woolgathering

My first fiber-fest!

It was a gorgeous day, and I must say I enjoyed the drive down nearly as much as browsing the exhibits (which is good, as it took about as long)

It was also perfect sweater-weather. Just the right side of cool. I've resolved that I need to make a better sweater for wearing in public like that. I felt a little embarrassed of my not-quite fitting felted tweed. FPS would have been great, but it was a bit nippy for that.

I didn't come home with anything (other than half a rootbeer float), which wasn't completely the plan, but not really unexpected either. I didn't plan at all to get things I actually needed, and the focus of the exhibits was spinning material, not knitting.

This was, honestly the first time I'd seen people actually spinning. It was fascinating. The techie in me is embarrassed to admit that I was paying so much attention to their hands I didn't even look at how the wheel was working - it was just magically twisting and sucking up the yarn. Too bad, I'm sure the wheel mechanics were fascinating too.

I was hoping a bit that I could get a basic 'learn to drop-spindle' set and enough instruction to set me on my way, but pretty much everyone was using wheels, though I did get to try one of them (fun! and not as hard as I thought!). I *almost* went over to the kids area where they were doing hands-on CD spindle lessons, but chickened out. There wasn't a heck of a selection of spindles to begin with.