Road Trip - On the road again!

I have just finished a 7 hour drive to beautiful southern Colorado today.  Picking up the kid from college and a mini vacation.  I brought my cloud fiber to spin on the spindle.  Need to finish the sachet bag and will begin the Estonian lace scarf on this trip. The cabin is really nice and I did bring items to take photos of in the beautiful mountain area of Southern Colorado.  There is a lake about 1/2 hour away and we are near a big hiking trail.

The Great Western Alpaca Show begins tomorrow and although I will miss it this weekend I did enter a skein of yarn into the competition.  Competition life has definitely been a learning experience for me.  First I forgot to provide postage on the return envelope.  Then I forgot to provide a description of my item for the competition - somehow I missed this detail on the 2 page instruction form.  I told the coordinator that this had definitely been a learning experience and next year I will rock at this process.  The Estes Park Wool Market also has a yarn competition with a low entry fee.  I am going to try to enter 2 items to it and hopefully will be able to make it to the judging event.  I am thinking of entering my spindle spun yarn of alpaca and perhaps some roving.  I need to check the rules to see if the spun items can be from rovings or must be hand processed.  Apparently there is a big distinction in the competition arena of spun yarn.

One more weekend to shearing day and I have been reviewing my fleece sorting information to make this year's fleeces cleaner.  Need to confirm with my rancher what she considers to be her prime, seconds and thirds as mills and hand spinners may have different expectations. 

I ordered cotton bolls (10) from Woodland Woolworks which is sadly going out of business.  I have always wanted to try processing cotton and took the leap this week and ordered the fiber.  Will keep you posted on how well it turns out - am curious about how much fiber I can get from the 10 bolls.  Then of course the next decision is what to ply it with for a knitting or yarn project.  This summer is going to be a great journey into fiber events, projects and sales!