I have a lot of misc. things to talk about in the blog today. Several questions from you, as well as a few announcements and such.  First of all, the Cascade Wall of Wonder is done and we’re totally in love with it.  What do you think? (Click on the photo to see it larger – it’s worth it!)  It’s 7 ft. high and 24 ft. long and it still doesn’t hold all of the skeins that we got in (but that was as big of a wall as we had available, so the cubbies fit the space.  WH made those – isn’t he handy?) Now we just have to figure out a way to be able to sell the yarn without taking any out of the cubbies and making holes in the display – ha! (Oh, ok.  We’ll allow holes….) We are still working on photos.  It’s about 480 photos total to deal with (full shots + close up shots). We will have it ready to put up in the next week or two. In addition to all of this 220, we have all of their sock yarn in and being photoed.  It’s wonderful yarn, and sells at a great price. They also sent us this afghan, made out of blocks from the Great American Afghan book (which we will have up for you next week.) There are some really fun block options in there, and if you can’t see yourself making a whole afghan, it would be easy to make each square as a pillow in colors that matched your favorite knitting area or family room. My favorite square is the “Socks” square. Barring backorders, we will do our best to keep all of the colors in stock for you. (Because what’s the point in telling people that you carry “all of the Cascade 220 colors” if half are out of stock?) There were 5 colors back-ordered from this first batch, so we are short five.  But honestly, if you’ve ever seen all of the colors together at once, you kind of wonder how there could be SO many shades of any one color anyways.  So I think a few out of stock is not a big deal :-)   They’ll ship them to us as soon as they’re available again.

Now, to your questions!

1.  Did you ever pick a winner from the Second Quarter Challenge?
A: Um, no.  Actually, we all got so carried away with the Dream in Color Sweater Knit A Long that the Challenge kind of went by the wayside! So we apologize for that slipping past us.  I used the random number generator and Timmie is the winner of the Q2-08 Loopy Ewe Gift Certificate!

2.  Speaking of the Quarterly Challenges, was there one for the Third Quarter?
A: No.  We realized that we had too much going on at once, and since we started the DC Baby KAL right after the sweater one, we didn’t want to put another challenge out there.  We think we’ll do a mixture of both KAL’s and Challenges in the future.  Just not at the same time! We have another Challenge planned and we’ll announce it here on the blog in a couple of weeks. (The Dream in Color Baby KAL ends 10/1, for all of you who are participating.  Don’t forget to get your photo uploaded to the gallery!)

3.  What is the deadline for Loopy’s 2008 Summer Vacation Photos?
A: We mentioned mid-September, so let’s make it 9/15.  I’ll do a blog after that, calling for you to vote on several categories.  There are a lot of fun photos in there already!

4.  When will you have Sock Club signups again? And are you doing it lottery-style?
A: Sign-ups will be mid-January and we’ll announce it on the blog when we’re ready to have you sign up.  We do it as a lottery to ease everyone’s blood pressure!  Seriously – we had more than double the amount of people sign up last year for the available spots (225) and we don’t want to stress people out by having them try to get “in” at 9:00 am on the day it opens. (Or have to sit at their computer and spend time waiting for the announcement.) We’ll give you a week to sign up and then we’ll randomly draw numbers again.  If you get in one year, you can have an auto-renewal for your second year. (We’ll email you about this in December.)  After two years in, it goes to a lottery again. We think we have figured out a way to add more spots for next year, so that’s good news!

5.  Are you doing a Spring Fling again? And how can I make sure that I get a spot?
A: Yes, we are!  We have reserved space at the hotel for the last weekend in April (2009) again, and we have already signed up some of our teachers. We will give you full details and have signups in December. We are increasing the number of spots this year, and we will again assign the spaces by lottery.  We view this as a Customer Appreciation event, so you do get extra tickets in the lottery if you are a Loopy Groupie! We love having our regular customers attend so that we can put names and faces together and get to know you. (Look at all of those beautiful faces – and Claudia’s feet behind the sign – from the one we had last April!)

6.  Are you ever going to put more recipes up on your blog on Fridays?
A: Gee – WH asks the same thing.  Or rather, his question goes like this: “Are you ever going to do some cooking and baking again?”  Yeah.  I need to.

7.  How did you arrange the Cascade in the cubbies?
A: It’s all in numerical order so that we can find the skeins quickly when we’re packing your orders!

8.  Any Sneak Peaks into new lines arriving soon?
A: Oh, we love to give Sneak Peaks! You can pretty much plan that most of the lines we currently carry are on regular re-order, so watch for those to continue to update. A few new things to watch for this fall include: Sereknity, PolarKnits, a worsted cashmere line from Jade Sapphire, Opal Harry Potter, Opal Rainforest 4, Opal Winter’s Tale, Malabrigo Sock, HiyaHiya Bamboo, another indie-artisan bag line, several new yarn bases from some of your beloved indie dyers and yarn companies, more Loopy logo items (including PJ’s – I promise, by the holidays at least!), and of course several other things still in the works and not yet ready to be announced. But we will definitely keep you posted as we go along. As you can see, we have plenty of room for adding in new things now.

Sheri tomorrowalloftheshelvesarrivetofillupthisnewspace
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