If you have been to the NJ Sheep and Fiber festival in Ringoes, it's like that only much, much bigger. Think a dozen or more buildings, dozens of food vendors, and thousands of people, all proudly wearing handmade stuff. Crowded! Think amusement park at lunchtime, and you get the idea. One building had tables of authors signing books, another had food items (totally unrelated to yarn) for sale from small vendors (like hot sauce, fudge, pickles, cookies, all packaged up), a few housed animals, but most were devoted to vendors. Yarn, knitting tools, crochet tools, spinning tools, carding tools, weaving tools, felting tools, handmade buttons, mugs, art objects with sheep on them, fleeces, roving, dyes, hand creams, patterns, finished garments, felted things, tote bags made from llama feed bags, etc… Building after building full of beautiful things to see and feel, and lots and lots of people. But everyone was polite, and if you took the time to look at the people instead of the things, everyone was adorned with something they had made. Scarves, shawls, hats, skirts, legwarmers, sweaters, coats - mostly (but not all) beautiful, all proudly declaring "look at my skill!". Yet I never saw anybody compliment anyone else on their garment - as if the overall sentiment was "I could have made that". And being that yarn is not the only aim of sheep breeders, there were also lambs roasting on spits and demonstrations of things to make from lamb. I hate to say I missed out on that, but 5 hours of wandering around to see all of the vendors was enough, especially because it was pretty cold and windy.
I think I showed admirable restraint. I only bought 4 skeins of yarn that spoke to me and suggested projects. Overall, I'd say $20-30/skein was about average for the things I looked at, but there were many that were much more (and few that were less). I petted a skein of a yarn called "Kitten", a blend of cashmere and silk with no price tag (a bad sign), and wondered what I could make from its 400 yards. Eventually I found a price card, and alas, Kitten was $88 a skein and the card helpfully suggested buying 3 skeins to make a sweater. I gave Kitten a last pet and backed away, clutching my wallet. I saw skeins of something made from Alpaca/Vicuna (not sure whether the yarn was a blend or the animals were a hybrid) for large sums of money, and goggled at a finished product made from it - a scarf labeled "machine knitted with hand-crocheted edge", priced at $750. I'm sorry, unless you plucked the hairs from the critters one at a time with diamond-edged tweezers while fighting off rabid weasels, that's not justified. I saw yarn so fine that the scarves made from it were like spiderwebs, beautiful and delicate, but my experience working with fine yarn is that you can't recover well from mistakes, so I admired it and moved on.
But now I'm back, and I'm going to bag up each of my new skeins with its pattern so I don't forget what I wanted to do with it. I still want to crank out more stuff for my fundraiser (I only have 30 totally finished items, about 10 in progress or needing finishing, and I want to have 50 - 60). And then there's this:
Several pounds of wool from Stonybrook Meadows, with my friend the swift, without which I would not have gotten these into balls. I'm thinking of not just hats, but maybe some felted items (coasters, potholders, clutch purses) and even scarves made of squares like this one. At Rhinebeck I looked for things to make with thick, coarse wool, and noted felted dryer balls and felted balls labeled "aromatherapy balls", assuming you douse them with scented oils. That might be a good use for some of the roving that hasn't been spun yet. Now that the weather's colder, we'll see how the hats sell.
Today? Cooking up last week's CSA stuff. Huge head of lettuce (red oak leaf, perhaps?) for mighty salads is clean, celery tops have been washed and are drying to freeze for future soups while the stems regain turgor in a pot of water, carrots will join chicken in soup, beets and cabbage will join celery and carrots in borscht (with store-bought potatoes and onions, see "Russian Cabbage Borscht" from the Moosewood Cookbook), eggplant and big crinkly cabbage head will sit in the fridge until I come up with ideas. Carrot tops and trimmings have fed the compost pile and local bunnies. Stonybrook Meadows kielbasa is thawing for those who need something meaty. Time to go check my chicken soup stock.
