Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival

On Saturday I attended the annual Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival (MDSW) for the first time. What a great day! This is one of the largest fiber festivals in the country–I’ve heard estimates of 50,000-100,000 attendees per year. It’s a celebration of all things fiber–from the sheep, rabbits, and goats to the finished products–yarn and knitted/felted/woven fabrics. There is an animal component with exhibitions and judging, and a market component where one can buy fleece, roving, yarn, spinning wheels, and any knitting/spinning/weaving tool or accessory you can think of. There are also other vendors selling hand crafted baskets, furniture, jewelry, and the like. Add in musicians and fair food and you have the makings of a great festival.

Having heard the stories of the crowds and traffic backups on Saturday (the festival runs all weekend), I decided to head out early for the just-over an hour drive from Northern Virginia to the Howard (MD) County fairgrounds. My strategy worked well. I breezed right in ahead of the crowds, got a great parking space near the entrance, and headed onto the grounds. Even though I arrived about an hour before the official start time, there were people there even earlier, and there were already substantial lines of people waiting outside two very popular booths–the festival souvenirs, and The Fold, vendor for the currently-hot item “Socks That Rock” sock yarn.

I wandered a bit and then met up with some friends who arrived a couple hours later. We went to the Ravelry meetup, then spent the rest of the day shopping, eating, and sitting on blankets knitting. I left the festival 10 hours after I arrived, sunburned, dead tired, and very happy.

My “loot” from MDSW: yarn for four pairs of socks and a shawl, a felted iPod case, and a hand-woven white pine basket that was made as I watched.

Lessons learned:
–The hype about things selling out is overstated. To listen to people talk beforehand, you’d think that the stock of certain popular booths would be ravaged within minutes of the festival opening. There was still plenty of yarn and other goodies left by the end of the day.
–People talked about how crowded it is on Saturday and not to go until Sunday if you dislike crowds. Yes, there were a lot of people there, but it wasn’t uncomfortably crowded. Maybe I’m desensitized from living in DC and commuting on the overcrowded Metro trains every day?
–Having been there once, next year I’m going to plan my time so that I see more of the animal side of the festival. I spent most of the day browsing the booths and knitting on the lawn. No regrets about that, but next year I would like to see the sheep dog demonstration, maybe a shearing, and wander through the barns to see more of the animals.
–Cell phones are a godsend at events like this. Made it so much easier for our group to coordinate and find each other when we wanted to go separate ways and then regroup.
–Reapply sunscreen liberally. With my fair Anglo skin I’m usually over-vigilent about sunscreen, but I still managed to get burned on one side of my neck and shoulders.
–There was more of a cross-section of people than I was expecting: male, female, old, young, singles and families.

I’m eager to start knitting up the yarn I bought, but I’m trying to finish at least a few of the projects that I already have in the works before casting on more.  Stay tuned for updates.

Pair-A-Month Sock Challenge

Just as I’m rediscovering my enthusiasm for sock knitting, I find the Pair-A-Month sock knitting challenge.  So I joined, and quickly found an “accountability partner” in Christina from Germany.  The deal is that we each need to finish a pair of socks each month.  If one of us fails to do so, we have to send enough sock yarn for a pair to the other person.  Could be a way to score some cool German sock yarn that I couldn’t find around here.  On the other hand, having to give up sock yarn plus pay international postage is a good incentive for me to stay on task with finishing my pairs.  And, in a year’s time, I’ll have 12 more pairs of lovely custom-fitting handknit socks.

For April, I’ll be knitting a pair of Monkey socks designed by Cookie A. I started these yesterday and they are looking great so far!

A few other recent FOs

Here are a few other recently finished objects that I’ve knitted:

Peekaboo Mittens

Baby Kimonos

“Fetching” Fingerless Gloves

“Amanda” Hat

Happy St. Paddy’s Day!

It took 9 days of stealing a moment here and a moment there to knit, but I finished in time to wear today for St. Patrick’s Day: the Lacy Prairie Shawl in a gorgeous shade of variegated green.

The shawl is a pattern from Cheryl Oberle’s Folk Shawls in the Verde Adriana colorway of Malabrigo, the absolute softest wool yarn ever.

Now, to find a way of wearing it that doesn’t make me look like Jemima Puddle-Duck.

Let No Good Deed Go Unpunished

After dropping off some household items for the MV Big Flea, a community flea market fundraiser to benefit our neighborhood elementary school, I was attempting to back out of a narrow alley and managed to sideswipe the mirror off the driver’s door of my car.  Fortunately, the swiping was courtesy of a utility pole rather than someone else’s vehicle.  Unfortunately, preliminary estimates put the cost of repair in the several-hundred dollar range, far more than the value of the items I had just donated.  I’d have been better off had I stayed home and just written them a check.

However, my luck was not all bad.  My father happens to be an auto mechanic and I spent lots of time at his elbow in his garage–yes, I was a bit of a tomboy and probably the only girl in my 6th grade class who knew how to bleed a brake line.  Though I have since moved several states away from where I grew up and thus too far for him to make the repair, he convinced me that the job would not be that difficult and that he could tell me over the phone how to do it.  He was able to get the replacement mirror at cost for me, $75 including shipping.  (To go through a garage here would have cost almost $200 just for the mirror, plus the labor charges to install it.)

Armed with my new mirror and a very basic set of household tools, I commenced to tear the car door apart in order to install the new mirror.  I got off to a poor start when I found that I didn’t have the proper tool to remove one of the screws (which Dad told me later was a TORX screw), but with a little stubbornness and ingenuity I managed to jam an Allen wrench in there to get the job done.  About 30 minutes later I was proudly adjusting the new mirror, door panel firmly reattached.  And yes, the electronic controls for the door locks and windows still worked, too.

Idea for the new house

I’m liking this DIY $10 Pot Rack that Myscha Theriault posted on Wise Bread. I’m thinking I’d want something a little softer than “industrial black” for the new kitchen, but basically the same idea.

Knit your own iPhone

Daddy Types gives the step by step details on how-to (photos included), as provided by his mom.