Exciting news

I've been asked to be the featured speaker at the Kitchener-Waterloo (two cities in Ontario) Knitters' Guild on October 8.  This is a huge guild with 180-200 members and as many as 140 people showing up for meetings.  Their theme for the year is Accessories and I will be talking about shawl pins and how to use them.  I've prepared a PowerPoint presentation on the history of shawl pins and then, using my mannequin, I will demonstrate a bunch of different ways to use shawl pins with various types of scarves and shawls.  This should be fun!  Not only are they going to pay me a speaker's fee, but they are going to let me sell my pins after the speech!  Some photos from the PDF I'm going to send folks who sign up for my mailing list:

Retro Pixelated Cane Shawl Pins

I decided to jump on the bandwagon and make something using the Retro Pixelated Cane.  Thanks to Bettina Welker for her tutorial.

Button, button, who's got the button?

I've got the buttons.  Lots of them.  I've been working flat out for the past couple of months building inventory for my very first show, a Knitters Festival.  After that, I'm doing a Fleece Festival.  In both shows I will be selling my shawl pins, buttons and knitting-themed jewelry.  I've also been creating a booth for the shows, making tables and table coverings, making pegboards, and buying grid walls, lamps and other accessories for the booth.  So these are my excuses for not blogging for over a month!

Here are some photos of my booth.  It is set up in my basement so the backgrounds are a bit messy.

Tall revolving Pegboard with bags of buttons.

Big buttons in containers and square buttons on the pegboard.  An Ott Lite for color matching.

The big buttons

Table with shawl pins

Examples of using the shawl pins hanging on the grid wall.

An attempt to get around the "But I don't have a shawl" problem.

My homemade fitted table covering.  I made three of these.

Here is the final design for my beaded shawl pins. 

New Shawl Pin Design

I've been working on a new shawl pin design that will fit through closer knit fabrics.  Here is my first prototype - it resembles a safety pin:

Some things to show off my shawl pins

I've been knitting as well as making things out of polymer clay and metals.  It all started because I needed some things to show off my shawl pins.  Here is a lace shawl knit on my standard gauge machine...

and here is a sweater knit on my bulky gauge machine...

Both are shown on a mannequin -  that's not me!