It's Warm Outside!

Yes, the warm weather finally arrived.  Actually I think it is around 80 today.  It went from winter to summer in a matter of days, but there is a cooler weekend ahead, I think.  Now what we really need is some rain.  We've had nice warm sunshine and now we need the rain to make the grass grow.  The alpacas say "please"  because I am not letting them out on the pasture until we get a good soaking rain.

I was looking at my blog entry from April 5th last year and the photo at the top of the page was of Rowdy sitting amongst bright yellow wildflowers with redbuds blooming behind him.  We are so far behind this year, there is almost no color in the woods yet, but it's coming!

I have mostly fibery stuff to write about this week.  I attended the Knitter's Fantasy Show in Youngstown Ohio on Saturday.  It was a nicely done show and well attended.  Here is my booth all set up.  My sales were good, but not fabulous.  I sold some syrup, some yarn, some roving and some alpaca bears.   So many people oohed and aahed over my rugs, but no one bought any.  I guess I would have to say I would attend this show again.  I even talked to one nice lady (whose name I neglected to get) who says she follows my blog and purchased a black alpaca fleece from me on ravelry a couple years back and she even brought along some of the beautiful yarn she had spun from the fleece.  Gorgeous.

It is always wise to take an easy project along when one is going to be sitting at a festival all day.  I finished up a pair of fingerless mitts from some of my handspun alpaca/wool roving.  I basically knit the entire second mitt while I talked to people  who came through at the show.



 The pattern is a freebie on ravlery.com called Bainbridge Mitts.  They used about 100 yards of yarn and are incredibly simple.  I have enough of this yarn left that I plan to make a matching hat.  I need a new hat, but I guess there is no rush now, right?

I also have to brag about my Spanish Armada Shawl, which I think I posted about finishing last month as I was boiling sap into syrup.  Our county artists' group has an art show every April and this year I decided to enter some photographs and also my Spanish Armada Shawl.  I dropped everything off last Monday and on Sunday I was able to go into town and see how my entries had done.  My photos did not take any prizes, but my shawl took first in the "Fabric" category.  It scored 50 out of 50 possible points.  The judge was a former art professor at Ohio University.  My mother-in-law also got a first place for a batik watercolor and my father-in-law took a first place in the sculpture category, so the Moores were well-represented.

 This is a short week at home for me since tomorrow I leave to go to Dayton to do a fiber demonstration for a group that my mother has gotten involved with.  She said most of the group are retired home-ec teachers and once they found out I was a spinner, they were anxious to have me come and visit.  So I drive to Mom's tomorrow afternoon and will do a demo on Thursday morning, then have dinner with some high school friends while Mom has her book club and I will come home Friday.    I need to get a lot of things together for this demo, various types of fibers, hand cards, my wheel, prepped fiber, finished items, etc. so that is tonight's project.

I have also finally washed up a fleece I have been hoarding until I had time to work with it.  it is a beautiful LONG staple, super fine alpaca in white with fabulous crimp.  It is too long to send to a processor, over 6", so I plan to do it all myself.  The plan is to blend it with silk and I will probably dye part of the fleece as well as the silk before carding it into batts to spin.  Here is is on my drying rack in the ever-so-useful mudroom!  3 1/2 pounds of fiber looks like a lot, doesn't it?