Thursday, May 15, 2008

Great Western Alpaca Show Report!

Whew, it's been awhile! Looks like I haven't posted all...month. Whoa. How did that happen?

Okay, to sum up, I've had a fantabulous fibery month so far. Not this past weekend but the one before was the Great Western Alpaca Show!! It was in Denver, but that's not so very far away and I managed to drag Josh along with me with promises of lunch at Watercourse (LOTS of vegan options). I just had to go and get some wonderful alpaca-y goodness. Plus, my spinny friends from the spring Spinning 2 Class, Jess (of Midnight Designs, http://www.midnight-designs.com/) and Wiley (of Sakina Needles, http://www.sakinaneedles.com/) were sharing a booth, so I wanted to stop by.

Well, the show was really wonderful. Lots of fuzzies on parade. The Fiber Fiesta was upstairs, and actually was much smaller than I expected...then again, I'm used to the madness that is Estes Park Wool Market. I bounced from booth to booth, digging my hands in everything. That's expected, right? Since fiber is such a tactile art? :) Found Jess and Wiley's booth quite easily. Wiley is hard to miss, what with her green hair and all. She was spinning away at her beloved Sonata while Jess and her husband worked the crowd. All manner of things were for sale at their booth...oodles of dyed SakinaNeedles fiber, Jess' handspun and hand-processed fiber, even some handmade lip balm. Jess' husband is allergic to lanolin, so her specialty is alpaca. I had just bought some MoWoPaca (50% mohair, 25% wool, 25% alpaca) from a neighboring booth and was looking for some straight alpaca. When Jess saw me fondling some alpaca roving, she casually let drop that she had some batts available, too. Well, I love batts. LOVE. So her husband popped open a ginormous plastic tub chock FULL of heathery alpaca batts. And then Jess told me she'd sell them to me for $2.50 per batt. Um, yes please! I bought six, which was about how many I could carry...these batts were huge and superfluffy. And I've already spun 4 of these beauties, from an alpaca named Marcus. Pics soon to come! Thought I'd dye them, but...yeah...just couldn't keep my hands off the batts.

Josh and I poked around a little more at the festival, but decided to hold off buying any more, so went on to Watercourse, then returned to Boulder to check out the Tulip Festival. Every year Boulder imports something like 20,000 tulip bulbs from Holland and plants them down on the Pearl Street walking mall. It was just gorgeous. About a million people were there, half of which were little kids dressed as fairies and elves...guess there was some sort of fairy parade earlier? So it was cute to the point of we-need-to-get-outta-here-before-sheer-cuteness-makes-my-brain-explode. Natually, I'd forgotten my camera for the Alpaca show, but I sure had it to capture some tulips.

On May 5th I went to the First Monday Spin-in at Shuttles. Good news: since there were so many of us there (20 people, maybe?), Maggie decided to keep the Spin-ins going throughout the summer! Yippee! Usually they take a hiatus, so this is great.

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