Today was the first day of the Annual Chain Link Conference being held in Greensboro, North Carolina. While I had missed the pre-registration deadline, I arrived in plenty of time to get one of the eight remaining spaces in the professional development day and purchase raffle tickets for a series of drawings that would be held throughout the day.

At a cost of $1 per ticket or $10 for 11 tickets, the raffle was a fundraiser for Ovarian Cancer awareness. I decided to go all out and purchase 11 tickets:

Throughout the day there were periodic drawings for a number of prizes, and for the first three rounds of drawings my raffle tickets didn’t seem to be all that lucky. But everything changed in the late afternoon when I found myself sitting at Edie Eckman’s presentation on how to draw your own crochet diagrams.

One of the prizes was two skeins of yarn from Tracey and Jim Schuh of Interlacements. As I tracked the numbers that were being read against the numbers on my tickets, I was both surprised and delighted that one of my tickets was a match. I was even more delighted when I got my hands on the yarn:

I would have been perfectly happy if the only prize I won were the two skeins of Interlacements Seeds yarn (a fun, almost spritely, DK weight rayon/polyester blend), but my good luck had not yet run out.

Not too long after my yarn acquisition, yet another one of my tickets was a winner. This time, the prize was a book:

Donated by Nancy Nehring, Crochet Compendium: the ultimate collection of crochet techniques from House of White Birches is, as the title suggests, an amazing compendium of crochet techniques including mosaic crochet, a technique that a friend of mine has been itching to learn. Now I have a book I can lend her so she can scratch that crochet itch.

I also would have been happy if my swag collecting had ended with winning that book, but like an annoying infomercial for a slicing and dicing kitchen wipe that gets out stains and erases streaks from windows where the spokesman exhorts, “but wait, there’s more,” it turned out that I would win one final prize for the day: This huge yarn bag from Red Heart Yarns:

filled with everything needed:

to make this Weekend Granny Throw:

Now if I had just won a weekend so I could get it done!