You know you’re an obsessed Knitter when you travel 20 hours one way for a Knitting Festival.

Debs and I are back from our whirlwind trip to San Francisco and Stitches West.

The Back Story is I lived in SF eight years ago and at that time I went to my first Stitches West. Not knowing just how large a show it was, and being particularly new to my obsession, I only had about 3 hours at the market itself. Since then I have vowed to return.

And return I did. I managed to convince another Richmond Knitter, Debs, that this was a most worthwhile trip. Enter the shopping partner and enabler!

The standard question from stall holders at the market (upon hearing the accent), did you come all this way for this? Yes, yes we did (well it was the main reason).

Here’s a few photos of our time at the show.

Here we are right before visiting the market on Thursday night, market preview night.

We were quite the fangirls, meeting lots of Knitting Royalty and having our ‘selfies’ taken with them.

From left: Jane Richmond, Me, Shannon Cook, Jill Draper

Here I am after my fabulous class with Anna Zilboorg. More on that on my personal blog soon.

Debs with Hilary Smith Callis

Here we are having a blast with Stephen West and StevenBe

I also took the opportunity to try on a few of Stephen’s designs:

I really like this second one, it’s called Lost and Found and is a new design on Rav. Knit-along anyone?

Debs with Jane and Shannon again! We kept running into these girls, there was lots of laughter and fun.

And I met Romi on preview night. Wow, she was sooooo… nice. I’m pretty excited to be participating in her mystery knit-along held with a Verb for Keeping warm.

Here’s the yarn I chose for my project:

A fun photo with Jill, whilst she was helping pick out a colour for a sweater project.

I tried on Hannah Fettig’s ‘Contented Cardigan’ at Alana Dakos’ Never Not Knitting Stand. I’m totally making this. I also had my photo taken with Alana (and let her know about the several ‘Little Oak’ cardigans that have been made by Richmond Knitters), which I think you’ll find on Debs Instagram feed…

That’s about it for our Stitches West experience (apart from the truck-load of yarn I’ve come home with!). It was amazing, totally worth it, and I guess you had to be there to appreciate the excitement!

I’ll be writing a series of posts on my blog over the next week or so to re-cap aspects of our trip, starting with my Stitches West Loot! If you haven’t already you can also check out our Instagram Feed for my pictures from our trip.