I enjoyed my time at the
Spring Fiber Fling. I always do! This is a weekend-long fiber retreat held at a
church camp near Pickford , Michigan ,
in the Upper Peninsula about half way between
The Bridge and Sault Ste Marie. This year it was Friday evening through Sunday
lunch, May 17-19.
Workshops were scheduled for
Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday morning. That’s plenty of
activity all by itself, but the action really started on Friday evening. Registration
started at 6pm. The hosting guild, Country Spinners & Bridge Shuttlers, provided snacks of all kinds for evening noshing.
And the vendors set up on
Friday. And we got to attack the vendors even before they got set up. They didn’t
mind, really. I made a bee-line for Deb and Bob Cline’s booth, Maple Row Stock
and Wool (email: dbcline@earthlink.net
). I’d earlier emailed Deb to see if she had a very fast Lendrum flyer that I
could buy. She did. And I did. So I guess now I have a more-than-complete
Lendrum folding wheel. This flyer offers a drive ratio of 44:1. That’s a lot of
rotations for one treadle. Good for cotton, and that’s exactly what I plan to
use it for.
Another purchase I made from
Deb and Bob was 5 skeins of Euroflax linen yarn. In an earlier blog entry I mentioned a sweet pattern in Interweave Knits Spring 2013: Bayswater Shell, designed by Cheryl Niamath. I think this
top will be wonderful in the color I chose.
Joanne Dufour had some
lovely wood items in her booth. There was a fabulous bowl that would have made
a perfect knitting bowl, but I’d recently purchased a knitting bowl (to be
explained in a future blog post), so I didn’t get it. Kristen G. did, however,
buy it, and many at the retreat drooled over it. Kristen is a lucky girl.
Instead of the bowl, I bought a gorgeous rolling pin. I’m not sure what kind of
wood it is. I think maple. But it’s got intriguing “tiger” stripes. The wood
worker was Daryl Thurston (email: thebrook2009@hotmail.com). I’m thinking of trying my hand at making
pasta to give this special rolling pin its initiation.
In an upstairs area of the
lodge, Roxanne Eberts had set up her booth. She is the owner of Woolderness Fiber Arts Studio in Hessel ,
Michigan
The last purchase I made was
from Seldon Collins (email: pickfordec@yahoo.com . She raises corriedale sheep and her fleeces are always
spectacular. I bought one last year. This year I was really in the market for
some millspun yarn. That may seem odd, but I do like to have breed specific
millspun wool yarns on hand for teaching my workshop Diversity of Wool. Seldon had’t brought any yarn with her on
Friday, but she actually lives in Pickford, so she was able to bring some for
me on Saturday. I bought 2 skeins of white lamb wool yarn, and 2 skeins of very
dark brown ram wool. Both classically corriedale! I was thrilled.
So, even before the
workshops started, I had jumped in to the deep end. And I had fun.
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