I’ve had this post in mind all week, and here we are, almost 7 days after the fact. I swear, the more things I have on my mind to do, the faster time flies.
Anyways- Last Saturday was the Waynesburgh Sheep and Fiber festival. As you read in my last post, I was on the Butler Gals Sheep to Shawl Team. Indeed. We came, we sheeped, we shawled. In my limited experiance, sheep to shawls always start rediculously early, and we were supposed to kick off at 9:00am, but ended up starting at 9:30. This means my behind had to be up at about 6:30 to be out the door at 7:30, to get to Waynesburgh at 8:30.
There were 4 teams in the sheep to shawl, basically 2 teams from 2 guilds. Waynesburgh is a tiny show, more country kitchen crafty than sheep and fiber related, but I digress. To give you a comparison, Maryland has 6 teams from 6 guilds. We set up, and the as soon as our shearer started shearing our sheep, the show was on, this sheep to shawl had a time limit of 4 hours. This is long for a sheep to shawl. The shortest one I know of is 2.5 hours. Yea. We were using a small brown sheep, a Southdown, I think, I never found out for sure. Two sheep were sheared, and each guild split the fleece between the two teams. believe me there is more than enough on one sheep for several teams! This is our sheep-o being sheared-

Isn’t that crazy!!?? Check out the belly on the white sheep. Yikes. As much as I love wool and fiber and all that is related, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to own sheep, or livestock of any kind for that matter. Nothankyouverymuch.
This was not only my first sheep to shawl, but my first time “spinning in the grease.” Which is when you spin right from the fleece, right off the sheep, without cleaning it or preparing it or anything. It. was. greasy. But not so bad. I learned that when the locks get cold, the grease sort of congeals, and is very hard to draft, but when they are warm, the locks draft like butter. Needless to say I kept my little bucket of locks right in any sunbeam I could find. We were spinning sport weight singles, which was very good for me, as I tend to spin thin, rather than thick. Also- for a team with three unique spinners on it, all of our spun yarn was very consistant. A team consists of usually 4 members, a weaver, and 3 spinners. I think that’s standard in sheeps to shawls, but I might be wrong. This time though, we were allowed a flicker. A flicker (Hi Angie!) is the person who takes locks from the fleece, and “flicks them” (didn’t see that one coming didja?) with a flicker, or flick carder. This opens up the burnt end of the locks for easy spinning. This made things go very smoothly.

Since our sheep was a chocolatey colored sheep, our weaver (Hi Sandy!) got the idea to do a Neapolitan themed shawl. Brilliant, I think. The warp on our loom, (those would be the vertical yarn strands running up through the loom) was brown, with pink and cream stripes. The genius of a the shawl comes from the weft pattern. the weft is the yarn that is woven horizontally through the warp on the loom. Each warp yarn strand runs through the loom, and is connect to a harness, and each of several harnesses are connected to peddles under the loom. When the peddles are pressed, harnesses move up and the weft yarn is passed through, the peddles are pressed in a specific pattern, which will create the pattern in the shawl itself. The basics of weaving are simple, but can be very confusing if you have no idea what I’m talking about. Allow me to illustrate-

Pretty, no? I had a great time, and I’ve already volunteered to spin in any other sheep to shawls that come up.

Filed by Julia at 5:40 pm under Sheep and Wool
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This Saturday and Sunday (May 19th and 20th) is the Annual Waynesburgh Sheep and Fiber Festival, in Greene County PA. This is maybe the 4th year for this show, I haven’t been there before, but I think it will make for a nice fiber fix this weekend. This show really isn’t advertised all that well, so I try to tell as many fiber knittery people as possible. So if your anywhere near south western Pa, please do come, it’s about an hour, give or take, south of Pittsburgh, if that helps.

I’ll be there bright and way to freaking early on Saturday, I’m spinning in the Sheep to Shawl competition, on the Butler County Spinners and Weavers team. This is my first sheep to shawl, I’m pretty excited, but honestly, I’m not looking forward to gunking up my pretty little wheel with all that greasy fresh-off-the-sheep fleece. Gah. We “borrowed” a chocolate colored sheep, I forget what breed, from one of the guild members. Hopefully I can take a chunk home to clean and spin, just a little bit though, I’m not particularly found of raw fleece. Anyways, I’ll be one of the three spinners for our team, the youngest by far, no offense to my wonderful and lovely team mates! So if you can make it Saturday, stop by and say hullo!

Filed by Julia at 9:34 pm under Sheep and Wool
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Two weeks ago on Saturday, I brought my new baby home.

A 2002 Volkswagen Cabrio. I love this little buggy. I’ve wanted a convertable in a bad way since last summer, to have as a summer car. A few weeks age I drove with a friend in his little Mercedes convertable, and the very next day I was out hunting one down for myself. I picked the Cabrio for it’s sporty-ness. It’s a very zippy little car. I had the idea to get a two seater, when both my dad and my sister came up with good reasons against it. Supposedly, insurance is higher, says my sister, and my dad, who can never believe all the baggage I always travel with, asked where I would put all my stuff. Points taken. The Cabrio has a full trunk, and the insurance rate for me was pretty low for 6 months, which is all I’ll need on it anyways, as I’m planning on storing it over the winter. Even though this one is 5 years old, and it’s had 3 previous owners, it only has 40,000 miles on it, and the interior, even though it’s been detailed, is in near perfect condition.

I drove it up to Michigan last week, and I can honestly say it was the best 5 and a half hour drive ever. Ever. While I love my Jeep to pieces, and will never never ever part with it (seriously, my unborn kids will be taking it off to college) the Jeep was given to me by my parents, while the Cabrio, the Cabrio is Earned. And that feels amazingly good.

Louie would like me to take him for a ride. He’s cute.

Filed by Julia at 7:40 pm under Cabrio
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but I got me some Maryland Schwag!!

BIG thanks to the Celtic Queen herself, for bringing me back a little piece of the fun. She asked if there was anything I wanted her to bring back, and I said YES!! I love the tote bag I got last year, and that’s what I wanted again. Then I gave her some extra money, and asked her if she could bring back some fun fibery stuff. Look at this awesomeness-

More from Puckerbrush Farm! This fantastic stuff is along the lines of their party roving,
but isn’t so much the “clown in a blender” (as Sarah and Laurie like to put it!) as the stuff I got before. There are alot of great green teals, and forest greens, and has alot of pink and chartruese sparklies mixed in. This is about 5 oz of fluff. I already spun a little, and it’s crazy!

Shop Stuff: It seems to be that my transitioning servers is still a bit unsettled. Everything appeared to be fine, both blog and shop-wise, then I got an order into the shop, and it got buggered again. So now it looks like it’s fixed, but today we’re going to do a little test to make sure. At noon, EST, I’m going to put a few skeins of Vesper Sock Yarn into the shop -just about 20 or so- and we’ll see if the shop doesn’t explode when the orders come in.
Not to worry though- I have a alot more waiting in the wings! If all goes well today, I’ll put them up either tomorrow, or Friday.

We’re all good! The shop didn’t explode, nothing crashed and sales went all smooth like butta. I’ll be stocking the shop later this week- like Friday or Saturday, with the rest of it.

Filed by Julia at 10:33 am under Get Your Yarn!!,Louie,Maryland,Sheep and Wool,Stash Enhancement
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If you hadn’t noticed earlier in the week, my site had been down, because I was switching to a bigger, better, server. A server where there is room for all of us, and bandwidth should hopefully not be an issuse again. It took awhile, but the lovely techy people at Hostdime, were very awesome at switching over the blog, and shop, and fixing the hiccups as they came up.

But. I suspect there is a glitch somewhere in the comments on the blog. So I need some help with this one. If you could all be so kind, please leave a comment, even just one word, so I can help the techy people to figure this one out.

If you have never commented here before, it will most likely go to the moderation queue, but that’s cool, because I need to figure out which comments are coming though to the blog, and which are not showing up here, but are being emailed to me.

Update: Wow! Thanks guys! I just rolled in from Michigan, and everything site-wise is great! I think there must have been some hiccups when the blog came back, but they were still working on the rest of the site. The comments are definately working!

Filed by Julia at 4:39 pm under General
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