Newly designed SweetGeorgia Yarns booth for Knit City 2014
Just into its third year of existence, Knit City has grown so big so fast and it’s a testament to how desperately Vancouver knitters crave their yarns, fibres, and community. Having outgrown the Croatian Cultural Centre, this year’s Knit City was hosted at the PNE Forum. Wider aisles, more space, real windows and daylight, and many, many classrooms… this year everything felt all new and like we were starting from scratch.
Being this year’s Qiviut sponsor, we had the opportunity to have our booth space at the front of the hall near the entrance. Learning from last year (where our booth was too small to fit everybody, including our staff), we opted to go for a larger space and had to figure out how to configure a brand new booth. Another challenge we had this year was that Hubert and Teresa (and their super humongous minivan) were out of town on some much needed and well-deserved holidays during the weekend, so we had to figure out how to get all our stuff to the PNE. Three SUVs seemed to do the trick!
This year, we chose to dye everything specifically and intentionally for our booth. This way, we could offer full dye lots of yarns to everyone so that they could make sweaters rather than having only a few skeins of each colour to pick from. Thank you to Hubert, Teresa, and David for ensuring that all these yarns were perfectly, freshly dyed for the show. Hopefully this went over well. It made our booth look quite pretty though and hopefully a bit like a little yarn shop!
The first hour of the first day of Knit City was craaazy busy and we heard that people were lined up all down the side of the building, waiting to get in. Who knew Vancouver had so many yarn-hungry knitters?
Opening Day at Knit City!
We have the best crew of the most fabulous souls. Channa, Liisa, David, Ginny, and Danni spent much of the week and weekend preparing to get everything ready for the booth and they are still smiling, come Sunday!
One of the best things about the annual Knit City weekend is that we get a chance to actually chat with our knitting and fibre friends, both old and new. On Friday night, I got to meet one of our Club members, Leah Churchley and her husband at the party and then on Saturday she came to visit us wearing her new Jet Set Cowl. She is all caught up with her Club knitting and this cowl was knit up in our September colourway “Bluebird Café”. Both the cowl and Leah look amazing — what a great smile!
Leah Churchley in her Jet Set Cowl knit in SweetGeorgia’s September Club Colourway “Bluebird Café”
Grace came by to visit us too! Very, very sadly, Grace returned to her old industry in animation and had to leave SweetGeorgia earlier this summer, but we are super thrilled that she has been our Spinzilla team captain and still keeping in touch with us. Miss you, Grace!
Liisa and Grace, reunited at Knit City!
While we had some great highs and excitement for the party and Knit City, it meant that we missed spending much time with baby Russell during the entire week. Thank God for grandparents. Seriously. To have a clean, safe place for him to play every day and loving grandparents to spoil him all week, we feel unbelievably blessed. But, we were also eager to spend some time with Russell and bring him to part of Sunday at Knit City. Russell had other ideas…
Russell had a rough start to Sunday morning…
The baby woke up at 6:45 am on Sunday morning and within 15 minutes of waking, managed to tumble onto the side of the bed and cut the side of his eyelid. Of course, he cried right away and I went to pick him up, seeing one… two… drops of blood drip onto his foot… and then I saw soooo much blood on the side of his face, I freeeeaaaked out. Being the new and inexperienced parents we are, we whisked him to the ER while I called Ginny to ask her to cover for me. Ginny graciously and wonderfully filled in for me without a hesitation. Bless her soul. And after waiting for an hour to see a doctor, he whipped off Russell’s bandaid and said, “meh, that’s nothing. He just needs a bandaid.” I think we were more traumatized than the baby was… but oh so thankful that the injury wasn’t worse!
Despite the unexpected trip to the hospital, the weekend went surprisingly smoothly and we were happy to be a part of Knit City. Thanks to Amanda and Fiona for organizing such an amazing annual event. It can’t be easy, given that both are mothers, wives, and also prolific knitters. This community of Vancouver knitters are so much better for having these great organizers and this wonderful event!
