Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival 2012

Baaaaa baaaaaa!

It's that time of year again!!!

I am really excited to be volunteering again at the crazy t-shirt booth for the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival.

I've heard that the lines before opening get longer and longer every year. 

Can't wait! :-)

The beautiful artwork is by Deanna Williford.

Spring Happiness

Our farmer's market started last week. Hooray! It was cold and rainy, though, so the kids and I didn't stay long. I was very excited to bring home a large dill plant (for making pickles) and four strawberry plants that are supposed to bear all summer long. I am very excited for that!

We went again today and I couldn't help but buy a hanging cherry tomato plant called Tumbling Tom to hang from our back porch overhang. It even already has green tomatoes on it which means in a few weeks we'll have delicious fresh tomatoes! I think this year I'm taking a break from growing tomatoes. For some reason I have such a hard time growing them in containers. The past couple years have been dismal. I guess I just need to learn a bit more and probably rig up a drip irrigation line for the pots.

A Karakul Sheep

Also, last Saturday was the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival - rumored to be the largest on the east coast. I volunteered to help with t-shirt sales. I seriously thought it would be slow. I mean, t-shirts? Really? Boy was I ever wrong! I got there at 8 am and the county fairground parking field already had a lot of cars in it. There was a line of people waiting outside the 4-H building where the festival gift shop was when I walked up. We had a cryptic briefing by the head of the volunteers, and at 9 am they opened the flood gates and the building was instantly full of waiting people. There were about 12 of us volunteers and we were busy pretty much the whole first 3-hour shift.

I was so tired after working that I barely had enough energy to look around the festival! haha! I did get to see some beautiful sheep and picked up a business card for a local felting company. There were bags of wool and skeins of yarn everywhere you looked! A few workshops were going on as well. I'll have to come up with a different game plan for next year so that I'll actually have enough energy to enjoy the festival. Volunteering was fun though. I wouldn't mind doing it again - especially since I got a free t-shirt!

:-) And when I left, the parking field was totally full of cars with people parking across the street in another field. Whoa!

Look at that beautiful curling wool from the Karakuls sheep!
(It's good for making rugs and ropes apparently.)

Getting a trimming.

This little sheep has 4 horns! I love the dual colors.

Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival

Ooooh, I am so excited! The Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival is coming up this May 7-8, 2011. A whole day of wool, yarn, baaing sheep and lots of crazy people who love that stuff! Yipee! I can't think of a more fun way to spend a spring Saturday. Not only that, it's only a 15 minute drive, lucky me! They are even looking for volunteers, so what do you think I did? ;-)

If you're anywhere close, try and come. I've heard this is the biggest festival of this kind in the region.
Check it out here: http://www.sheepandwool.org



*picture credit

Felted Balls Tutorial

You know, I think this is my first real tutorial!
I got one request for it (Thanks, Holly!), and one is enough for me, so here we go!

The first part is making a felt ball using roving. Using roving makes felting go much, much faster. But if you'd don't have roving, that's ok. Just skip on down to Part 2 where I show how to do it using wool yarn.

Part 1 - Felted Ball Using Roving

1. Start with your cat/ferret jingle ball found at pet stores.

2. Hold the ball in one hand and start wrapping the roving around it.

3. Keep wrapping while trying to keep the wool even all around.

4. Keep wrapping...

5. Wrap enough roving around until you get the size of ball you want. Keep in mind that it will shrink some while felting, so you might want to make it a little bigger than what you want the finished product to be.

6. Get an old nylon stocking. It's easier if you cut it so it's only about 12" long. Gather the nylon in your two hands until you get to the toe.

7. Then shove the ball in, pushing it as far into the toe as you can.

Make sure the end of the wool is facing the toe or it could come unraveled a little.

We don't want that!

8. Get out your dish soap.

I promise this is not an ad placement!

9. Drizzle the dish soap on.

10. At this point you might want to get out some rubber gloves. I didn't which is why my fingers are red.

Twist up the end of the nylon like shown above, so that it helps maintain a round shape and hold the ball under hot water. You may also need to pull and tighten the nylon around the ball throughout this process. Scrub with one hand while rotating the ball in the other hand. Continue to get it wet, scrub it, get it wet again, and scrub it, etc. After awhile you'll need to add more soap. You'll notice the ball will get lumpy and uneven. It's okay! The wool is shrinking. Keep up the scrubbing and soaping and wetting under hot water for about 5 minutes. Then rinse and squeeze repeatedly to get as much of the soap out as you can.

11. Remove from stocking and you're almost done! Run the ball under water, perfecting the shape as much as you can. Squeeze out water as best you can. Set on an old rag or cloth to dry. If its dyed wool, there may be some staining to the rag. Let dry over night in a warm place.

Part 2 - Felted Ball Using Wool Yarn

Make sure you use 100% wool yarn that specifies that it is good for felting like the "Fisherman's Wool" line of yarn which is what I used in my project below.

1. Hold your yarn in place and start wrapping.

It may be a little difficult as the surface is slippery plastic.

2. Keep wrapping...

3. Try to keep the yarn evenly distributed as your wrap until it's the size you want.

I wanted a little one.

4. Finished ball.

5. Now get that nylon stocking (12" long), stuff it into the nylon (making sure the end doesn't come unraveled), and duplicate steps 8-11 above except increase the scrubbing/soap process to 10 minutes.

There will be some shrinkage, but not as much as the roving ball.

The yarn ball will hold its shape much better than the roving one too.

Beautiful!

Aaah! A completed set. I'm so excited!

Can you tell I love these things?

*Note: If you'd like a crinkle ball, replace the center jingle ball with a big wad of cut out bill envelope windows. What a great way to recycle!
*Another note: You don't have to put anything in the center at all. If you want just a plain ol' wool ball, just wrap the yarn or roving around itself in a tight ball and wrap to the size you want, etc.

Good luck and have fun! Let me know if you try this out and send pictures!

Felted Balls

Finally, some of the apples are on the stove, simmering down to soon become applesauce. It's a good thing too, because we've gone through half our applesauce from the last canning adventure. It's giving me a really realistic picture of the volume of applesauce I would have to can in order to feed our applesauce appetite around here. I truly think an entire wall of our basement would be dedicated to applesauce and we'd need to have at least 3 apple trees.

Okay, so on to the felted balls! I've been eyeing felted balls as they've appeared on various blogs I follow and the library books on felting I've checked out. It was my goal to make some for my daughter's first birthday which is next week. 

I bought some jingle balls at a pet store (The balls are meant for ferrets, but I'm sure they sell them for cats too). Last night I tried the felted balls for the first time and I was totally thrilled with how easy they were! I tried two balls with dyed roving and they, by far, felted up the easiest and fastest, although they did end up with some creases. I tried one with thick, one ply wool yarn and that felted up pretty well too, were very even all around, but the yarn lines still show. Not a big deal, though. It's for a baby! One of the balls also has a bunch of bill envelope windows wadded up inside, so when you squeeze the ball it crinkles. I'm really happy with the way these turned out! I'm planning on making a few more since I have some jingle balls left. If you'd like a tutorial, just let me know and I'll take step-by-step pictures when I make them next. 

1st Felting

This is a potholder I crocheted from some light brown wool yarn I got for Christmas and some gold yarn I got when I worked at Conner Prairie and was learning to knit. That yarn is from their own sheep that the staff spun themselves. It's special yarn to me, so I had to use it in my first ever attempt at felting!

I started out by mashing the pot holder in hot, soapy water in a bowl. Out wafted the most delicious smell of woodsmoke! I was totally not expecting that and I'm not sure where that came from - probably the Conner Prairie yarn since they cook on hearths there. This smell made me completely happy and I mashed away. I wanted to get a feeling for hand felting, but it was taking a long time, so I switched it to the washing machine, bundled up in a pillow case. (I've read that felting can clog up your washing machine.)
And, this was the result!:

I know, it doesn't look much different, except for it maybe being a little fluffier. I could have run it through the wash a few more times, but I liked it the way it was. I had crocheted it pretty tight, so I'm not sure how much more it would have shrunk without making it all warped. I let it dry overnight and now I have a beautiful wool potholder. Hooray! I'm excited to try my hand at making baby toy balls using roving. I'll let you know how it goes!

Felting

I am really interested in felting lately. It sounds super easy and a great craft to do with my 3-year-old son. I got some beautiful wool yarn for Christmas and I went on a 100% wool sweater shopping spree at the thrift store. And I've still got a tub of dyed roving. So now... I'm just trying to figure out what to make! I'd like to make some felted balls for the baby. I've read that you can save the clear plastic windows from your bills to put inside a felt ball which makes a nice crinkly sound. And a bell inside a pill bottle covered in felt for a jingle ball. Other than that, I'm not quite sure what to make! Maybe a hat? Any other ideas?

I found this nice webpage on felting thrift store sweaters at Craftsylish.
A webpage on felting.
And another webpage with a list of different felt toys you can make.
A cool fiber arts webpage talking about felting.

Wish me luck!

A Ball of Roving and a Spinning Wheel

A long time ago, in a land not too far away - Indiana to be exact - I learned how to spin on a large walking wheel. Within the depths of Conner Prairie, they taught me that valuable historical skill of spinning, then set me to work in the historical village, Prairietown. Dressed in an 1830s work dress, with sloping shoulders and only slightly puffed sleeves, I stood at the window and spun. The wool stretched and pulled, running its soft fibers slipping across my fingers as it wound itself sinuously around the spindle in uneven clumps and threads. While I wasn't that good, it was relaxing work and I liked gazing out the windows at passerby on the dirt road as I paced back and forth, spinning, spinning...

I haven't spun again since then - until today! Today I finally put off all pathetic excuses, pulled out my friend Mairi's borrowed spinning wheel and started spinning. Well, in reality I didn't start out quite that easily. First, I had to research how to make my big bundle of wool into roving for easier spinning. (Beautiful wool which I got from Mairi's generous fiber expert sister, Heather. Oh, and their sheep. Thank you!) I found a lovely instructive video on youtube. Then, after a half-dozen frustrating failures at starting I figured out the darn tension on the wheel and then I started spinning! Aaah, all the memories came flooding back with the wool running through my fingers. It's good to be spinning again. Now, all I need is a good audio book.

What do you think? Quite imperfect, but not too bad for starting again!

I need to learn how to ply this stuff too. Plying scares the heck out of me!

P.S. Check this story out. It's about a Sheep to Shawl contest and it sounds really intense! I think I'd go to pieces under pressure like that!

Memorial Weekend Get-Away

Barn Kitten

This past weekend my family and I went up to visit a good friend of mine up in New York. I haven't seen my friend, Mairi, for about a year and through letters I've heard so much about the little farm where she lives with her sister Heather's family. So Friday afternoon my husband, our two kids, and I headed up to stay for a few days.

Heather and her family's hospitality was wonderful and we had ourselves a great time chatting, walking and eating. We enjoyed drinking raw milk from a dairy down the road, eating fresh eggs of the chicken and duck variety, wandering the ruins of an old gristmill next door, and meeting their large family of animals in the old barn on their property. Among the animals we met were three sheep whose bleating sounded rather mournful and pathetic (haha!), three psychotic geese who we had to fend off with a stick nearly every time we left the house and ventured toward the barn, a sweet old horse, a dozen little barn cats, and a bunch of chickens. We got a glimpse of the ducks who were a bit snooty and stayed downstream on the creek if we came anywhere near. We also had fun playing with their dalmatian dog Rooster. (I asked if their rooster's name was Dog, but it wasn't. Heehee!)

One of the wonderful things about visiting them was being able to eat some of their local food. It really was such a treat. I went with my friend, Mairi, to go pick up the raw milk from that dairy down the road. It really is such a shame when getting raw milk is reduced to the status of something akin to picking up illegal moonshine at a secret meeting place. I personally don't mind pasteurized milk, but if people want to drink raw milk, why not let it be their choice and to get it if they'd like to?

I realized something important this weekend. We were driving past that "dairy down the road" and I looked out my window to see their beautiful, creamy brown Jersey cows grazing in the pasture behind their old wood slat and stone barn and a thought struck me hard: "There are the cows whose milk I'm drinking." For a suburb girl who's only ever drunk milk bought at the store in plastic jugs, this was really profound. Not to mention I had been eating the eggs from the ducks and chickens I had met at Mairi's house. There is one thing to be eating the food you buy at your local farmer's market, but it's a completely different thing to eat the food that comes from animals you've met or that you take care of, the vegetables you've sweated and labored over in your own garden. It's a whole different level of eating. The satisfaction is immense. I don't know where it comes from exactly, but to be that connected to what nourishes and strengthens my body is a mind-boggling experience. To have that feeling every day - wow. I want that so badly. It's the biggest goal I'm going for right now. And to think being that connected was such an everyday part of life to so many people in the past. I'm glad that so many people today are passionate about getting back to that.

Mairi's sister Heather sent us home with some fresh eggs!
From top to bottom: Chicken egg, Duck egg, Goose egg.
Man, the goose egg looks like a freaking ostrich egg! I think I'm going to manage to make a whole quiche with just that one goose egg. Amazing!

A wonderful gift from Heather:
Washed, carded, and dyed wool ready for spinning (from their own sheep.) Hooray!

Me feeding the horse, Des, a candy cane.
Apparently, he loves these. It was quite the slobbery experience!

Adventures in Homemade Mittens

At one of the last farmer's markets there was a booth where they were selling recycled wool sweater mittens. Each pair was colorful, unique, and lined with warm fleece. They were $15 a pop, so I didn't buy any. I was determined, however, to make my own. It was a great idea!

So, the other day I went to the thrift store and casually combed through the women's sweaters and SCORE! The first wool sweater I happened upon was actually a pretty dark green with pink, blue, and white stripes. (I was expecting to come across the most hideous sweater on the planet, but I sure lucked out!) Needless to say, I bought it.

And my mitten-making adventure began. I wanted to line them with fleece, and not wanting to go out and buy any fleece, I cannibalized an old Old Navy fleece scarf. (We have a lot of scarves lying around. My husband used this black scarf a lot, but I consoled him that the exact scarf duplicate in red stripes would be just as warm.) So, using a website and Jenna's idea from Made From Scratch I set to work.

Actually cutting the sweater had me sweating. It was a beautiful sweater and I didn't want to waste a thread, especially with a dumb mistake like making them too small. It was about five minutes before I could make the first cut. But I did it! The cut-out mittens looked pretty promising.

Now, I've sewed a lot in my life (mostly historical dresses), but that doesn't mean you'll never make mistakes. My fleece linings didn't work out because the wool outer mitten was just the right size. I didn't make them big enough to fit a lining. And, on top of that, the fleece lining is too tight. Dang it. Wasted scarf. (Sorry, honey.) But the plain wool mittens fit just right and are beautiful and warm. I'll have to test them on a cold windy day to see if I need to make another pair that's bigger with lining. Thank goodness I have a lot of sweater left!

Here are my step-by-step pictures to my winter mitten-making:

After tracing around my hand and adding seam allowance, I cut out my paper pattern and then cut out the fleece.

Next I cut (nervously) cut out the wool.

Looking good so far!

Hey, what do you know? It fits like a glove!

Don't they make a beautiful pair?

This is the way to go, folks. Custom fit gloves - no elastic in the band needed to make it fit and you can pick the wool you like, recycling a sweater in the process. A great all-around project if you ask me!

I think the next pair I'll make them a little more roomy in the finger area, but I am sure feeling pretty darn proud of myself! Wouldn't you?