In fact, they won’t. If it’s not a paper bill, they don’t want it. I think it would be cool for future shows to set up a “pay your kit fees here with PayPal” page so I don’t have to carry around a giant stack of 20s.
So in short, it was a tiring but fun weekend, and I’m catching up on a lot of email and stuff now… yay!