New Toy for Mommy

As a result of my knitting obsession interest, I have been reading a number of knitting blogs. As a number of fibery types are into more than just knitting, I have been reading about people engaged in other sorts of fibery goodness. The one that has been consistently intriguing me is spinning. Even as a child on numerous field trips to the Dacotah Prairie Museum I remember being fascinated by spinning demonstrations. As a result, I have been looking at some spinning books from the library and thinking...

Last week, we saw an announcement for an open house at the Rainbow Fleece Farm in the Isthmus. This farm is about 25 miles from where we live and they raise sheep and sell sheep products (sheepskins, yarn, roving, meat, etc.) from their sheepies. We drove out to check it out. It turned out that the woman who runs it has been at our local farmer's market with her wares. So we had a nice time looking around. Mama looked at gorgeous yarn (the wool is sent out to be spun at a mill, but they do all their own dyeing), roving (carded at the farm), unprocessed fleece, and lots of spinning and knitting paraphernalia. I bought a drop spindle and a ball of roving (blame it on the wool fumes...that's what the Yarn Harlot says!!). The spindle is (to the left) is an Ashford bottom whorl hand spindle. The hot dog truck is for scale (for non-spinners). That is the actually Oscar Meyer weinermobile. These spindle things are HUGE! It doesn't even fit in the house...okay, just kidding, it's really just a Matchbox car. The spindle came with two little balls of roving. One is on the left of the picture, the other has already be spun and wound on the spindle. I am considering this my trial roving and I will spin up the other ball and then ply the singles to try and make two ply yarn. At some point, there will be more pictures.

This fluffball is my other acquisition. It is about 4 oz. of wool/silk roving. It is so soft and fluffy that I just want to sit and pat it and love it and call it George. While the hand dyed stuff is gorgeous, I just LOVE the natural yarns and rovings we saw.

While Mama was inhaling wool fumes, Daddy and the kids wandered around and saw lots of different kinds of sheep, some turkeys, free-range chickens, peafowl, kitties, dogs, tractors, and other farm stuff.