First off:
THANK YOU ALL, FOR TRAVELING AND VISITING US!
We truly were honored by seeing how many of you came to check out our little shop up here in Fairhaven and it was SO awesome to hear how much you liked the shop and the patterns we came up with for the tour!
This was our first time in the LYS Tour and we really did not know what to expect. We were told it is going to be intense. There will be lots of people. So we thought, ok, lets print 60 patterns….(I was still a bit skeptic, if we really needed that many…HA!)
These last 4 days were the most intense work days I had in a while! It was amazing how many knitters and crocheters came out and participated in the tour! We ended up giving out close to 500 patterns!!!!
The Patterns! I haven’t shown them to you, have I?
Well here they are:
When we first thought about participating in the LYS Tour this year, we thought we should have a pattern for knitters and crocheters. For a while, this is as far as we got. Then we settled on wanting lace shawl patterns. Ok again, for a while, we hovered there. Finally we thought, we should try and make a knitted and a crochet shawl as close to each other as possible. This way, if you are a crocheter and liked the knitting pattern, you will still be able to have it and visa versa! This way nobody will feel left out, or sad, or feel the “other” craft got something unobtainable for them. We do feel very strongly about embracing all kinds of fibre arts and artists and wanted to do our best to express that in our patterns.
So, said and done and there were the shawls not long after. It was such fun to pick out the yarn, design the shawls and knit/crochet them up, trying to imagine how people would like them and what kinds of colours they would choose to work up their sample!
We were done with the sample shawls quite a bit before the Tour started and it was SO hard to keep them a secret and not show them off to people! FINALLY the Tour date rolled around and we got to take the precious out. We decided to hang them on the wall in the shop, so they can be seen from all over easily and if you choose to make them out of yarn differently than the suggested one, you could glance over there and decide which one of the tons of yummy yarns and colours you would like to imagine it in.
We were open until 8 pm on Thursday and Friday and we had two sets of knitters that came in just under the wire on Friday, calling and letting us know they were close and asking if we could stay open just a wee bit longer.
We thought, well if it was us in the car, coming up from down south for several hours drive to check out a yarn shop, we would be super disappointed if we didn’t make it, so we stayed. Can’t disappoint a fellow fibre addict!
We were happy to do it and it turned out the ladies were super awesome and we were happy to get to know them.
I have to say, it was one of my favourite bits of the whole tour! The chatting with fellow fibre enthusiasts! Talking about (and in some cases fondling) the latest project on the needles, discussing what and why one yarn is preferred over the other, checking out favourites and regaling in tales of past projects and past years of the LYS Tour of the knitters/crocheters that came in our shop for the first time ever. This is not to forget our regular friends and neighbours that -of course- also hopped on by this weekend! YOU ROCK, but you already knew that! 
Look! One of our new friends and I! 
I am amazed at the amount of creativity and generosity and happy attitude of fibre folk. I was a bit sad, that I had to “work” that weekend and could not go on the tour myself, but it ended up not being “work” at all. Many of you told us you really liked the shop and the patterns and generally made us feel like a welcome stop on the tour! It was so wonderful! I can really not begin to tell you how great that made us feel! I do hope to see many of you back for a bit more chatting and knitting/crocheting together (or even showing off some of the other projects I have been hearing about, like quilting and weaving and embroidery!!!!). Maybe we can enjoy a spot of tea together and get to know each other a bit more. If we can’t make it, then I do hope to see you again next year and that you at least stay in contact via email! I DO WANT TO SEE THE THINGS YOU KNIT WITH THE YARN YOU GOT! EVERY SINGLE LAST ONE OF THEM!!!!
Another really fun and sweet gesture was that Meg, from NW Handspun and Andrea and her husband, from Apple yarns took time out of their own busy schedules, to come over to our shop and check on us! I guess they remembered their first time on the tour and how hectic it can get. Thanks guys! It was such a nice surprise to see you. The gesture was absolutely appreciated and made us feel such a part of the group!
In recap: Lots of laughter, lots of ooh-ing and aaah-ing, lots of stuff learned, lots of tips swapped, lots of new friends made and A WONDERFUL TIME was had by Callie and me at Mrs. Hudson’s Yarns and Teas in Fairhaven! We hope you had a great time, too, and we are looking forward to welcoming you again!
Thank you, from Callie and me!
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We went to the beach this weekend (I say weekend, but it was Tuesday actually, since that is my “Sunday” at the moment, if that makes sense to anyone lol)
