Stitches West 2009

It's that time of year again when registration opens up for classes at Stitches West. Every February (usually right on top of Mr Kiwi's birthday), XRX comes to the Santa Clara Convention Center, trailed by knitters from all over California, the entire West coast, and a few of the more inland states. Armed with pointy sticks and string, they descend on the nearest hotels, booking them solid Thursday-Sunday. Any out of town traveler who happens to be at one of these hotels during this time must have quite a shock seeing so many knitters all at once. Lucky for me, I am a mere hour's drive north, and if I cheat and stay at Dad's house in San Jose, I'm even closer. To a first timer, this knitting convention is huge and overwhelming. My first year I couldn't believe that there could be so many booths filled with so much different yarn, patterns, tools, and people. To those who have experienced it before and have had a year to recover, the market place is only half the draw. The other half is getting to take a class to learn or refine a specific skill (or 3).
On Friday, the class brochure came out and I promptly downloaded, printed, and forgot about it. Moday morning I spent a good amount of time trying to decide what class(es) I wanted to take. I wanted something on the weekend (this is a Thurs-Sunday event) so that the easy solution for Little Kiwi would be to have Mr Kiwi stay home with her, however, none of the weekend classes appealed to me enough. The ones with the big draw were on the weekdays. Mr Kiwi so kindly offered to take a vacation day from work to be with Little Kiwi on a weekday so that I could have my fix of knitting heaven.
Last year I treated my mother in law to 2 classes with me (and even with early bird registration, the price added up!). This year, I am taking 1 long class (6 class hours). So, very reminiscent of college and getting our time slot to sign up for classes for the next semester and waiting for the *second* the slot opened to be sure that the desired (or required) classes weren't already full, I got up, searched for the registration page, and got to make my choices. My first choice is a Fair Isle class, and the second is a Pattern Writing class. I should easily get into the Fair Isle one, since I submitted my info 9 minutes after registration opened, and probably not too likely to have been sold out in that time. It's an all day class, so Friday will be spent learning fair isle, knitting, shopping, knitting, having fiber overload, knitting, and fair isle-ing some more.
Only 5 more months, and the knitting sensory overload can begin. :o)