Oregon Flock & Fiber

I'm back from an awesome weekend in Canby. It was amazing! On Saturday, the weather was glorious. You could tell people were happy to be there--lots of old friends greeting each other, and smiling faces all around. Customers from Sock Summit and Black Sheep came by to say hi, which was all sorts of cool. Today was rather soggy, even by PNW standards, so it was pretty quiet for the lawn vendors, but I still got to see a number of people that I've met through other shows.

I have these serial obsessions (bicycling, dog agility ...) and whenever I start getting into something, I discover a previously unknown subculture with its own world, complete with jargon and events and inhabitants who obviously live and breathe it. It makes me wonder how so many people could be so into something, and without my ever suspecting that it even existed. With the particular rabbit hole that I've fallen into this time, I'm surprised at how quickly I'm feeling at home. I only made my "debut" into yarn/fiber society a year ago, not counting the safe and cozy confines of HC, yet already I can go to an event and get hugs from people and feel like I've known them forever. I think part of it is that so many fiber people are eager to share what they know about techniques or materials, not in a show-off way, but from a real desire to exchange knowledge. I think it's very cool.

Back to OFFF. I was quite busy in my booth and didn't have much of a chance to shop, myself. Well, I guess I should count my order of 20 pounds of roving that Jill and Jim of Ashland Bay dropped off for me. I'm excited to start dyeing these up--BFL, BFL/silk, mixed BFL/silk, merino/tencel, and one I'm especially itching to try out, alpaca/merino/silk.

I did take a quick walk through the buildings before the show officially opened on Sunday morning, and saw a pin with the line, "It's a brand new day and the sun is high"--a reference to the movie Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. I listen to the soundtrack a lot while dyeing (my obsessiveness also extends to music), and I even have a colorway named for a song from the DVD commentary, Better Than Neil. The booth vendor wasn't around, and I'm regretting a bit that I didn't have a chance to check back later to get the pin.

I also saw some customers come into my booth with patterns from Blue Moon, so I took a couple of minutes to run over there and pick up two, Moonstruck and Ogee. Though the pattern that I really fell in love with was Skuld (this is a link to one made with some of my yarn). I've been looking for a project to make with my new silk/merino fingering, and I think this is it.

Tomorrow I plan to sleep in, then continue dyeing my current wholesale order for Apple Yarns. Also in the game plan for the week are my October yarn club selections and doing a real balance sheet for my business. Just one more step toward making this dyeing gig a real honest-to-goodness livelihood. Exciting!