First Day at Shelter Valley

Going to make this brief because it's almost midnight & I have to be back out at the festival site tomorrow morning before 9am!

Today was the first day of the Shelter Valley Folk Festival and this year my Mom & I are volunteering and attending this local festival.

My role as a festival volunteer is parking, directing people where to park and helping them back to their cars after dark. It went well today although it was stinking humid and very hot out in the sun in the middle of the parking lot for my 1-5pm shift today.

I have to say though, Shelter Valley knows how to treat their volunteers! Upon registration you get a t-shirt, a meal ticket for all meals over the weekend and if you choose to, a camping spot on site. And the food is amazing!! Today's meals were pasta salad and pizza for lunch and chili, cornbread and assorted salads for dinner, so very tasty!

My view for much of my 4 hrs parking looked like this:

After parking I headed over to dinner and then up to the main stage where the show had already started.

Layah Jane started us off with a great voice & an amazing guitarist (I think his name was Oliver Robertson?)

Donne Roberts was up next with his band (drummer was a lot of fun! Whole drum set was hand drums, no drum sticks!) and some music inspired by the folk music of his native Madagascar. During this set we started to get some rain, you could tell by the way the whole audience collectively reached for their tarps/umbrellas/raincoats/ponchos/etc!

Then there was a lovely introduction for the guitar maker, guitarist and singer Grit Laskin, but just as he was about to start, the artistic director of the festival came on stage and warned us all that there was an intense, but small, thunderstorm cell headed our way and advised us that they were shutting down the main stage for a bit and that we should all head to our cars. We were lucky and for the most part the storm passed to the south of us and we were in the clear, but we did have about a half hour delay. Grit boasted when he got back on stage that when he took the stage the whole audience stood up and left! The humour was appreciated by those of us who had waited out the storm!

Grit went on to play a wonderful set, with a few guests, playing the guitar, mandolin and squeeze box. His fingers seemed to fly over the strings of his guitar!

Oh Susanna was on next, she was one of the acts of the night I was really looking forward too. I wasn't hugely impressed by her set, but I'll be searching her out in workshops tomorrow, sometimes I prefer the artists in the smaller stage settings than headlining the main stage. Her comment about this festival was that she seems to have been type-cast, singing in workshops with names such as 'Love Does Not Conquer All' and 'Death Becomes Her', so she was "going to play to type tonight & proceeded to sing us a song about heartbreak and death, rock on!"

I knew Mom's shift was over in the middle of Oh Susanna's set and so went out to find her after. Note for the future: set a meeting place if you're going to be trying to find someone in a large crowd of people in the dark! I did find her and went on to watch Karen Savoca & Pete Heitzman with her, neither of us were super impressed with them, but they seemed to be a crowd favourite.

Next on stage was Royal Wood, who I have seen last year at Home County Folk Festival and really enjoyed. His set was really good & I'm excited to see him again tomorrow.

Headlining the night was Ron Hynes, who is amazing. We decided though that since the show was running late and we have to be there bright and early tomorrow morning and we would be stuck in the parking lot if we stayed to the end, to call it a night before Ron Hynes finished, which is too bad, but we're exhausted and it's only day one!

Did I mention bright & early tomorrow morning? Yes, I'm booked in to work parking 9am-1pm and then again(!) from 9pm-midnight so tomorrow will be a long day! Also planning on heading over early because there is breakfast for the volunteers & apparently the scones are to die for... we'll see :)

People I'm very much looking forward to seeing tomorrow are Chic Gamine & Luke Doucet, I've been told I also must make a point to catch Eliza Gilkyson, who I haven't heard of but now I'm intrigued!

Probably no post tomorrow night (because of above shifts!) but hopefully one to wrap up the weekend!

Stitch & Pitch at the Blue Jays!!

Earlier this summer my brother had been complaining that he had never been to see a Jays game, my response? "I'll go with you but we have to go to the Stitch n Pitch game" (expecting really to be going by myself or with Mom who I've been able to drag along before), imagine my surprise when not only did he say sure, but my Dad piped up and said get 4 tickets, we'll all go. So Wednesday night found us working our way downtown Toronto to the Skydome (bite me Rogers, it will always be the Skydome!) to sit in the only sold out sections of the stadium, the Stitch n Pitch sections!!




Brother at the baseball game

Stitch n Pitch is an event organized by TNNA (The National Needlearts Association) with major and minor league baseball teams across the United States - and the Blue Jays!! (Find one near you!)



They stick the knitters up in the 200 level in the outfield where we can sit and knit (or crochet) without fear of being hit in the head with a ball. There were over 500 of us there! Even Ace (the mascot) came up to visit us, wearing a scarf knit by one of the knitters and presented to him on the field at the beginning of the game.



The game was great, they were playing the Seattle Mariners and we were sitting right behind Ichiro, who having lived in Japan for a year I think is really neat!! The Jays got 3 home runs and beat the Mariners 11-6.
Despite being brutally hot outside, once sitting in the dome in the shade with the roof open there was a lovely breeze and it was great to sit there, enjoy the baseball game and knit!


The sock at the game

One of the best parts of going to Stitch n Pitch are the goody bags & taking 3 non-knitters with me, I ended up with 4 of them!



They all had the same yarn, so now I have enough purple/white yarn to make someone a sweater :)



We also got samples of Eucalan wool wash and coupons to use at the stores that had sponsored the game.



Not only did they do goody bags this year, but there were prizes on various seats throughout our section & I scored 2 of them! This lovely BFL yarn from Two Sisters Stringworks and a copy of the Yarn Harlots book 'At Knit's End' which I have been meaning to buy, so bonus!




At the end of the day though, the game was awesome and I am totally looking forward to next year's Stitch n Pitch!!



And for the record, this is how much sock you can knit during a baseball game:

SNOW!!

Hey,

So I haven't been here for awhile, blame pneumonia, work, school, final exams and pneumonia again!

I'm DONE university!!! I wrote my last exam yesterday morning and am so thrilled to be finished, but am now packing up like mad since I'm moving home tomorrow....

But, this just had to be blogged about. Yesterday it was sunny, warm, 17*C outside. I went out to lunch with friends and we sat on the patio, I was worried about getting sun burnt and I even put on sunscreen. At 9:30 at night I walked home with just a sweater, no jacket, and I was fine!

Today however, today is a different story. This is the view out my window this morning:

... yeah... It's hovering around 0, and nothing's staying on the ground, but it has been steadily snowing for more than 6 hours now, on April 26th, after being 17*C out yesterday... Wow.

Drive-by blogging

- Sweater finished, Olympics finish line crossed, details/pics hopefully to follow next week

- no new projects yet, still working on ill-fated sock design, again... new sweater idea percolating

- midterm this afternoon in Financial Statement Analysis, probably not going to go all that well

- catching a train home tomorrow morning for Dad's retirement do on Friday then back to Montreal Friday night for Special Olympic Curling Provincials Sat-Sun

- so far behind on homework it's not funny

- wish I'd done some reading during reading week instead of just watching the Olympics, but man, weren't they awesome?!

Ok, off for last minute cramming and procrastination :)

Halfway...

Or not so much...

I was going to have a great post here tonight about how my sweater has been going pretty good (besides a misplaced set of side decreases we won't mention), however...

instead I tried on my sweater and came up with this:

Yep, for a sweater supposed to have 0 ease, it's looking pretty big, too big.

I remeasured gauge and my gauge is spot on which sucks, because in my swatch it was smaller, so I did the math and cast on a size bigger, now I need to readjust to about 2 sizes smaller. I was checking my gauge throughout and always got the same as I had when swatching so maybe I need to check my tape measure.

But AAUGGHHHHHH!?!?!? what a set back to have. I'm going to sit down with it tonight and see what I can fudge. I'm not going to rip out the hem (drama with that I don't want to talk about either, let's just say Olympics is not spelt Oylmpics...) because I can't bring myself to, and also the hips fit fairly well, but hopefully play around with the decreases to get a different size from the waist up. Going to take a glass of wine or two to bring myself to rip it out though...

But tomorrow I get on a train and am going home for reading week, so no classes, no work to interfere with knitting (just a midterm the week after I need to study for), so who knows? Maybe I can still pull this off!