Thursday, April 28, 2011

More Fibre goodness

I don't know that I ever actually explained to you how I ended up spending a large portion of Easter at the Bendigo Showgrounds, but in a nutshell the story goes like this:

The denizens of Emu Creek, otherwise known as Pete-and-Brenda, are keen Chrysanthemum growers as well as their more usual guise of gurus of all things goaty.
Anyway, a year, or so, ago they decided that Bendigo really needed a Goat Show. I mean really, really, reallly [ no arguments from me ] and the easiest way to do it without headaches over venues and public liability insurance and the rest, was to create a goat sub-group in the local Chrysanthemum Club and ride along as part of the long-standing Easter Chryssie show at the Prince Of Wales Showgrounds - better known to readers of any knitting blog based in Oz as the home of the Australian Wool & Sheep Show. [ prize for most run-on and parenthetical sentence of the month ]
As is often the case, someone who fully intended to be there, selling her spinning wheels, fibre and yarns, had to bow out fairly late in the piece, and all the advertising mentioned spinning, so a spinner there had to be, even if she was only there to demo... and guess who is the only spinner that Pete-and-Brenda could call to mind ???
Yes
got it in one

And actually, now that I've written that, ONE advertisement came out touting the presence of " sinners" as I found out on the Saturday when one smartypants enquired " Are you one of them sinners I was reading about?"

Anyway
this is the alpaca/ kid angora singles that I managed to get spun over the two days of constant interruptions - like having to go pet sweet, snuggly caprines and camelids
this is how it looked on Sunday night when I plied it with a Corriedale-cross singles that was hanging around begging to be used


and the plied, wetted-and-whacked end product

Those lumpy bumpy bits all seemed to happen when I was trying to answer questions

as did any and all yarn breakages

any perfect spinning occurred when I was not being scrutinised

of course

and we will not even begin to discuss the subject of how one copes with the discovery [ beginning of day 2 ] that one has left the [ absolutely vital ] orifice hook sitting in yesterday's bag on the coffee table 50 kilometres away !!!!

3 comments:

Alwen said...

It's amazing the things people will ask.

(BTW - our son just admired your cat and noticed you still have Christmas in your header. I told him you were in the Southern Hemi & getting closer to midwinter!)

Lynne said...

Wow! What a great experience (I think)for you.

Actually, I remember when our painting teacher decided we should all paint "plein air"; we soon learnt that there are people who are both a critic and an expert in how it should be done - and they are not one of the people holding a brush! Moral to the story: don't have your first plein air experience in a public park!

catsmum said...

The pic is still up because it's such a good one of Oakley who went across the rainbow bridge last year. I hadn't really thought about the fact that a Chrissy pic might look a bit odd at this time of year :)