The Fiber Event

Earlier this month I made another trip to the Fleece Fair.  It was raining when I arrived, with snow (snow!) forecast.  It seems like this happened last year; Friday was warm, followed by a chilly, raw Saturday. 

In any case, there was one warm, sealed structure, two airy metal barns, and one open-sided wooden barn.  It was a good thing that people were selling warm, fuzzy merchandise; I can't imagine what it would be like if it were something like a sundress-and-straw-hat sort of event. 

An unexpectedly nice thing was that not only did I remember a number of booths from last year (most of them seemed to have returned, though not all in the same locations) but a couple of the vendors remembered me. 

There were the usual bags and balls and tubs full of roving, and tufts of fleece, and rolled up bundles of raw wool fresh off the sheep.  In all the barns were cages of angora bunnies, and one place was selling, in addition to bunnies, a tiny angora goat and a Persian kitten!  To all sides were balls and hanging skeins of yarn, wooly garments and artsy felted flowers, hats, animals and colorful lumps.  There were racks of needles, jumbles of niddy-noddies, bouquets of spindles, herds of spinning wheels, and ranks of rigid heddle and table looms.  There were a number of bars of scented soap, and a lot of knitting and sheep-themed tchotches.  One man was wandering around in a brilliant, chevron-design sweater he'd designed and knit himself, several Menonite women, many large women in dramatic wooly knits, a few people wearing shawls, and many wearing hats, gloves and scarves (see - the perfect marriage of weather and event).  In between the crowds of slower-moving adults darted children, who paused to pet rabbits, stare at spinners, and huddle around space heaters, clutching stuffed llamas and sheep, tugging on their parents' hands. 

I loaded myself up, though I tried to hold back from too much roving; most of the lot I bought last year is still sitting in my room mocking me.  I bought: a silk "hankie" dyed in a range of deep, rich browns; several ounces of tencel dyed in blues and greens; a skein of laceweight bouclé mohair in varigated blues and greens; a skein of brown and black alpaca yarn (both mohair and alpaca skeins intended for shawls); a copper fibula shawl pin; two Bosworth spindles, one large, one small; a "skein" of roving in blacks and greens; some knitting needles, both straights and circulars; and a skein of cream laceweight for D.  There's enough here to keep me busy for months.

Then I drove home in fluffy rain, er, fleecy rain... no, I have to admit it, snow.  The smaller birds were on the porch, the "fluffy rain" was accumulating on the daffodils, and I could hear it striking the leaves and the blades of grass - a peaceful, skittery sound.  It was still snow in April, however.

Comments

[Sara]

I love fiber fairs :) Our nearest one is usually a late summer or fall event though, so I've got awhile to go.

I've been here before, visiting from Phantom Scribbler's place, but I'm here today because I've been googling up a storm, looking for information on where to buy madder plants, and I stumbled across your post from last year about growing madder. I was just wondering whether your madder made it, and where you found a source for plants, since the articles I've been reading suggsest it is difficult to grow from seed? Did you find it at last years Fiber Event?

[Rana]

Welcome back, Sara! My madder did survive the winter, surprising me - it had been a bunch of dead sticks, and then, suddenly it put up some new green shoots (which were then killed by frost, and now it's trying again). I have it in a clear pot so I can see the roots. It's not a very pretty plant - it's prickly and sprawly - but that's not what I got it for.

I ordered it from these folks: The Thyme Garden. They're very nice and helpful - it's a small, family enterprise - and they ship the plants live in a box. This would be a good time to place an order, in fact; they ought to be shipping in the next month or so, if they're not already doing so.

[The gods have quite a sophisticated taste for irony:::::The Jew takes boss by calling in the Quasi-H]

Austrian Sigmund Freud is known as the father of psychoanalysis ...

Okay - this rant was too long and too off topic for me to allow it to stay. I'm not paying Typepad to provide random folks with soapboxes. If you can't manage even the basic courtesy of reacting to the actual post, you should start your own blog.

--Rana