Michigan Fiber Festival

 Last week was the Michigan Fiber Festival in Allegan, Michigan.  I have attended this for several years as a volunteer, demonstrating my circular sock knitting machine.  This year, I only signed up for Sunday.   

We got to the farm on Thursday night.  I drove to the festival Friday, and stopped by and chatted with Clara at the Heritage Spinning and Weaving booth.  She pointed out the Knit Michigan booth in the next building.  Knit Michigan is a charity to offer comfort items like quilts to persons who are fighting cancer.  They had a bunch of bins of donated yarn, and they were giving it away to those who made a donation to Knit Michigan.  I found some Paton's Classic Wool in a brown color, as well as a cone of turquoise acrylic.  I stopped and took a photo of these lovely black-eyed Susans.  Are they Rudbeckia, or some other yellow flower?   

I stopped by to chat with my fellow MICHIGAN GEARS friends.  They are makers of Georgeous, Easy Amazing Rapid Socks, with their circular sock machines.

   On the way, I stopped by Carol Leigh's booth.  She had a display of naturally dyed sock looper kits.  The sock loopers are the loops that children use to weave potholders on small looms.  I was awestruck by the way she included colors showing the different hues attained by one dye bath, but by using different mordants and modifiers to vary the colors.  It wasn't really in my budget, so I passed it by, although I relented on Saturday and purchased a few kits anyway. 

  I did find some bargain yarn to purchase, in the Dances with Wool co-op's booth.  Skeins of handspun, including alpaca and mohair blends, for only $5 each!  Since I got home I am knitting a shawl with my purchases. 

The yarns range from worsted to bulky and I am using a size 9 circular needle.  I've had to change needles twice, as the shawl gets larger.  I'm currently using my old  Boye interchangeable needle set with all the cords linked together.  

On Sunday, I joined the GEARS demonstrators with my Home Profit Master Machine. 

I learned a couple of new things.  I have been hearing Jamie Mayfield talk about the faux Russian join several times, so Nancy was good enough to demonstrate it for me.  Also, she had a child's hat hanging from her stand, it was made on a 72 cylinder by knitting at half-pitch (leaving all the cylinder needles plus the ribber needles in work), then dropping every other cylinder needle stitch to get a much larger stitch size. The adjacent stitches take up the slack when the extra stitches are dropped.  I was able to do a ribbed edge, then change to half pitch and knit a cylinder.  

All-in-all, a very good trip.  

While we were at the farm, I rode my Gator around the trails and filled up some bushel baskets with sumac bracts and goldenrod, which was surprisingly blooming earlier in Michigan than in Ohio.  The flower heads had not yet started to open when we left for Michigan, although I am seeing some now on our return.  I hope to do some natural dyeing when back in Ohio.