September 16 -- Fleece Fair

My spinning guild puts on fiber-fondling, color-soaking-up extravaganzas in September and in February.

September 16 was a beautiful day. Cool, but clear and blue.





Did that stop fiber people from going inside? Not.

Here is part of what awaited us indoors.

This is a middle school cafeteria. The whole fair used to fit inside the cafeteria, but now the fleeces, the tools (from spinning wheels to knitting needles), and the finished goods are outside the cafeteria.

Here you can see balls of roving (prepared for spinning: clean, and with the individual fibers going more or less in the same direction), and those racks in front of the windows hold yarn.





Many members of the group have animals, and raise most of this fiber. Most of it is wool (from a number of different breeds of sheep), but there is also mohair (from angora goats), angora (to confuse the issue, this very soft fiber comes from rabbits), llama, alpaca, cashmere (also from goats, but a different breed of goat).....





Most of the roving you see above has been dyed, but of course there is a lot of natural color as well.





One of the things that is fun about buying fiber this way (right after getting to fondle everything!) is choosing the work of a particular sheep........ Anna makes lovely very dark brown fleece, which the camera, alas, declined to record.....





A couple of close-ups of prepared fiber. Isn't it nice when they show us what the fiber looks like spun into yarn *and* worked into a small sample (or several samples!)?





Seeing the fiber spun and worked into a sample is even more important when the roving has multiple colors...... I think I have some idea what this might look like if spun. But I could well be wrong! (And it does, of course, depend *a lot* on how you spin it.....)