Stone Sock Blog: WSWF Was Memorable

I returned home very late Monday night from Wisconsin. It was a terrific trip. The Wisconsin Sheep & Wool Festival is always a terrific trip. I am especially impressed by the very good organization of this event; they are so kind to the workshop instructors, taking care of many of the details so we don’t have to. So I offer a gigantic “Thank You” to all the volunteers at WSWF.

This festival is one of the very best places for buying high quality fibers. This year I came home with exceptional Coopworth wool from Hidden Valley Farm & Woolen Mill, and equally fabulous Bluefaced Leicester wool from Red Oak Farm. They don't have a website; their email address is redoakfarm26@cheqnet.net. They share a booth with Riverwinds Farm, my go-to source for Cormo wool.

My workshops were all tremendous fun. This was the first time I taught “Spinning Super Stretchy Wools”, and I hope to do this workshop more in the future. Right now I am totally crazy for highly elastic wools.

Food highlights for me came from one booth whose name I cannot recall: I had a refreshing shaved ice with lemon and raspberry syrup on Saturday, and an awesome iced mocha with loads of whipped cream on Sunday. Yum!

I did take my camera, but was way too busy to take pictures until after the Festival was over. On Sunday night, I stayed at the home of Carol and Paul Wagner, owners of Hidden Valley Farm & Woolen Mill. They took me out on Monday morning to see “the girls” (the ewes). Here’s one picture:

As I was departing the Wagners, Carol gave me a bag of fresh picked tomatoes and bell peppers. And a couple bags of roving that she said she’d probably never get around to spinning. One bag contained some roving from a sheep that was a cross of Jacob and Scottish Blackface. Lovely dark wool!

And the other bag was of some Corriedale roving dyed with natural dyes by Stefania Isaacson, from Handspun by Stefania. Always a treat to spin (or use in my classes)!

It was only a short drive from their house to Manitowoc to board the SS Badger. The ferry ride was great as always. Here is a series of pictures of Manitowoc disappearing over the first 30 minutes or so of the 4-hour voyage:

I had planned to take another series of pictures at the end of the trip of Ludington appearing, but I was too caught up in my knitting to do so. I was working on a new mitten design that uses a very cool slip stitch pattern that looks like seed stitch. Here’s what I got done: