Tuesday, June 16, 2009

WWKIP day - awesome!

Saturday, June 13th was World-Wide Knit in Public day. So, Renata and I hosted the 2nd annual picnic at El Dorado Park in Long Beach. It was a great day. We got there around 9:30am and set up the tables and pop-ups with help from Jamie and some others whose names I didn't get (sorry, I'm bad at names). We hung the All Things String banner between 2 trees, and our new banner - which has the WWKIP logo and 'All Things String' on it, from one of the pop-ups. We also had 2 folding signs that Renata designed and I helped make - we used them to point the way to our area.
There was a steady stream of people who started showing up - I think we ended up with over 40 people. Lots of goodies on the table. Denise W. brought her delicious cupcakes - I grabbed the first one.
We had a table set up for 'Free' yarn - anything people wanted to give away, and a table for 'Raffle Prizes'. Renata and I took some skeins from the Free table and moved them to the Raffle table - 4 skeins of Koigu, etc. :-) There were lots of goodies on the Free table - I limited myself to one skein of ribbon yarn in a blue/purple color. At the end of the day there was 1 bag of yarn left that will be passed on to Project Linus.
After the lunch, we had the Mystery Pattern Battle - started with 13 contestants, a few dropped out during the game due to wrong-size needles, yarn trouble, etc. The pattern was for a water-bottle cozy. I think most people had fun with it. We also had 2 spinning speed contests - one for wheels, one for drop spindle. And a speed crochet contest. Denise W. won the Mystery Pattern Battle as the first person finished, I called Gwen as the last one standing since we were running out of time and had to start the raffle.
Sabrina (the 13 year-old knitter) was one of the lucky raffle winners - one of the jugglers had a winning ticket and passed it to her. :-) She also won the fiber and lady-bug spindle - another person lured into spinning. :-)
Towards the end of the raffle, Margo arrived with 2 alpacas - Seven and his little sister. They were so cute.
We packed up and were home by 6:30. I spent the next day recovering. :-)
I got to wear my tiara all day, although I should have been wearing either my sun hat or more sunscreen.
Thanks to all who participated, and extra thanks to Jamie and Abraham for all their help, Melyssa and Su for the name tags and badge holders.
Here's a link to Jan's pictures.