Anne made me do it

I think where I started to go horribly wrong at the Knitter's Fair was probably when I bought the Japanese stitch books, because they cost a bomb and the only way to justify that is to say Price Doesn't Matter, which is dangerous thinking when surrounded by fiber.

Shortly after that purchase I found myself at a booth where Koigu was on sale.  I've been obsessing about Koigu since I found the sample Minions (that is a link to Heather Sebastian's blog, btw, because everything she designs is obsession-worthy) at PassionKnit, a sort-of-local yarn store, and I couldn't help looking at all the colours in front of me, and drooling.  But honestly.  How do you choose?  And there was a siren call to my right, so I sort of drifted that way and found a lot of super yummy fiber from Briar Rose.  After some agonizing I chose this:

and then hugged it while I walked around the booth some more.  This was another big mistake because when you are hugging fiber you know you are not going to put it back on the hangy-uppy-thingy no matter what other lusciousness you find, and what I mostly found was a big long table of samples I instantly recognized as Anne Hanson's work.

Now, if I had had time to breathe in the previous week I would have kept up with my favourite blogs and known that Anne was going to be at the Shall We Knit? booth and also at the shop later in the week for classes.  I didn't.  So when I looked down and saw a familiar-from-blog-pictures figure getting things out from under the table I said exactly what popped out of my head, which was, "I thought this was a lot of Anne Hanson samples not to have Anne Hanson with them."

Well.  We got chatting, in part about the fiber I was hugging.  Anne seemed to feel that while Blue-Faced Leicester is very nice, I might like the Polwarth even more.  And of course, having spun with both and having just been torn between them two moments before, I said that if she kept up that sort of talk I was going to have to buy both and it would be her fault.   "Let's look at colours!" she said.

Which is how I got this, too.

All that led to more shenanigans with my wallet, but I gotta go, so I'll tell you more about it another day soon.  In the meantime you can read Anne's posting about the Fair - she's got pictures of a lot of what I've described, including part of the magical Viola booth, complete with Emily!

(Emily knit the sweater she's wearing with some of her own yarns of course, in about a million colours - she did even the start and end of the stripe transitions with individual balls of yarn chosen specifically for their gradualness.  It is a fabulous piece of work.)