Wine, Yarn and Song!

Not necessarily in that order, but you'll get the idea.

This past weekend was busy as usual, but there were a few wonderful highlights. First off, on Saturday, the Grand Opening of Pioneer Valley Vineyard finally arrived.

I do love a nice wine, but the opening of this winery was extra special because it is owned and operated by our Linda B., our faboo Customer Service Manager. This is an endeavor that has been three long years in the works (much more if you include all of the planning and such) for her and her family and every bit of effort paid off. The vineyard is beautiful:

The winery and tasting room themselves are lovely and the wine, well the wine is awesome. Steve and I tasted all of the offerings and bought a bottle of each of our favorites:

Raspberry, Cranberry, Blueberry and a white grape called Cayuga. The Apple wine was good, but not quite us. I was actually quite surprised at had good these wines are since I tend to not ususally be a fan of fruity-tuity wines, but these won me over. Maybe we need to institute free-wine Fridays at WEBS, rather than free-lunch Fridays! Probably not, I don't think our mail order customers would appreciate us picking and packing their orders under the influence :)

My favorite picture from the event has to be this one though:

I love the role reversal of Linda running the register and WE"RE checking out :)

We kicked off the weekend with Parent's Day at the boys' school on Friday. We saw adorable performances

Ate special treats

and battled it out in the parents vs kids soccer game. The kids won, of course. Fun was had by all.

As I eluded to in my last post (at least I think I did), Gail Callahan, our own Kangaroo Dyer has created a limited edition "Pink" colorway in our Franklin Sock Yarn. With October being Breast Cancer Awareness Month and knowing so many people who have been touched in one way or another by this disease, we wanted to do something extra this year. The proceeds from the sale of this yarn will be donated to our The Cancer Connection, right in Northampton. If we sell out of this first batch, Gail is up for dyeing more, but when the month is over it will be gone until next year. The yarn is available on-line and in the store.

When Gail was in last week, she had her latest dyeing creating with her. She is a nut when it comes to playing with color and she particularly likes to practice by over-dyeing the not so pretty leftovers from some of our closeouts. This little treasure had to come home with me:

It's formally a skein of angora that was a not-so-great-purple. I am not usually a fan of angora, but I fell for the gorgeous colors, the sweet fluffiness of it all. It's a small little bit, but I think I can create a pair of wristlets for myself. Or I may just keep it as it is. All I know is it makes me smile everytime I spy it in the basket in my home office. If you want to score some of this for yourself or see some of Gail's other amazing yarns, be sure to visit her at the Franklin County Fiber Twist in Old Deerfield, MA on October 27 & 28.

Oh and don't forget. Stitches East is this week in Baltimore! We'll be in booths 313-317 & 412-416 at the Baltimore Convention Center. Kaffe Fassett will be signing books in our booth on Thursday night and on Friday, Teva Durham will be with us to showcase her new yarn line, Loop-D-Loop and sign her pattern books.

Tomorrow I'll finally post Pixie's darling Tilted Duster and I also want to give some love to a new sock yarn that came in during the avalanche and somehow didn't get shown any love here on the blog and it's one I do truly adore.

Kathy