It's almost Winter now…let's look at the animals.

I actually only attended one fiber festival this year, in New Jersey, in addition to my lovely visit to Cedar Haven Farms over the summer. And now that Portland's chilly/rainy season is truly beginning…

Something like this. For a few months. Sigh.

I find it necessary to reminisce about late summer, and the opportunity to meet fiber animals that it provided. This was the Sheep and Fiber Festival in Lambertville, NJ (which my non-crafty mother was kind enough not only to attend with me, but to actually bring to my attention in the first place).

So stately, these llamas. Not pictured--my mother really bonded with the one on the left.

Alpaca; sheep of many varieties; llamas. This is the festival where I learned the term "fiber pet;" it is now a concept etched in my heart and memory. Someday, when I do not live in a one bedroom apartment in reasonably densely populated SE Portland...

And lots and lots of raw wool and fleeces. I bought some, of course, but not nearly this much.

And I'll leave you with this one piece of good advice (though "no germs in or out of area" seems, perhaps, a touch overly ambitious). 

Experiments in New Skill Acquisition: Weaving on a Floor Loom

So, I've been taking another Multnomah Arts Center class (that place is, genuinely, the best).

Getting it all set up:

So far, I've been working on the class-mandated sampler, with plain/tabby weave and a bit of a simple twill done. I cannot wait to get the process of warping the loom a little more streamlined, because, at least for me, the weaving part is much more fun than the setup.

For this project, we used an inexpensive cotton rug yarn. For my next, my hope is to incorporate some of my handspun art yarn--it will be neat to see what it looks like in a format other than crochet/knitting. Set loosely in a simple weave (maybe a twill), I'm thinking it will be fluffy and spongey and gorgeous. 

For knit example, see: handspun hats (below, and all over this site and my shop).

And now, see some examples of other peoples' handspun in weaving.

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There's a lot of potential here, and I'm quite excited to see how it plays out.