Knitting and Stitching Weekend, Birmingham
On Friday five intrepid knitters headed off to Birmingham, braving the current war on moisture* to fly there from Dublin. No problems flying out. You no longer have to take your shoes off through security in Dublin airport. Liquids and ges all fine. In fact, when we arrived we discovered that one of our group (I won’t name names) had accidentally carried a small penknife and a pair of scissors through without being stopped.
On Friday we went to Selfridges, and I shopped like crazy in Paperchase and Whittards, two of my favourite shops. In the evening we ate Japanese:
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On Saturday we headed off to the Knitting and Stitching show.
It was about twice the size of the Dublin show, and even though a very large part of it was dedicated to cross stitch there was plenty to keep us knitters occupied.
In the afternoon I went to a couple of workshops, and when I’ve finished the projects I started there I’ll post them up here, but they don’t look so good as works in progress. It was great fun doing the classes and learning new ideas, and I had excellent company.
We all did a good bit of shopping too, and after the first day this was our haul:
Yes, that’s a double bed.
A hard day’s shopping needed a good dinner, with a delicious dessert of ice cream and fresh mint tea:
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On Sunday it was back to Selfridges for breakfast and some last minute paperchase shopping, then back to the show for more.
My final knitting haul:
Not shown: Fabric, freezer paper and fabric dye, sewing stuff from the workshops, stationery from paperchase and tea from whittards.
After a fantastic weekend we had to head home, so I had to try to cram all my purchases into my rucksack. I did pretty well I thought - my rucksack acted like a tardis and a huge amount went in, but I was left with my shoulder bag and a cloth bag crammed full of yarn and my pajamas (rucksack space had to be used for knitting). With the rucksack safely checked in we braved security. This time we could only take one bag, and no liquids or gels. I had two bags. Hmmm. I spent the queuing time wisely, and crammed all the contents of my shoulder bag into the cloth bag (I have no idea how I managed this, it was jammed full already), and into my pockets (ahh, cargo pants), and voila! One bag. Between the five of us we lost one bottle of hand gel and a lip gloss to the war on moisture, but another one of each were missed**. We almost had bag-size related casualty, but the security supervisor told us that if between the five of us we could cram the extra stuff into our bags until we were round the corner, then take them out again and put them back into the original two bags, he was happy. We managed, and we were happy too.
All in all a wonderful weekend with fantastic company, and a trip that may be repeated some time in the future.
*War on moisture label stolen from BoingBoing
**Note: None of us were intentionally trying to smuggle liquids/too much stuff through - the signage about the arrangements was really inconsistent, and the increased security rules have been relaxed now (from Monday morning, 5 hours after we were going through).
Well done! I’m thinking that you must be related to Houdini the way things kept disappearing into that bag! A great time, I must say! Where to next?
18 Sep 2006 at 2:07 pm
I’m sure that by the time all the blogging is done about the weekend, all the bits will be told. I’m with Cheryl, where to next?
18 Sep 2006 at 9:18 pm
Yes, yes, suishi and mint tea and wool and that but what of the gin?
19 Sep 2006 at 7:11 pm
Wow…look at all your loot! I am jealous…keep on knitting!!
20 Sep 2006 at 5:37 pm
Wow, so much fun and stuff and delicious food. I´d loved to be with you but Germany is too far away. But one day I will join you, watch out! *smile* Well with that stuffing of things into other bags at airports is something that sounds extremely familiar to me too. *sigh* I had a rucksack as big as myself full o´stuff I bought in Japan and so was my suitcase. The same problem with my boyfriend and our other friend. We told the checkin-lady at Narita international airport in Tokyo, who said that their suitcases were too heavy and we would need to pay some 10.000 yen extra, that we will go and send stuff via the airport- postoffice. We actually went around the corner too, both guys transferred some of the heavier items from their suitcases into their bags and then we returned to checkin. Now the suitcases went through easily but both boys needed to pretend their bags are sooooo easy to carry and took them into 2 fingers with a big relaxed smile - only that both carried 20 kilogramms each. This was a hollywood- like scene, I can tell you. *g* Fortunately this was in Febuary 2001 and so they didn´t sceen our bags nor did we have to drink our whole bottles of japanese peach lemonade at the airport or other nonsense.
11 Oct 2006 at 3:03 pm