Greencastle!
Posted by fiberxspin on April 24, 2010
Well, it happened: S and M finally met in person for the first time at The Fiber Event at Greencastle! Unfortunately, while we did manage to obtain banana fiber, we didn’t set it on fire after all (thanks to the wind being a bit tempestuous), and we didn’t get to hang out for very long due to S’s crazy amounts of Real Life Obligations. Still, it was pretty awesome to roam around the festival together and hang out on a blanket in the parking area with our assorted friends and family. Joining us were Ellen of the blog Sheepwreck, Michael (a relatively new spinner who was attending his very first fiber festival), sisters Waldorf and Stadler, S’s mother, Kara, and my boyfriend The Buttface (whose apartment the Chicago contingent took over for the weekend).
Waldorf, Michael, S, M (and penisgun) and Ellen
One of the most fun things about meeting up in person with someone you usually only talk to online is finally getting to show off so many of the things you’ve discussed or only seen in pictures. This is especially relevant when the people in question are fiber nuts- there really is no substitute for the tactile nature of fiber. So, there was an immediate spate of “Hey! Check this out! Pet this! Oooh, right, look at this!” as S finally received her share of our massive World of Wool order from awhile ago and inspected the Wollmeise I’d brought to show her (she wasn’t that impressed), and I got to happily dig through the pile of books she’d lugged along. I also got to shoot her with my penisgun, shown above in its censored form (Ellen took and edited the picture, phooey).
Of course, we all hung out at Susan MacFarland’s and Trading Post Susan’s booths a lot, in addition to dashing between buildings, cuddling baby bunnies, ogling dyed fiber and raw fleece, and consuming way too much kettle corn. I got to show a lot of people my Very Special Spindle Case full of ultrafine 15-micron merino being spun on my Greensleeves Ethan Jakob. It was fun watching their reactions when they realized what the case was originally for.
I had a lovely chat with the people at Cormo 24/7, who had mounds and mounds of luscious Cormo and Cormo-cross colored top. While I was drooling over the various tops, a box from Ohio Valley Natural Fibers got dropped off, and contained within was four and a half pounds of this
ganked from Cormo 24/7's blog
processed into pin-drafted roving. It’s marvelously soft and fluffy and boingy, with hardly a nep to be seen. Two pounds of it came home with me; one before exiting the booth on Friday, and the other one as a gift from Ellen the next day after she heard me dithering about whether or not to buy everything that was left.
It’s been a little over a week since I came home with the amazing awesome roving, and I haven’t been able to keep my hands off it. Seriously, a wad of it is hanging out on the bed with me as I type this. Right now I’m trying to come up with a rough estimate of how much yardage (3-ply, approximately sport-weight after finishing) I’ll need for my very first sweater, and spindle-spinning madly away in the meantime. Yes, you read that correctly. I’m using a spindle (my bloodwood Bosworth mini) to spin the yarn for a whole freaking sweater. My plot to keep the finished yarn relatively consistent is to spin a bunch of 50g balls of singles, number them, and when I’m ready to start winding plying balls, I’ll mix the numbers up so that none of them are in order. This way, even if I fail at keeping the singles the same size over time, the end product won’t be super-thin at one end and thicker at the other or something. I think it was Amy King who wrote about this technique in SpinOff, so hopefully either it will work or I won’t suck at consistency. I’m already about eight ounces in, and am thinking about cobbling together elements from a few different patterns to create my ultimate dream sweater. Have I mentioned that I only figured out how to knit more than garter stitch last November, and have certainly never designed anything? This will be interesting.
Wow, I need to shut up about that roving and its associated project. They’ve taken over my brain.
M
