Maryland Sheep & Wool Recap

When non-knitting friends and family ask me about Maryland Sheep & Wool or MDSW as most fibery people call it, the only way I can describe it is that it is like Black Friday held at a fair for fiber enthusiasts.  There are every type of sheep that you can imagine, yarn of every color in the rainbow and fiber type, fantastic lamb cooked in a countless number of ways, and more fiber and yarn enthusiasts than I have ever seen in one place together.   Since pictures tell a much better story than I can, this post will mainly be pictures of what we saw and enjoyed.

The Central Maryland Knitting Guild yarn bombed the fence at the entrance.  What a happy thing to see first thing when we arrived!

 

 This is a baby mohair goat having his breakfast.  It's a good thing our yard is too small for farm animals or this guy would have been coming home with us!

 After we went through the line to get a t-shirt our first stop was the Miss Babs booth.  This was the booth to be at the festival.  There were a few others that were busy, but Miss Babs booth was packed for the entire weekend and the line to pay went out the back door of the building she was in and curved around.  When we saw the line Andy immediately told me to go pick out what I wanted and he would wait in line.  I wish I had taken a picture of the line - it really was like Black Friday only with out the pushing and rudeness.  Everyone was as nice as could be!  I made it in and out of the booth with some goodies and met Andy who continued to wait in line while I walked through a few other booths.  Have I mentioned that he is the best husband ever?!  I was really excited to see my Mother of Dragons shawl hanging up in the booth along with the pattern.  It's one of my proudest moments :)

 

I picked up a few goodies in her booth and a couple of skeins from other dyers that I like. Can you tell that I was in a bit of a purple mood?

From left to right: Miss Babs Polydactl Set in Edge of Reality (I think this is going to be a new shawl design!), Miss Babs Yummy 2-Ply in Shaken Not Stirred, Miss Babs Yummy 2-Ply in Bat Sh**** Crazy, Miss Babs Yummy 2-Ply in Perfectly Wreckless, Miss Babs Yowza in Zombi Prom, Maple Creek Farm Yuma in Twilight, Ellen Coopers Yarn Sonnets Tinkerbell's Gold in Diva - those flecks you see are sparkles, and Maple Creek Farm Portland in Spice's.  

I also picked up a few other goodies.

Andy found the bag with the dragon on it.  I absolutely love it and totally missed it when we were walking by the booth that had them.  It's a backpack and holds a huge amount of yarn.  What else would you put in a backpack, right?  A purple MDSW t shirt, added to my Signature Needle collection and picked up a Shark Week kit from the Tsarina of Tsocks that I pre-ordered before the show.

On Sunday we got to hang out with our friends Julia and Daniel.  Julia was so sweet and brought some of her Babydoll Southdown roving!  I'm pretty sure it's from her own sheep and it's so soft that you just want to cuddle up with it!  She brought sampler of different colors which you can find in her Etsy shop and a larger ball in a beautiful creamy white color.  I think it's going to be time to break out my wheel soon and spin this lusciousness up!

One of the other booths that I had way too much fun in was Going Gnome.  They had so many cute felted things and were so nice and let me take a million pictures of everything!  There was a felted chess set with Vikings and gnomes, a couple of tree creatures that had incredible detail, and one of my favorites was a giant purple dragon.  I think she was about 4' long!  If you look closely at the picture of her you can see that she accidentally stepped on one of the gnomes!  I picked up some felting supplies while I was there and took a few extra pictures of the Viking so that I can make one.

My Aunt Linda, Uncle Gary and Cousin Lindsay live within driving distance of the festival and we got to visit with them Saturday evening and stay the night.  Lindsay has her own place and came over so we could all hang out and have a mini slumber party.  Andy and I tried to stay up with everyone, but couldn't stay up as long as we liked.  We had so much fun visiting and they have a beautiful house on the water.  We were able to sit outside in the evening and have wine and appetizers.  Gary has built boats as a hobby ever since I can remember.  We were talking about when he lived in Franklin Square, NY with my Grandparents. Every summer I would get to go spend some time with them and it was always a huge highlight.  One year Gary was building a boat while I was there and he took a picture of me and my brother in front of it and one of us took one of him leaning on it.  It's been at least 35 years and he still has the boat.  He pulled out the album from when he was building it and we decided to try to recreate the picture!  I think we did a pretty good job.

Andy took a picture of us.  It's been so long since we were all together, but it didn't seem like it.

I was able to work on the shawl in Coquette while we were driving to and from the festival. It's making really good progress and I am really enjoying the pattern and yarn.  I haven't named the design yet and have just been calling it Coquette after the name of the yarn.  Since that name has been used for patterns about a million times on Ravelry, I think I need to pick something else.  Any ideas?

Rain, rain, go away.

It's been abnormally cooler here so far this June.  I actually contemplated turning the heat on for a bit yesterday.  I managed to restrain myself and opted for adding a sweatshirt over my long sleeve shirt.  The rail road ties for our new patio project were going to be delivered yesterday.  It was raining so hard from Tropical Storm Andrea that the delivery was rescheduled until next week.  At least the ground will be easy to dig where we are adding the patio! Our soil here is red clay and when it is dry it seems almost as hard at concrete to dig.  It's going to be a wet weekend here so I think we will be working on some inside projects.  After seeing a larger-than-a-small-dog spider in the basement, I'm hoping we can do a bit of organizing down there.  We still have a few things that need to be sorted from when we remodeled the kitchen last year.  Andy is going to help which is great because I think the spider is now under the dryer.  I sprayed it with wasp spray but it took off so quickly that I think it may have survived. 

I finished the back of the Tempest sweater.  It's such a cute pattern and very easy to follow.  I'm hoping to start the front's this weekend.  We picked up Warm Bodies and The Guilt Trip from Redbox.  It's going to be a perfect night to curl up and watch movies. 

If you are working on a striped project and having trouble carrying your yarns, I put a little tutorial up on Ravelry.  It's in post #253 in this thread.


Kristi sent me one of the new Another Way Kit's from the last Shalimar Etsy update.  I just love these colors, this grouping is called Vero Beach. 

It's not like I didn't have anything else on the needles that I should be working on, but I just had to cast on as soon as the kit arrived!  The Another Way pattern is so much fun and really quite easy.  The colors are really happy and cheerful. 

Needle felting therapy is still going on.  I think my arm muscles are getting into great shape from it. I think I need to work on the mushroom house a bit more.  The top looks a bit flopper than what I had planned.

Ive coerced Beth into felting too.  She came over last week and made the cutest gnome.  I wish I had taken a picture of him to show you. 

Blogaversary!

I'm not sure how it slipped my mind, but this month is my 2 year Blogaversary.  My friend Tierney encouraged me to start a blog for quite some time before that.  I really wasn't sure what I would write about since I often have a hard time coming up with things to say.  I know a few of my friends who are probably laughing at that last statement, but I really do have to think about things before speaking most of the time. 

In celebration of my Blogaversary I'm having a sale in my Ravelry Pattern Shop.  10% off all patterns until May 22.  Just use coupon code: Blogaversay when checking out. 

The two secret projects that I have had in the works are complete.  One has been sent off for submission to an online knitting magazine.  My fingers are crossed that I did the submission correctly and that the editors like the pattern.  The second one is waiting to be released in the next couple of weeks.  I can't wait to show you pictures of both of them.  The Amazing Beth test knitted both of these patterns.  She can't really be bribed to show them off, unless you offer some luxury yarn or perhaps chocolate.  I'm really not very good at keeping surprises to myself and this is killing me!

I do have a new sock pattern in the works.  It's cute little design and works up nicely in tonal colors. 

Ive been coveting the beautiful hand thrown yarn bowls that I keep seeing on Etsy and at the fiber festivals.  While they are beautiful, they are really expensive and I kept putting off getting one.  Mostly because the one's that I really like are around $100 and $100 can buy a lot of yarn.  I was cleaning the dining room to get ready to paint the bottom of the wall and took this cute little bowl down from the top of the pantry. 

I found it at an estate sale for less than $10.  At the time I thought it was for making baked apples, but then realized that the hole in the center could let the apples juices drip into the oven.  It's really too small to be a bunt pan so it wound up sitting around collecting dust.  As I washed it off of it, it occurred to me that  it looked like it could work as a yarn bowl!  I stuck a center pull ball in it and voila! Instant yarn bowl. It works like a charm and the yarn feeds nicely out of the center pull ball like it's supposed to.

One really cool thing I found at MDSW this year was at a brand new vendor, Going Gnome.  Ive done a little needle felting here and there, and have always enjoyed it.  I wish I had taken some pictures of their tent.  It was really too cute for words. The top of the tent was bright red and had big white polka dots on it to resemble a mushroom.  I wound up going back to the tent a few times over the weekend.  They have some pictures of the beautiful things they make on their blog.  I picked up a couple kits from them and made these guys:

I enjoyed making them so much, that Ive called Jen and had her send a couple more kit's and supplies.  I've had a stressful few weeks with my Grandmother not doing well health wise and our dog Roper having some health issues as well (when it rains it pours).  The needle felting has been a huge stress reliever.  There is nothing like stabbing something repeatedly to make you feel better, and even better than that is you get a cute little wool guy when you are done. 

Thank you so much for reading my blog :)