Fleece Festival Adventures

Yesterday was the yearly Fleece Festival.  It's not a huge affair like those across the border, but it's big enough to generate a fair bit of excitement.   There are fibre vendors, equipment vendors, indie yarn companies, rug hooking and more.  I had missed it last year due to a volunteer commitment elsewhere, but this year I was demonstrating spinning for my local guild.    Many people came by with questions about spinning, how spinning wheels worked, stories about their experiences and more.  While I spun most of the day, I did take a couple of stretching breaks where I got to see a lot of the vendors.  I even did a little bit of shopping! 

 I found coloured cotton sliver and ginned cotton.   The ginned cotton is on the top right.  It is Pima, which is a longer stapled cotton.  I have a bit of Acala at home, but thought this would be fun to try.  Below it is some dyed cotton in a rather rich shade of red.  The natural colours are on the left, both cinnamon and sage colours.  The colours are supposed to develop properly after the cotton is finished in boiling water.

 There were a lot of fibre animal breeders selling their own fleeces.  I almost bought a lovely Leicester fleece, but stopped myself  because realistically, I don't have the time to deal with a whole raw fleece right now, no matter how clean and wonderful it was.   I have her business card, just in case though.  I did find a another pound of the Perendale that I'd purchased ages ago.  This time it was on sale.  I'll wash it by the lock like the first pound, so that I have enough for a major project.  There was also some shiny nylon to add to novelty yarns, a small ball of striped dyed roving and a handful of dyed mohair locks.

Meanwhile on the home front, Kevin, who has been trying to snuggle up to our older Cat, finally manged to do so.  He started at one end of the couch and every few minutes he wiggled forward several inches.  Finally he was touching Cat, who was quite alarmed and gave him the evil eye for a good few minutes.  However Kevin was sound asleep so eventually Cat ignored him, since it was obvious that Kevin wasn't moving out of Cat's reserved spot.