Whew!!!!!! What a week! I spent all of last week at a conference, which while very informative, was exhausting. I then drove out to Dani’s on Friday night so that we could drive out to Asheville to attend SAFF. It was a lot of fun, but, I am shocked to admit that Dani and I only stayed and shopped for about 2 hours Saturday morning. SAFF is really small, which is great. It allowed us to shop and see everything, and then we could go someplace else and play. And we did just that. After shopping and bringing home a relatively small haul by Mary standards, we explored Asheville. My SAFF purchases:
DragonFly Fiber Designs’ merino lace
Persimmon Tree Farms’ pot luck yarn
Miss Babs’ superwash sport
Dani and I took a spinning class Sunday morning with Julie Wilson, who was an incredible teacher. So, drum roll please…..I give you my first skein of lumpy yarn that I spun:
It looks craptastic, but who cares???? I SPUN IT MYSELF!!!!!! And then I plied it. I really got the hand of it at the end. Of course, the first thing I did when I arrived home was find the local spinning guild and immediately joined. I spin again next week and hopefully I will have a rented wheel that I can practice with until February and the Carolina Alpaca Celebration where I hope to buy a wheel.
Dani and I hit downtown Asheville and visited all the local yarn stores. We both fell in love with Purl’s Yarn Emporium. It was a fantastic store with a great selection and excellent prices. When in Asheville, go there. We also checked out Earth Guild, which was a pretty cool store with lots and lots of crafts supplies and tools.
After exploring Asheville, we headed back to the hotel to rest. I took a 20 minute power nap and then we headed out to the Moose Cafe for dinner. It was AWESOME!!!!! Located right next to the Farmer’s Market, you can taste how fresh the veggies are and the down home cooking was delicious. The portions are huge. I had the meatloaf it was heaven!
Following dinner, we got to exploring more of this part of our state. We headed down to historic downtown Hendersonville, which apparently closes at 5:00pm. Then we drove over the mountains and into the hills to Bat Cave, NC. We were intrigued, so we had to go. We topped the night off by me introducing Dani to the wonders of Ross and World Market. We just browsed and I made mental notes of things I needed to buy.
We had our spinning class Sunday morning. I can’t say enough good things about Julie. She is an amazing instructor and I suspect an incredible human being. Dani and I both really loved spinning and I think Julie just created two new addicts. The drive home was pretty uneventful. I was exhausted and missed the cats. Of course, I got sick. Some sort of stomach thing has invaded my body. I think it may be from exhaustion, but who knows.
I also owe my three readers pictures from the state fair. Here is a teaser, you can find the rest here:
The food at the fair is insane. I mean, off the hook, insane.
October 30, 2007 at 4:25 pm
When you asked me about Asheville recommendations I misunderstood and thought it was for a friend. I didn’t realize you were there too – I sure hope you had fun. It’s my favorite city ever.