Purchases from the 2015 Vermont Sheep & Woolcraft Fair

I got a big treat this month: on Saturday, October 3, I went up to Tunbridge, Vermont, to attend the 27th annual Vermont Sheep & Wool Festival.

The festival, which I'd gone to once before, has all the usual fun wool festival things like sheepdog herding demonstrations and small ruminant lectures, as well as pens full of sheep, cashmere & mohair goats, alpacas, angora rabbits, and llamas. And they have loads and loads of vendors of beautiful yarn.

Since everything at this festival is tempting, I decided this year to stay away from the roving and just look at the prepared yarn. And, in particular, yarn that was unique, created by hand by small farmers and artisans in small quantities. I especially love it when the vendors have spun wool from their own animals and can tell you the animals' names.
I came away with some great stuff. Here's what I bought:



Luigi's Locks from Yellow Dog Farm,
dyed an intense grassy green

A beautiful charcoal gray and pale green hand-spun mohair yarn, variegated in both texture and color, from Dillner Hillside Farm. Two of their cute tiny goats were in a pen right next to their vendor tent.

Green & gray hand-spun mohair
from the Dillner Hillside Farm, 
variegated in both color and texture

Five vegetable-dyed sampler yarns from Tidal Yarn that I plan to use to practice tapestry weaving. The owner of Tidal Yarn says she gets her yarn from small New England sheep farms and dyes much of it using plants she grows in her own garden.

A bouclé mohair yarn called "Luigi's Locks" from Yellow Dog Farm. The fleece was specifically from Luigi the Goat, whose picture graces the label of the yarn. It is a FANTASTIC color of grass green with little streaks of yellow that the owner said that she had just dyed that week specifically for the show.

A beautiful hand-spun combination of jewel-toned pink, burgundy, and lime green from Wiseacres Farm. The vendor said people did seem to like her "crazy mixes" (of which this was one).

I only wish I'd been able to have a little bit of everything. You can find a full vendor list here.


My haul from the 2015 VT Sheep & Wool Festival

Big E Natural Brown Alpaca Scarf

Dimensions: 5 1/4" wide by 70" long
Completed: December 2011

In the fall of 2011, I went to The Big E. (For the uninitiated and/or non-New-Englanders out there: The Big E is like a state fair, except that it includes all of the New England states.)

At the Big E, in the Mallary Complex, which is where all the sheep, goats, llamas, alpacas, and other fleecy animals are housed, there is a small store called the Fiber Nook. There they demonstrate spinning and weaving, and they have yarns and hand-made woolen goods for sale.

There at the Fiber Nook I bought one skein of a soft, worsted-weight alpaca yarn. It looks like it's the natural shade of whatever alpaca it was taken from.

It knitted up quickly into this beautiful, soft, natural brown, k1p1 rib scarf.

I have no idea who produced the yarn, since I lost the label shortly after I made the scarf. I went back in subsequent years to see if the yarn would still be there, but so far it has not.

So this is truly a one-of-a-kind accessory.

Swatch Yarn Has Arrived and Now I Need to Buckle Down

I just received the Cascade 220 yarn I bought for my TKGA masters program swatches. Very exciting.

Now I just have to get up the courage to make the first one. Who knew a simple garter stitch swatch would be so scary? Especially when it's going to be in one of these silly Easter egg colors?

Ultra Alpaca Fisherman's Cap

Completed: 2013

Dimensions: 18" diameter

Several years ago I was all eager to make myself a brick red sweater. I bought a couple skeins of different alpaca yarns I thought were good colors, and I had all these grand plans to make a bunch of sample swatches in fancy cable patterns, and then the sweater itself.

Once I came to grips with the fact that I most likely was never actually going to make the sweater, I figured I should go ahead and use up the sample skeins in smaller projects. One of the skeins I had lying around was Berroco's Ultra Alpaca yarn in color #6280 Mahogany Mix. It is a really soft worsted weight alpaca and wool yarn, perfect for a non-itchy fisherman's hat.  

This one is knit on #5 needles, with a gauge of 23 stitches and 32 rows = 4".

The finished hat with more accurate color

Good stitch clarity but inaccurate color!

Office Supplies

Office supplies for the HGA COE
and the TKGA MHK

I biked down to Staples and bought all of the office supplies I'm going to need for the handknitting and handweaving masters programs. It makes for quite an array.

The differences in the program instruction manuals are interesting. If I were to judge them based purely on the handbooks, the handweaving program seems a lot more organized and a lot more businesslike.

For one thing, every single item that you submit for the handweaving COE must only have your ID number on it; no names are allowed, so as not to bias the judges. They also give you a clear outline of the different sections and types of work you'll have to do for the program, and a list up front of all the materials you will need for the program.

The knitting program, on the other hand, requires you to put your name, address, email, and phone number on every single sample piece you submit. The instructions seem a bit hodgepodge; for example, the swatches themselves are described in one section and the information sheet you have to submit with your swatches is described in a different section. And the materials you need for your submission are sprinkled throughout the instructions, section by section, so you have to read through the entire thing to figure out all of what you need to gather.

A Great Leap Forward: Masters Programs

I did something rash a couple weeks ago. I bought the instruction packets for both the Master Hand Knitting Program from The Knitting Guild Association, and the Certificate of Excellence (Level I) from the Handweavers' Guild of America.

These are the two top master certificate programs in the national American guilds for these respective crafts. I realize it's a bit presumptuous of me to attempt to do both. I don't know if I'll be able to finish getting all the materials together for either or both programs in a timely manner, much less pass either one--but I'm very excited to try. My dream would be to finish the submissions for at least one of them by 2018.

Now I have to read through the packets and see what I need to get started.

Big Block Romney Mittens

Completed: Fall 2014
Dimensions: Women's Large or Men's Medium (8" around widest part of hand)

The finished mittens, palm side up

These mittens were a bold experiment for me, since I used a big ostentatious blocky pattern that was far outside my usual delicate and demure comfort zone. They're not one of my more successful products, but they went quickly and I know I benefited from the radical departure from my norm.

I made them using the Foxhill Farm yarn I had left over after finishing my Spartan Romney sweater. I had one skein of their natural Black Romney left, plus a skein of oatmeal-colored Romney in roughly the same gauge that I had bought from them at the same time.

The finished mittens, palm side down

I wound both skeins into two balls each, and then knitted the mittens by holding two strands of the same color together as one. The original wool was a heavy worsted weight, and the double strand ended up being roughly a super bulky gauge.

The pattern for the mittens--both the structure and the two-color design--came from The Mitten Book, which is a great little book chock-full of traditional Swedish mitten patterns.