Need Help in Minnesota in February!

I'm coming to Minnesota in February - as you can see on my sidebar. I'll be at the Mall of America doing two days of booksignings and some little demos on the 16th and 17th. But here's my conundrum.... and I am hoping some of you fine knitters in Minnesota can help me out.

The thing at the Mall of America will be fine but I want to give a lecture on how I see and use color. I did a similiar lecture at Stitches East in Maryland in October and it was an astounding success. It was so much fun to do and everyone loved it. I would like to share it with the knitters, stitchers, and quilters of Minnesota. There isn't a good space at the MofA which will be dark and quiet. I will bring my laptop with the lecture on it but I'll need a screen and a computer hook-up which can project my photos. The date I am hoping to do it on is Friday the 15th, 2008.

First I contacted the Knitting Guild of Minnesota and their meeting is February 24th, the week after I will be in town. Doesn't work. I've talked with Karen at Needlework Unlimited to see if she had any ideas. She suggested that I contact the Textile Center at the University of Minnesota. I've got a call in there but no response yet. She said the space there is lovely for lectures.

Do any of you have any pull with them? Does anyone else have any other ideas. I really want to do this to spread my word about my books, my colors, and how I see textile design. If you can help, please email me by clicking the email button on my sidebar! Thanks so much. If this works out and someone out there reading my blog puts this all together for me, I will be further impressed by the powers of cyberspace. Fingers crossed!

I don't want to leave you today without a visual image. Here's my photo of the gloves I did for the current Winter issue of Interweave Knits. They're intended to be fun and playful. Each is knit with the same colors but I swapped around the ribs and the base colors. I used a pretty very dark green for all the colorwork. The fingers were knit with the same colors but I placed them different on each hand. My way of breaking up the boredom and making people do a double-take. Boy, do I wish they would send them back to me so I could wear them to Minnesota!