I forgot that not only did we get swag at the retreat, but I also purchased a bit of yarn and I have a little video directly from the Rocky Mountains!

First of all, despite deciding not to do swag this year, Brady was able to get us some wonderful give-aways.

The bag and the green yarn were both from the Coats & Clark company…the fantastic sock yarn was from Donna at Skeindalous.  I think Donna’s colorway is even better than last year, and I just checked out her web page and she has some incredible sock yarns…love the yellow/green.

One of the other very generous sponsors of the Rocky Mountains Men’s Knitting Retreat, is a local yarn store in Estes Park, called The Stitchin’ Den.  Each year, in addition to providing a full scholarship for one of the guys, they also host a cocktail party at the store for us.  I always like to support fiber companies that support the manly knitters, so I purchased a bit of local and foreign yarns.

The tweedy, natural color yarn is a alpaca/merino blend called Powder River made in Wyoming by Mountain Meadow Wool, and the sock yarn is a great colorway I’d never seen of Skacel’s Zauberball.  Here’s a closeup of the Zauberball:

Finally (and I this is the final posting of the Rocky Mountain Retreat for this year…I promise), I took a short video of the creek right down the road from the retreat center.  I sat here for about an hour, listening to music and relaxing before retreating.

It was truly heaven.

I’ve been doing more work on the Milano blanket…I’ll post a project photo in the next blog entry.