And so it begins

The hardest part of packing for me is always trying to figure out what knitting I’ll take, and I would like to do while I’m at Sock Summit. Not that I really think that there will be much time for knitting, b but you never know, and I just find it sort of comforting and appropriate to have a sock with me all the time. (Don’t you?) In any case, I thought a lot about what socks to bring. What should you be knitting when you’re meeting Barbara Walker? Maybe one of the stitch patterns from her books? (Which is, by the way, almost all stitch patterns) What if Meg Swansen wants to look at it? What if I find myself knitting near Nancy Bush? I thought I should be knitting one of the teacher’s patterns, but which one, and how could I knit Anna Zilboorgs but not Priscilla Gibson Roberts? Every time I thought about it I got so flipped out that I couldn’t imagine what I would knit. It seemed all loaded, like trying to figure out what to make Julia Child for Dinner or how you would toast Gandhi at a pacifist contest… it was too big. Big enough that after days and days of trying to figure it out and imagine myself knitting on something while they were there, I finally realized that I was about to leave. Really about to get on a plane and go do this, and that I had got myself so flipped out about it that I couldn’t hardly take anything. It had become so charged that all of a sudden it was 15 minutes before Denny and Rachel were picking me up to go to the airport and I had no knitting at all, and I took a deep breath, stepped back and realized in a second that I was overthinking, and I needed to get a grip. (This happens to me a lot lately.)

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Meet my new sock. That’s Tina’s new colourway ST-1, being knit into my plain vanilla sock pattern. How perfect is that? Totally perfect. I’ve hauled it all over the place so far. I started it in the cab yesterday when I was leaving to begin this epic, I knit it on the plane, I knit it while I waited for another plane, and then I knit it on that plane. I did a few rounds on the way to our meetings this morning at the Convention centre…

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Where they are totally starting to set up tables and chairs. (Yes. That makes me feel really really sick.)

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We looked at the empty Marketplace hall, and we looked at the empty lobby where registration will be. (Remember we said “under the dragon boat”? There it is. )

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We saw the empty loading docks where all the vendors will bring in their stuff, and Rachel found a machine that she liked, and they wouldn’t give her permission to drive it. (That’s probably best.)

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Then Tina found a forklift that she really liked, and I know it’s best that they wouldn’t let her drive it, especially since she made “zoom zoom” noises like a four year old when she was sitting on it. She would drive it fast, I tell you that much.

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We rented equipment, we had a very scary “pre-con” meeting where lots of people who were not us had suits on.

We picked up all of the handouts for all of the teachers for all of the classes.

(We know. It’s a lot.) In short, we got it together, and although there were only 4 hours of sleep last night and not a single member of a ST (Sock Team) thinks anything will be different tonight (or in the next 6 days…really) we got a lot done. It’s been a really huge job, but while we’re still writing an appalling number of things on post-its, the jobs we’re scrawling on there are starting to be smaller and smaller, take less and less time and seem more and more doable. I think there’s the tiniest, most misiscule, itsy-bitsy, teeny weeny chance that this is going to be okay.

Still. The sock is pretty freaked out.

(PS. Dye for Glory results are coming. Hang tough.)