Great Lakes Fiber Festival

This past weekend was the Great Lakes Sheep and Fiber Festival in Wooster, OH (about 2.5 hours from our farm).  What a time we had.  All of my baskets went and were a big hit (this is why there are currently none listed in my shop, but don't worry, more to come!).  Above is some of the beautiful roving in one of the booths.  The colors were fantastic!  Here's some other pictures from the festival.

Our booth.  It was shared between Stramba Fiber Mill who is a local alpaca farm and fiber processing mill and Alpaca Fiber Studio and Friends who specializes in beautiful hand dyed and painted yarns, batts, and wearable art.  

Here's one of my newest creations!  I call it the "Zombie Scarf".  Maybe because of the colors.  Some people call them Fairy Scarves, but the zombie name just stuck in my head!  I'm fairly new to water/needle felting, but folks, this is fairly simple!  For those of you looking for a way to take your own wools and process them into something beautiful without having to spin them, felting is it!  There is so much potential with felting.  I never knew.  Check out this book if you need some tips and ideas: Fabulous Felted Scarves by Chad Alice Hagan and Jorie Johnson.  And there's one of my baskets hiding down there.

Here's one of the fabulous hand felted works of art by Robbie Grodin of Alpaca Fiber Studio and Friends.  She has an amazing talent for color!  We bartered a basket for some yarn.  A good trade.

 Another shot from the front of our booth.  There was just SO much wonderful color there!  I especially love the colors in the alpaca rug in the center.  I was able to be a part of the process.  It was so neat to see it come together.  Terri from Stramba Fiber Mill processed the rug yarn, I dyed it, and my friend Lisel from the Harmony Weaver's Cabin wove it all together.  How amazing when you get to see a work of art that used the talents of so many hands come together like that.

 Here's some lock spun yarn from another vendor's booth.  This was spun from Wensleydale sheep.  Another of my favorite which I hope to own some day.  I bought a few fleeces at the show and hope to combine it with some other fleeces waiting to be spun to create some yarn like this.  I had to post this as a large picture so you could see better all curly locks spun into a strand of yarn! 

Here are a couple Border Leicester Ewes in the barn.  I bought a couple of Border Leicester fleeces in what we like to call a 'behind the barn' sale.   It's not as mischievous as it sounds.  Many shepherds bring their fleeces to festivals to sell.  They are somewhat confined to the barns with their animals (as opposed to a booth in one of the buildings), so we simple asks ask them if they have any fleeces for sale.  Most of them do, and you can get them for a great price that way.  

A few of the finds from the festival.  The huge ball of roving was used to make another zombie scarf.  It in the process right now.  I'll post pictures of it when it's finished.  There was so much fiber there though that I think I'll spin the remainder into yarn.  Same with the smaller green/gray ball.  They yarn was my barter!  I also found a needle felting kit, and some silk hankies to spin, which I've never done yet.  This along with the three raw fleeces I found, should keep me pretty busy all summer!


On another note, I'm recovering from having my wisdom teeth removed yesterday and two other upper molars.  I lost a front tooth as well!  It was an old root canal from trauma as a kid.  Seven all together - Yikes!   Sounds so, for lack of a better word, Redneck.  It was the first time I had ever had anesthesia before.  What a weird experience.  Took eight sticks to find a vein.  I inherited my mother's veins, apparently.  But once they got it, I was given something that made me pretty loopy.  I started talking about all sorts of things!  I remember that, but I don't remember going to sleep, just waking up.  It was pretty quick.  In and out in two hours.  And surprisingly, I'm not even noticeable swollen this morning, nor did I have to take some of the stronger pain meds, just Motrin.  Tomorrow I will have that front tooth replaced.  I'll try not to smile until then.  Might scare someone away!  =)  No rest for the weary, though.  I've got potatoes and onions still to get in the garden, herbs and lettuces to plant, and another bed to weed and plant.  Add that to basket-making, felting, laundry, and washing fleeces and you've got one busy girl.  
Lastly, on a 'better' note - we got some rain!  And the plants soaked it right up.  It was nice to not have to water the garden, at least for one night.  

Weekend Full of Activities

This past weekend was a whirl wind of activities.  I don't think we got to truly sit down once.  Saturday began early with a trip to the Waynesburg Sheep and Fiber Festival just south of Pittsburgh.  This was my third year attending, but the first with out my husband.  He's been so busy taking a class and working full time.  He needed to stay behind and get caught up.  This was okay, as I headed down with a friend who we've met up with the past two years at the festival anyway.  Last year I rode back home with her to 'chaperone' the two pygora goats in the back of her car.  Oh the adventures we have!  I'm really not much for garage sales (I've got enough junk I'm trying to scale down), but we stopped at a few along the way.  I did managed to find this wicked broom!  

I think I'm going to hang it on the wall in my craft room.  Perhaps it will get some use one day, but for now, I just want to admire it.  I attended a broom making seminar last September at the Mother Earth News Fair in Seven Springs, PA.  I couldn't believe what all went into making brooms, especially if you grow your own broom corn.  I guess that's why I couldn't pass this one up - for a whole $2.  What a deal!

The Fiber Festival was actually rather small this year.  Perhaps people were still getting over there fiber shock from the recent Maryland Sheep and Wool festival.  Still I picked up some roving to spin.  Here's the before and after.  At least for the purplish one.  I've a ton of fiber I need to process and dye.  I'm hoping these beautiful colors will give me the motivation to get some art batts made to spin.  I've yet to really try some of the core spinning.  There were some amazing handspun yarns at the festival.  We refrained from bringing home any goats this time, but my friend did find a great little loom.  So it wasn't a complete bust, but we didn't stay as long as we have in the past.  


The remainder of the day was spent working in the garden.  We've really been working hard the past few years to try to build up the soil.  We even brought our own compost pile when we moved down here.  Sound silly!?  Well it took at least a year to establish those beneficial microbes and attract the worms!  How could I just leave them behind.  It was only a large Rubbermaid container-full, but we made it, and I wanted to bring it.  Now our pile is 20 times that size (or more).  We're working on building semi-raised beds within the area our landlord has offered for us to garden.  It's just a corner off of his corn/soy field, but I appreciate it all the same.  The only downfall has been that the soil has been stripped over the years from growing just those two crops.  So we've been building the compost to help rebuild at least our little section of the field.  We'll see how it goes this year.

Here's a small section.  We used grass clippings to lay out the plots
for this summer.  We move them every year.

Notice that there is some growth already?  The garden was full of weeds two days ago.  When we went to weed-wack, we discovered that our Parsley and Cilantro came back from last year!  I was really excited to see that. We'll let some of it go to seed.  The Cilantro is already flowering.

Cilantro!

Parsley!

Knitting Addictions

I ran across this animated short a couple days ago, and the whole time I watched it, I sat there shaking my head thinking, "I can relate!"  I would knit just about anything to keep on knitting.  Once upon a time I ran out of fiber, so I actually spun up some plastic bags into 'plarn' (plastic yarn).  I never did knit it up into anything as someone felt so bad for me that I had resorted to making plarn, that they gave me one of their sheep fleeces to process.  I will not deny that I have a fiber addiction.  I have more fiber up in my craft room than I could probably process in an entire year.  Then again, who knows.

So to all my other fellow addicted knitters, crocheters, and fiber artists, I hope you enjoyed this clip!  Happy Knitting!

Two Busy Weekends and Another to Come

("smile for the camera" - a cute goat from the fiber festival)

Goodness how busy I've been! So much to write that I think I'll have to do it in segments. Where to start:

This weekend we travelled ALOT! On Friday we travelled an hour and a half (one way) across the state line to pick up a new partridge silkie hen. I lost my Eleanor a few months back and have been looking for another, as one silkie hen just doesn't seem like enough. She's pretty cute and we refer to her as the "new" Eleanor. Some may think that recycling a name is a dumb thing to do, especially if you're other one died, but I have to tell you...new names are more difficult to come by that one might think. So she's 'Eleanor the second' in memory of my wonderful first partridge silkie hen.

Saturday we went BACK across state lines to a fiber festival in upstate Ohio. It was quite the drive (120 miles one way!), but I came home with 10 pounds of unprocessed sheep's wool and 5 pounds of a gorgeous gray alpaca fleece. Give me fiber, and I'm a happy girl! I've been processing a good bit of alpaca fleece lately. Today was my first experience washing a sheep fleece. For what it lacks in cost, it sure makes up for in washing. It's very different to process. It will take some practice, but I can't wait to dye and spin it. Our travels were extended another 60 or so miles on the way home as we swung up to Butler to pick up a dozen silkie eggs to stick under my broody silkie hen, Delilah. She just finished raising a clutch of six (who need to find new homes) and had already been found in the coop making nest. It's a little crowded in the coop right now with all the new chickens, so we've created her own little protected sanctuary in the corner in a big old dog cage that keeps everyone else out. Though her chicks are certainly old enough to be on their own (and almost twice her size now), they still seem to want to be close to mom sometime.

Last weekend was an exciting one on the alpaca farm. But that will have to wait for another day, as my bedtime has come and gone, and 6am will come far too soon for my liking.

Wool and Sunshine

I woke up this morning to the sunshine illuminating my bedroom. Even though I'm still trying to get over this cold, and even though I'm still coughing like an asthmatic ready to pass out, nothing could extinguish the joy I had as I walked outside! It's a rare site to behold here, folks! And certainly nothing to be taken advantage of in these parts. Apparently the chickens thought so too, because the all but plowed me over as I opened their door to give them fresh water. It was a stampede of 11 chickes; if chickens even can stampede. I was glad to see them want to get out, flap their wings and forage the farmyard. They've preferred to stay close to or inside their coop for a few weeks now. A little sunshine will do us all a lot of good.

So above is the newest addition to my fiber arts life! I'm so excited! I've been dreaming of a spinning wheel since I started spinning last winter! Don't get me wrong, I got pretty darn good and fast at spinning on a drop spindle. But nothing compares to this! It's like a luxury! Now she might not been all that much to look at, but she's mine, and for all I can tell, spins like a dream. I've been spinning up a storm since I got her over Christmas break. I'll make sure to post some pictures of the results.