Adventure in a Stairwell

Oooh! This sounds exciting... and maybe scary. Not really. But I came up with that idea while in said stairwell and thinking about Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher and all those other heroes who narrowly escape with their lives Every Time they are being chased. This morning wrote a blog post about being at TNNA. We stayed on the 5th floor of the hotel. On Sunday I had a little extra time before getting to the show and I thought I'd go up to the top floor. After checking out the view from the 26th floor...

...ooops! Turns out its the one that I misidentified in the last post as the view from our room...I decided to take the stairs down. May as well get a little exercise even though gravity would do most of the work. (Notice that I hadn't thought to take the stairs UP!)

I opened the door to the stairwell and there was a guy sitting on the floor facing away from the door. Beard. Backpack. I think that maybe he was writing something. That's all I noticed because I thought that maybe I shouldn't stare or otherwise engage...thinking about those books and movies. I started down the stairs.

Your typical stairwell, although cleaner than some. 8 steps.

8 more steps.

8 more steps. Sometimes at the landing I would make a turn clockwise just to keep from getting too twisted in one direction.

Sometimes I walked back up a flight just for the heck of it.

Things changed when I got to the first floor.

Surprise! Notice the blue barrier at the bottom. There is a swinging gate there. The door to the right...

...is this one. Guess I can't go out there. So I went through the little blue gate.

There were three choices. Go down the next set of stairs or go through one of two doors.

Surprise again! Look at what is in Door #1.

Yes, it's a chandelier among all the pipes.

This was next to Door #2. The door was closed and I didn't open it.

I chose the blue stairs.

Another message of positive thinking. I chose not to go through that door because I kind of thought that I was where I wasn't supposed to be.

Back up the pretty blue stairs...

...to what I recognized and through...

...the door to the second floor.

Uh oh! Do you ever open a door to a stairwell or the back door of a commercial building and wonder if you'll ever get back in? Is that door locked from the other side? In this case I came through the door on the right, but wanted to make sure that the door on the left would really open or I'd be stuck forever in this little room with no window. Before the first door shut completely I made sure that the other door would open.

Whew! I made it into the safety of the hotel.

Please don't judge me. I've told you before that I write blog posts in my mind all the time. You can be thankful that many of them never make it to the keyboard. But now you see how I sometimes amuse myself.

TNNA 2017

Every January I meet up with my long-time friend, Irene, who owns Cotton Clouds, a mail-order business based in Arizona, to go to the Winter Show of The National Needlearts Association. Since I've been going it's been in San Diego (2016 and 2014) or Phoenix (2015 and 2012) or Long Beach (2013 and 2011). This year it was in San Jose, only an hour and a half from here (on a weekend without commute traffic), so Irene flew to Sacramento and spent a few days here before we both drove to the show.

TNNA wasn't the only thing in town on Saturday.

There was plenty of pink visible.

Other colors too. Why does Irene always look more excited in these photos of us together?

Big fat yarns seem to be the new thing this year.

I managed to find a few sheep.

After spending a few hours at the show we checked into our hotel where we had a room on the 5th floor.

This is the view...

...and this is the art work on the wall.

We went back to the convention hall. We had been seeing groups of young (mostly) men (mostly) wearing black (mostly) who were attending something in the convention center but didn't quite fit the demographics of the yarn buyers and sellers. Irene spoke to one group and we found out that they were competing in the Super Smash Brothers Tournament, a Nintendo gaming event (if I'm using the right terminology). It's worth looking at this link for a view into an obsession a little different than the fiber one (maybe takes up less space?) A quote from the article: “For video games you don’t need depth perception at all,” he explains, sounding almost Baudrillardian, “there’s no depth: it’s just right there.” Put in perspective, that quote is from a gamer who is blind in on eye. We may bring out fiber swatches and knitting needles. They bring their own controllers.

Back to the Fiber Hall.

I love how this sign was made.

Very clever.

I like the look of this fabric...

...woven on this loom which I have in the shop and eventually on the website.

We talked with a lot of vendors. This is Francis Chester-Cestari who has sheep and a fiber mill in Virginia and promotes American grown fiber. Irene is looking at some of his U.S. grown cotton. Notice the book on his table. That's his memoir.

I didn't come away from this show with all the new products that I usually do, although I do have some lotion bars with sheep on them (see photo in one of the collections above). There weren't as many vendors and I really don't need more yarn. What  I need is a better way to market what I already have before adding more. So my investment this year is a new modern website! You'll be hearing more about that in a month or so.