No Place Like It
November 1st, 2011But wait! FIRST…! Breaking Tsocky News.
- We have… a few spots left for the 2012 ART for your FEET TSOCK CLUB, and we are now throwing those open to the public. First come, first served - you know the drill! A year-long subscription; six wild and crazy designs that run the gamut of colors and techniques and themes and styles; plus assorted surprise goodies tailored to your tastes and participation in a cozy free-for-all knit-along group on Ravelry. If you want in, go here and clicky on the buttons. It’s OK, I’ll wait.
- We have… YARN! Just delivered last week, 500+ beautiful pounds of Tsilk Tstocking, just waiting to be skeined and dyed into wonderful rich colorways.

- We have… OK, we don’t have yet, but we soon will have… Robo-Skeiner! Betty and I are going to NEFF this weekend (as civilians, for once) and we’ll pick up our new little monster from Judy while there. So next week look for us to be skeining fools, getting into serious production.
- We have… some inventory. Not much, yet - just what’s left from Rhinebeck - but if you’re looking to order Kitri, or Poseidon, or Oktoberfest, or Vintage, you may be in luck. (No Imbas - that baby sold out, as usual. But there’ll be more soon.) Still working on getting the new web site set up, so for now you’ll need to contact me via e-mail (info AT tsocktsarina DOT com) to arrange things. But I must say, it’s nice to have kits in stock! Next up in the Coming-Soon Queue: Seven Chakras, The Nine Tailors, and Golden West.
Now, where was I?
Rhinebeck.
I do have some pictures, but almost all of them are of the booth. Which is appropriate, really, because I hardly got out of the booth all weekend. We were that busy. Busy surpassing my wildest expectations, some of which were pretty wild. (It wasn’t just us, either. In the brief opportunities I had to talk to other vendors they reported much the same thing. This was an EPIC Rhinebeck.) A great beginning for the New Empire.
In one sense, of course, this wasn’t my first Rhinebeck, by any means - the Tsarina saga began at Rhinebeck in 2006, and has continued there ever since. In that sense it always has been home to me - no place like it. But in another sense it was very much my first Rhinebeck - if you put the emphasis on MY. First time out on my own, first time as the Vendor of Record.
On my own, but totally not on my own. Because - well, that’s a story, and this is the place to tell it. Because almost a year ago, when it became clear to me that before long I was going to be out paddling my own solitary canoe, in a no-infrastructure zone, with no really cogent idea what the hell I was going to do with myself and my designs and my plans, I had a small epiphany:
There’s no place like home.
So I clicked my heels together three times and I betook me to my usual Sunday knitting/spinning group, and I took a long close look at them from a whole new angle. I’ve been getting together with these people for nigh on four years now. Every week we take over the local Panera and make a spectator sport of ourselves with the laughing and the talking and the fiber arts; we’ve come to know each other pretty well, and I was already convinced in a general sort of way that there wasn’t much this crowd couldn’t do - or wouldn’t do for each other. But I hadn’t ever had occasion before to break that down into categories and take massive advantage of it. And sure enough, on closer examination it turned out that I had wildly underestimated the richest resource an absolute monarch could hope for.
You already know about Betty, and you’ve seen something of what she can do with color (though actually… you ain’t seen nothin’ yet). I already knew about her too, and she was the first person I talked to about making this thing happen. Because, you know - no dyed yarnz, no tsocks.
After that - OK, I’m still not going to spell out the full dramatis personae yet, because if I start doing that we’ll be here all night. I’m heroically sticking to the overview stage for now, and we’ll get into individual profiles later. Suffice it to say that the New Empire comprises not only designers and dye artists and beading ditto; it also has skilled professionals in marketing, retail, graphics, fulfilment, and logistics. It has editors; it has typographers; it has test knitters; it has many hands making cheerfully light work of the more boring menial tasks. More to the point, or at any rate equally so, these people are my posse, my crew, my support group AND my support staff, they’re my rock, they’re my peeps, they’re my friends… and they are the reason that there is a New Empire at all. So really, not MY Rhinebeck after all. OUR Rhinebeck.
I don’t have pictures of all of them (and as it is I’m indebted to Liz for most of the pictures I do have), but if you look at how this

and this

evolved into this

there’s a pretty fair representative sampling along the way.
Crack-brained plan for gridwall assembly begins to make some sense:

That’s Kelly and Amy pulling the pieces together, and incidentally…?

…you do NOT want to mess with Kelly.
Gridwall? WHAT Gridwall?

It’s still there, actually, but it’s now backed by a huge swath of black Duvetyn - I wish I had video of the deployment of same, because that was an adventure in itself. (There IS video, though, of the disembodied hand demanding gaffer’s tape as the banner is being jury-rigged into place; Kelly and Jenn in foreground, Amy and Claire (I, um… I think) doing their ninja thing behind the masking.)
These should look familiar:


And so should these, as wielded by Claire,

who hasn’t got a leg to stand on.
What Betty is so happy about…

… I don’t remember, unless it is that gradually the walls are being stocked and the displays pulled together.

Amy, Claire, Jenn, me, and a little bit of Dan at far right
We’re just about done at this point, except for some last-minute assembly and the inevitable stashing-away of vast quantities of stuff, so we adjourn to the Holidome for some serious strategizing, with a little work thrown in here and there.
This is us, totally rocking the strategizing:

Claire and Amy sporting Official Headgear

Amy, Claire, and Rena, with the Headgear reshuffled
Actual Work Content: You ever need any collating done, this is the team. That’s Amy, Kelly, and Claire, working so fast that the job was literally finished before I could even ask “Weren’t you guys going to collate those patterns?”
Other than that… well, it’s mostly a blur, really. Here’s the booth Saturday morning before the mob scene began:

(That’s Betty and Ryan making a few minor adjustments to the display of Betty’s Moose Manor wares. BTW… have you perhaps noticed that it is a BIIIIIIIIIIIG booth? Yes, we noticed that too. We didn’t exactly overfill it, this time out, though there was certainly enough stuff to start with, and besides it was plenty full of people having a good time, which always delights me. But there is lots of room to grow, which is good, because grow is exactly what we are planning to do.)
We had Tsock Tsightings in the wild - always a happy thing:
Firebird (AKA the Barbecued Chicken, I was told) at the Holidome:

Seven Chakras in the booth:

Green Fairy in the booth:

To my utter embarrassment, I haven’t yet come up with a workable system for keeping track of who’s who when I take these pictures - especially in the craziness of Rhinebeck, it just didn’t happen. I’m sorry! If this was you, give me a shout in the comments and I will totally come back and edit; meanwhile, I trust you know that I was totally happy to see you even if the details did kind of get swept along by the tide.
We had a Special Guest honoring the Fronkenshteek display:

He’s standing in for the Angry Mob Action Figures Playset, which alas is the one really important display prop I forgot to bring with me (and they were Angry fer realz when I got back, believe me). Note that he is wearing his Miniature Baby Surprise Jacket, as devised by Kate Atherley and knitted by our own Liz. Kate (whom I kept introducing, with good reason, as the Most Patient Tech Editor on the Planet) is just one of the many many imaginary friends who come to to brief and vibrant life on these occasions; friends whom I saw and hugged… but totally failed to drink with and also neglected to photograph. I plead Rhinebeck fumes.
Here’s Betty and me in the booth at some point…

… and do please note which of us is doing the Actual Work and which of us is goofing off and schmoozing with the customers.
Other than that, most of the pictures I took looked similar to this:

(and I have to pause here to sing the delighted praises of Square, truly a vendor’s dream for smooth transaction processing)
So it’s a good thing that Liz was more camera-conscious than I; check out the rest of her Rhinebeck photoset on Flickr for a more complete picture of the, well, bigness of things.
I doubt I’ll ever be able to get the whole Team together in one place for one shot, but here’s a few of us:

From right, that’s Kelly, Liz and Jenn; from left, me and Betty. And in the middle, not part of the Tsarina Team but a friend and fellow-first-time-vendor in her own right, is Tina Martinez of Bittersweet Woolery, whom you last saw in these pages way way way back when - back when she was a spinner and I still wasn’t, and she taunted me with cookies and Cormo. She’s doing some great things with color and fiber and yarn, and there wasn’t much left in her booth by the time this picture was taken on Sunday.
I seem to have barely skimmed the surface of the real story here - there’s all this rich detail floating around the back of my head. Images of the people I saw and played and chatted and ate and drank with; vignettes from Kelly’s birthday party at the Holidome; the recurring theme of the vanishing staples; Amy and Claire doing the Official Happy Dance over the contents of the cash box on Saturday night; drive-by greeting and swaggering with Abby (she was teaching just on the other side of the wall - she threatened to drill holes through the back of my displays; I threatened to drum on the wall during her classes); seeing Jess and Casey and meeting Rav-baby Eloise; some of my not-so-imaginary friends meeting each other for the first time; the bittersweet awareness of all the friends there wouldn’t even be time to say hello to; the usual dizzying arrays of colors and textures and scents; as always the overwhelming cumulative effect of hugs upon hugs.
In other words, Rhinebeck. There’s no place like it.
But speaking of no place like it, there’s a moral to this story, and you already know what it is…
…it’s that - if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with! Is that right?
Yeah, it’s right, all right. It’s very right.
We’re home. Home! And this is my room, and you’re all here. And I’m not gonna leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all, and - oh, Auntie Em - there’s no place like home!
































































