Saturday, June 11, 2011

Fiber festival update

2 posts in one day!  I just learned how to send photos from Flickr to Blogger so the cotton yarn was posted all on its own.  Today was the Estes Park Wool Market and I was there for 3 hours.  My Facebook Page has a few photos of the cute sheep and goats I remembered to take pictures of while there.  The Shetland sheep are so cute and small.  There were quite a few tiny sheep at the festival today.  I also learned that Jacob sheep can have 2, 4 or 6 horns and there was one with 4 horns (no I didn't take a picture).  Picked up lots of business cards of ranches to visit this summer/fall.  There were lots of CVM breeds there along with Border Leicester and Wensleydale breeds.  Tomorrow is the sheep to shawl competition but I am not sure I'll make it (4 hour roundtrip commute to Estes from my home).  I did a lot of shopping and viewing of animals today.

There was one yak rancher at the festival who lives about 2 hrs from me and allows visits to their ranch.  I bought 1 ounce of a yak cloud.  They also sold Quivit ($50) which I had heard was expensive but didn't realize how expensive until I got there.  Quivit is the fiber from Musk Ox which are in Alaska and Canada and is rare.  I am going to blend my precious yak fiber with alpaca fiber and make it into a yarn.  Yak, Quivit and Paco Vicuna are some of the most expensive fiber to spin around the globe as they are rare animals.

I am an hour away from winning the bid on some wool carders (90 TPI) which will be good for the CVM fibers and Romney fibers in my stash.  We had great weather for the festival and it was a relaxed event.  My fiber shopping is done for the year.  I have so much to play with plus I will be picking up the mill processed fibers this month. Well I am off to rest my tired feet and spin up some dyed superwash wool from the stash.

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