Southern Adirondack Fiber Festival

It is that time of year again! 

I get to pet some short sheep and fondle woolie goodness to my hearts content. I just have to remember to buy the woolies before I love them, and pet them, and call them George.

I do believe I will start documenting one of my festival traditions. I like to wear a pair of socks made from yarn bought at last year's festival. It is a way for me to connect with the vendors. I can be rather shy or quiet at times so this works as a method of breaking me out of my shell. A beautiful form of woolie armor.

This year's armor is Fiber Stash's You Pick socks. Now these socks have my heart with all their vibrant beauty. It is very difficult to be sad looking at these socks.

So I bought more yarn from them.

Left to right: Tweedy Toes in "Moss", Polworth Roving in "70083" and Twinkle Toes in "Bushel".

Now I am not a Twinkle Toes kind of girl but sometimes when the yarn calls to you, you just pay the darn bill and be happy about it.

From D's Salt Rimmed Margarita Socks vendor, Mt Rutsen Studio, I found some more lovelies.

Little Abbey in "Auroa Borealis" (with neps) and Madison in "Deep Cornflower". Also I bought two more packs of my favorite stitch markers. You know the ones that made sweater knitting fun.

Last year I bought yarn for a sweater from Ensign Book Farm. I swatched the yarn but started having anxiety about running out of yarn so I let it sit and marinate in my mind. Last month I realized I can just buy more yarn in different colors and knit a colorwork yoke sweater. (I think I may have enough for sweater, cowl and mitts, na maybe I should buy more.)

In front may be my last skein of their Great Scott sock yarn.  

A nice big sweater/shawl bag from Stitched by JessaLu. Doctor Who themed of course.

That is five of the sweater skeins in there! Yowsa!

All of my new pretties taking a class picture. Could I be any more proud? 

Oh right I will be once I knit them into their destiny, right!

Like this sock of D's. It was showing off what some of them could/will be.

D came out at the end of the photo shoot to check out the new kids. 

Then he played yarn Jenga with them. 

Yarn Jenga is the best kind of Jenga!

S ADK Fiber Festival Oh Yeah!

Well this festival was a great time. Perfect weather and lovely vendors with beautiful wares.

True to my word I stopped at Stitched by Jessalu first. (She may be working on her site.) Well I did visit the ladies room first, but she was my first purchase of the day. As you can tell I love sheepy project bags, she has other prints but me I need to see happy sheep and a touch of London too. 

I then made a preliminary run through of all the barns just to do a mental inventory. I kept saying "I'll be back" and I was too.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of farms shared a booth and had I've been looking for but always seem to miss, Icelandic sock yarn. (It is from Icy Acres.) I've heard people rave about Icelandic sock yarn and soon I will be joining them. It is the lovely natural cream skein on the left.

In the same booth was Ensign Brook Farm whose name always makes me smile. D was an Ensign in the Navy when we married and I've always liked the word. Anyways they had lovely sock yarn too, called Great Scott cheviot. They had done some research and decided the sheep that are good enough to be used for kilt hose in Scotland is good enough for them. I am anxious to put this yarn to the test too. I bought both a dyed skein and a natural one. She used heavy metal free dyes too.

I did not buy any of their Romney sheep yarn but one of the funniest things of the festival was the lady telling me that people kept asking her if the yarn was from Mitt Romney's farm? I was then forced to ask her where her Obama yarn was. I'm guessing they were new festival people. Welcome to the club we take red and blue states. But we don't discuss politics on my blog.

Back to the yarn you say, well if I must. I then stopped into the Liberty Fibers to show off my socks and pick up something new. I'll be showing you the socks again in another post since I now have better pictures so you can see how truly lovely they are. (I may be a tad biased.) And while I was showing off she even remembered reading about them here. You may not recognize my face but my socks can be fairly distinctive.

I wandered back to the front of the show to pick out a skein for D socks. That is a pretty handsome, manly blue right? While he likes the crazy colors socks he also enjoys a subdued pair. Subdued manliness courtesy of Ball and Skein. This one is called After Midnight.

Periwinkle Sheep is sometimes stocked in my LYS, but some colors can not be resisted, plus if we want vendors at the festivals we need to buy from the vendors. I was there when a few of her knitting group cohorts were there. I heard "Well if it is not enough you know where to get more." quite a few times. It made me giggle. Now when I knit this one I will be constantly thinking of a Frenchman saying "Your mother smells of Elderberries." because its name is Elderberry. It remains one of the most creative insults I've ever heard.

Ah Bittersweet Woolery you tempting seductress you! I picked up Beloved on the left first, in the Glamourous Gams yarn base that includes cashmere. Oh cashmere I am loving you so. Then I noticed Debutante on the right in the Guilty Pleasures yarn base. Finally I tucked the middle one Oxblood in to my arms too. I thought for a bit and reasoned I should put Oxblood back and get another color of the less expensive Guilty Pleasures colorway when I realized it was in that base. Oh happy day, since I absolutely adore my Terrible Lizard socks from last year.

As I thinking this would be a nice combo for the Color Affection shawl, the owner asked me if that would be what I was making. I said no and we both agreed that the two darker ones are too close to be a good contrast but hmm, I need to buy that pattern and get the yarn requirements before I go to Rhinebeck because I am so jumping on that knitting train.

And I bought my first knitting tea cup. I packed it safely in with all my yarn. It was either Yarn Diva or Yarn Snob but this cup fit my hand best to that is what counts the most. I have the potter's card around here somewhere but I'll have to find it before I can post about them.

Now I was headed for the car with my overpacked bag when I decided to peak in on St Mary's on the Hill. Boy was I glad I did, where else can you get an ounce each of silver Romney roving and Tunis roving for less than $5? What more can a beginner spinner ask for? Plus I got to relive my high school cashier days when I offered help in using the old school credit card imprinter. My cashier skills are still intact!

Lastly I found some lovely roving at Foster Sheep Farm. Dyed Romney roving on the left and natural Wensleydale X Romney roving on the right. So I picked up some fiber with my yarn. Thanks Honey for suggesting that I take up spinning.

I did see several beautiful spindles but I just don't have the experience to buy another one. I may just need to try a few out at Rhinebeck, who knows?

Well here is my haul, in all its glory.

A great mix of things to enjoy. I better get knitting as Rhinebeck is closing in on me. Oh and D correctly estimated the value of my pile. Dude may be getting too smart for his own good. Nah he knows how many hours of entertainment it is for me too.

Well that was fun

I just completed round one of my fiber festival season. I can tell you that the tendency to buy yarn the same color as the shirt you're wearing did not hold true this year. This year I wore a candy apple red T-shirt and bought a lot of purple/plum/dark raspberry colored yarns.

I was proud of my self for not worrying about buying fiber. As a new spinner, the urge is there but the knowledge is lacking. I bought breed specific roving but didn't go crazy. It is mighty tempting when you see beach ball sized balls of beautifully colored roving. I don't even want to know what one of those is worth.

I did find a cute knitting related cup, but my cute T-shirt vendor was not there this year. There were a few vendors missing that I would have liked to buy from again. Alas as much as we would like to we can't all own a yarn shop. Businesses fail that is the sad fact of today's economy.

On the plus side I hope I helped a few to make ends meet, today.

Pictures to follow as tradition dictated. Don't worry either I still have money in the bank for Rhinebeck too. Hee Hee.

Festival

Can you guess what this weekend was? Well that shot does not really help but you can see it is much less crowded than Rhinebeck.

I have more yarn and yarny related goodness. 

Yep, it was Southern Adirondack Fiber Festival time again. I carefully picked out my socks so I could show them to their dyer. She took a picture and offered me 10% off the day's purchase but I was on the hunt for something and forgot to go back to the booth. I ended up buying from all new vendors.

First up we have Deathly Hallows from Forbidden Woolery. It is 100% Blue Faced Leicester (a sheep breed) and lovely. I was drawn into the booth by an amazing green skein but decided my last few purchases have been green, I will go with something different this time. (You're going to laugh at that comment later.) The shop owner pointed out to me that we tend to buy colors similar to what we're wearing and since I had on a green T-shirt it was certainly true in my case. 

Oh here is what I was looking for, my I gotta see that in real life item. A new project bag by Jessalu. She put up some pictures on Ravelry and I fell in love. I thought I was going for the TARDIS bag but this one with its glasses wearing knitting sheep, ah love at first sight. If you're looking for a new project bag I can tell you these are sturdy. We chatted for quite a while and I enjoyed it. Hey I may be coming out of my shell after all. 

Now this is a color scheme I don't see every day. Predominatly shades of green with browns and burnt red. This smooshy Merino/Nylon blend is from Bittersweet Woolery.

I ran into some of my knitting group sisters. After the festival I was hosting knitting at my house so we could show off all our goodies to each other. Well as we are know to do we started showing a bit early and I am just a tad glad because I was reminded that I had skipped the first building in search of my Jessalu bag. I went back and found these.

Red Maple, Super Sock 416 a Merino/Nylon blend and Forest, Sophia a Merino/Cashmere/Nylon blend from Ball and Skein. I saw this booth last year and wished I would have picked up a copy of the Ishbel pattern but I did not see any this year, but I got yarn!!

Oh look at that loveliness from Moonlight and Laughter. Why would I buy fiber and yarn packaged together? Thrum mittens of course. What is a Thrum mitten? Go look what the Yarn Harlot has to say about it, since she is the one that first introduced me to the idea. OK if you're too shy I will tell you what I know, some of which may be incorrect. They are a method of creating a lined mitten that was developed on the east coast of Canada. Instead of knitting the mitten with only yarn every so often you knit in a 3 inch piece of unspun fiber. The ends of the fiber are on the inside of the mitten and make it fuzzy. This will eventually felt and provide a wind proof and water proof mitten. Sounds toasty doesn't it? Well if I want to be warm I usually look to Canada or Norway for their innovations. They know warm.

Let me introduce you to Splendor Sock Yarn in Dark Roast by Jill Draper Makes Stuff. See what I mean about buying green yarn? Anyway this is a Merino/Cashmere/Nylon blend also. You sensing a theme in my buying this year? I make one set of Cashmere blend socks this year and now I am digging it! This is a manly color maybe I should introduce D to the softness that is Cashmere. You want me to say Cashmere one more time? Cashmere!

Who can turn down a T-shirt with ewes on it? Not this girl this year. And frolicking ewes also, I think I will wear this shirt on my birthday!

So that is what my festival yielded. Is it wrong to pet them all the time? Yeah, I did not think so either. Happy Knitting

What to do

So I was writing up our schedule for the coming months and discovered an issue. Granted of all the issues in the world this one is not bad.

I have two local fiber festivals that I like to go to. The newer one is in September (Southern Adirondack Fiber Festival - SADK) and the mack daddy one (New York Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck) is in October. This year they are 3 weeks apart! Have I not noticed the timing the last two years? This barely gives me yarn fume recovery time. I will still be slightly woolly. The September acquisitions will not even have made it into the regular yarn wall stash. Gus will still be bringing them one by one into our bedroom at night. (It's a weird Momma cat thing that I totally adore. Yes, he knows he is not a Momma cat he just has the urge to treat yarn a certain way.)

Oh speaking of Gus's yarn obsession, he is a yarn snob too. I received some inexpensive acrylic yarn, you know the kind most of us buy when we're starting out knitting because it is cheap and soft, therefore it must be yarn for learning on? Well we woke up the next day and Gus had clearly investigated the bag and may even have tried to pick it up in his mouth, but it did not make it very far. It is either yarn snobbery or the skein was too big for him to carry.

Anyways back to my fiber festival issue. I'm already saving up for the festivals so I don't have to worry about my budget. It is not like an extra week would allow me to replenish the coffers. I guess I am just a wee bit surprised they would choose to put the festivals so close together.

Of course Rhinebeck is becoming quite a large and cumbersome festival, so some people may not choose to go to that one. SADK is newer and less intense. If I know a vendor is going to be at both festivals, I choose to go to SADK booth instead.

Last year SADK was my heads up that sock yarn prices had increased over the past year in 2009 most of the sock yarn skeins I bought ran about $20. In 2010 there seemed to be a $2 bump for almost every vendor, which proved true at Rhinebeck also. Also at SADK I did not seemed to be overwhelmed by either the crowds or the volume of yarns and was able to find and try out some new (to me) dyers. I know I knit up the untried ones first because I was so excited. I cast on socks for D between the festivals because I felt a wee bit guilty buying more yarn. Of course last year I had three yarn buying excursions. The two festivals and in August I was at Twisted in Portland OR with a boat load of Socks that Rock and a couple of dyers I had not seen in this area.

While now I see the intelligence of acquiring a stash while the prices are lower I still don't want to let my stash get out of hand. In that spirit I did a bit of research into last year's big three purchases. At Twisted I bought 7 skeins of sock yarn, 5 of which have been knit up. SADK scored me 4 skeins of sock yarn and 2 of those have been sockified. Rhinebeck landed me 6 sock yarn skeins with 3 of them now wearable, and another 2 on the needles. Therefore I've only added 5 skeins to the stash. That is much better than buying the 17 skeins and leaving them all as stash. Hey I am doing much better than even I thought! Maybe I should go buy more yarn. Oh wait I just did. I'll show you pictures another day, don't worry it was only 2 skeins and the way I'm going one of them should be knit up by the end of this post.

Well at least I make me laugh.