The Florida Fiber-In 2014

OK; ya’ll get the unedited version; I’m going to post a slightly cleaner (no f-bomb) version on my work blog tomorrow.

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I was so busy the whole weekend I didn’t have a lot of time to whip out my camera; I think this is the least number of photos I’ve ever taken at Fiber-In.

Thursday night our living room looked like this:

Yes, we are watching Buffy; I’ve never seen the whole thing (more like one episode per season).

And when I went to pick up Rhea, after we got her bags in the car, the Rav looked like this:

That’s Yorkie, a stuffed dog I got when I was 16, and he’s gone everywhere with me since then.

I should have paid closer attention when That Poor Man was putting it all in there, but I was busy trying to wind up the last of the handspun yarn that I’d set to dry overnight. This “not watching him pack” thing will come back to bite me at the end of the weekend. But I like jigsaw puzzles… how hard could it be to get it all in there, right? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH foreshadowing.

Here’s our booth after setting up on Friday night (we got there, set up, covered everything, checked into the hotel, went to dinner, then came back and uncovered and opened the booth):

Friday night was fun; people trickled in after dinner and it was great to see old friends, catch up with the other vendors (I absolutely adore Jan and Leigh from Raspberries, and we were once again right next to Jane and Ginger of Ewephoric Fibers and I can never get enough of them), and to also sit and relax and spin a bit — I’m lucky in that my booth is right next to the spinner circle, so I just set my wheel up at the end of the circle and then when I have a moment I can sit down, join the conversation, and spin! Speaking of, here’s what I finished on Friday night; I’d had about half of it already spun, so it’s not as impressive as it looks:

Saturday morning we got to the room early, and there were already other vendors getting ready for the day, which was hopping! This was my view most of the day:

I was able to get some spinning in here and there and got four ounces of a lovely alpaca/silk spun up, and hey, it matched my tutu!

My mother came over for the event, for most of Saturday, and it was great to see her. She sat with us for a while – it was great to catch up with her because we hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months – and she wound up getting more photos than I did!

Honestly, most of Saturday is a blur. There was the auction, and door prizes, and old friends and new stopping by the booth; I was able to put faces to a few people whose names I’ve seen pop up on Facebook, was able to reconnect with a couple of old Hanks Yarn and Fiber customers, and just generally had a wonderful, social time. We broke for an early dinner, then came back and kept going on Saturday night until close to 10. At that point both Rhea and I were getting a little glassy-eyed, so we called it a night.

Sunday morning we were the first people in the room, but we were quickly joined by other spinners and vendors, and soon Sunday morning was just as busy as Saturday. As everyone started to think about lunch, though, things started winding up. As other vendors started packing, we did as well — reluctantly, because we didn’t want the weekend to end!

And it almost didn’t, as the battery in my Rav had died, and there was quite the comedy of errors trying to (a) find the battery and then (b) finding a jump. I got in the car to drive it closer to the hotel – Rhea was still back there with all our stuff from the event – and… click click click. Huh. Try again. Click click click. Oh, ugh. Really? Dead battery? Let me open the hood. Where a small angry gray cat promptly jumped out at me like a goddamn jack-in-the-box, hissed, flailed, and ran off. I so wish Rhea had not been inside because I was way too WHAT THE WHAT WAS THAT to be able to get a photo.

And also I was immediately confused because where is my battery?

If there is one thing I don’t like, it’s a stereotype. Especially one that is in any way demeaning to a person. And I felt like absolutely the most stereotypical “girl who knows nothing about cars” because where the fuck is my battery? I took this photo to text message Tim. Did he know where my battery was? Did someone… take my battery? How could they get under the hood without unlatching it first from inside the car? Did someone… replace my battery? With the cat? And I didn’t even get to keep the cat?

Soon, Rhea came out, with Allan (bless his heart, he was so patient), and I just cracked up and started to cry. Here I am a grown-ass woman and I can’t even find the goddamn battery in my goddamn car. Allan started cleaning the pine needles off, and we found a plaque that basically said “the battery is under this removable plate” (which really didn’t make me feel too much better since it was still dead, but at least we found it). It’s the plate in the upper left-hand side of that photo. Yeah. Easy, right? I guess I could have gone to the manual and found it, except that a battery is one thing I know what it looks like, and I sure as fuck did not SEE it, which means it must have been gone, right? And that’s why my car wouldn’t start!

I also posted about it on Facebook, and Jenn suggested a car parts store that also does minor things like replacing the battery… so after the comedy of errors of then getting the car loaded… which we wound up putting shit in and taking it out about six times, because I was hot, and fussed, and kept making it worse, and I swear to fucking god everything fit in there when we came DOWN, and we sold SO MUCH, so how come this shit isn’t fitting? Rhea talked me out of leaving behind three yarn bowls, two shelf displays, and three bags of packing peanuts. Because I swear I was so sweaty and so upset (at the car, at myself) that I was just going to leave that shit in the parking lot. (Now I’m glad I didn’t because one of those yarn bowls sold this morning, online.) We precariously navigated to Advanced Auto Parts (Orlando driving is NOT LIKE Gainesville driving! Ten miles from a hotel in Gainesville would put you in another city… ten miles from the hotel in Orlando puts you … deeper into Orlando. Where I promptly bought a set of jumper cables and a car battery, and they switched out the battery for us in, like, ten minutes. By a bad-ass lady mechanic who knew her shit about cars, let me tell you. She’s my hero.

To cheer ourselves up, a stop at the Barberville Roadside stand was in order, and let me tell you, that this photo will never, ever, ever get old:

I did not come home with that – not for $59 and how moth-eaten it was. But Rhea did come home with this:

Beyoncette!

And that was Fiber-In! You can see all of my photos, even ones I didn’t post here, in my Flickr Album for Fiber-In 2014. A cleaner version of this will be posted tomorrow on my work blog.