No Place Like It

But 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.