A Week Late With an Update

This is the blog I had intended to post last week before I found out our Internet was down.

The Malice Domestic Conference was great. It was a chance to catch up with my editor, agent and a lots of old and new friends. Of course, there were parties, too. The highlight was the dinner Berkley put on for their authors.

A big part of the event were the author panels. I was on one called Knit One, Kill Two. The moderator sent us a list of the questions she planned to ask. One of the questions was not really a question, but more of a request. We were to tell something about ourselves that wasn’t in our bio. I was hoping to come up with something interesting or at least fun, but I was still coming up empty the day of. That morning I went for a walk in downtown Bethesda. I remembered an odd sort of outdoor/ in door farmers market not far away. A few blocks later I reached it and it as exactly as I remembered it. The indoor part was an old fashioned looking white building that reminded me a very small version of the Farmer’s Market building in L.A. at Third and Fairfax.

The stalls outside had jewelry and some antiques, along with a booth of wonderful clothes from India. But I assured myself I was looking not buying. Inside there were stalls selling fruits and vegetables, delicious looking pastries and exoitc jams. I bypassed all with just a glance, but then I saw it. There was no mistaking the display of yarn in rich colors in a corner. As if in a trance I made my way over. In the entrance there were baskets of small kits to make scarves and flower pins with small amounts of the yarn that was displayed on the wall. It turned out that all the yarn came from a farm and was either handspun, handpainted or handyed. In other words not what I was going to find at my local Michael’s.

Luckily they didn’t take credit cards that day, so I left with only one of the scarf kits and a flower pin kit and I discovered the answer for my panel.

When it was my turn to speak I told them the story and said I realized that not only were Molly Pink and her crew yarnaholics, so was I.

I’m already making the scarf. I changed their pattern to my own and the photo isn’t that great since the work in progress was sitting on my lap, but look at those colors.

And now this Saturday is the Santa Clarita Friends of the Library Author Dinner featuring Connie Archer, Sue Ann Jaffarian, Diane Vallere and me. Anthony Breznican is going to be the moderator. It should be a fun evening. There are a few tickets available that can be purchased at the library or online at www.SantaClaritaFOL.com.