A Week Late and a Dollar Short.
Or something like that. I'm feeling better now [although the cold is still hanging on a bit.] This means it's past due for my Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival Report. I drove up with Fyberduck and Emily to Canby. After a short mishap finding the place, we arrived early enough that parking spaces were still aplenty. We immediately hit the barns and although we didn't get to see all the animals, we did see several sheep and this beautiful white llama:
We also saw some great Jacob Sheep including this one with 5 horns:
Just like a starfish...Sort of.
We then met up with another girl from here in Eugene and hit the vendors. I may have come home with a large bag full of fibers:
The top layer is a Grafton Fibers Poof, some silk caps, a second poof, and then a mystery batt which is a merino/silk/angora/flash blend. The middle layer [the reds and pink] are all from Crown Mountain Farms, corridale pencil roving to the left and two superwash merino rovings. Then we have some various bits, including a chibi, some short double pointed needles [size 2] a sheepy tape measure and a back issue of Interweave Knits. The last bit is some grey angora/merino blend.
On our way out of town we saw this place:
We stopped to inquire after their spinning wheel and got nothing but dirty looks for our trouble.
We also saw a bomber on sticks:
and a statue of liberty:
The random things you see on Oregon Highway 99!
See the rest of my OFFF photos here!
Bleh.
Flock and Fiber Festival update is forthcoming. Once my head drains enough to be comfortable again. After not having been sick all summer [with the exception of allergies and some dehydration] I am sick enough that I have to miss day one of my class this term. Luckily, it's a professor I know and I'm sure [or at least hoping] he'll understand. I just feel awful about it, but TheBoy is right when he says that if I go today I'll just get sicker. Send tissues and nyquill.
Right ‘Round Baby, Like a Record
It's Fiber Friday and here's what I've been spinning this week. These photos were taken with my new camera, I'm very excited to now own a DSLR.
A thick and thin merino single with white and black beads spun in. Each bead was tied in the center of a piece of thread and held together with the fiber as it spun.
Spun from merino dyed by spunkyhats.com It's a single plied with black perle cotton strung with cheap shiny pinkish-purple seed beads. It's soft and fluffy. Approximately 73 yards.
This is blue faced leicester from spunkyhats.com I spun it fairly thin and plied it using navajo ply which makes a soft, round three-ply. This is approximately 170 yards and 4 ounces. I loved spinning the BFL, it almost drafted itself.
On the bobbin, this is the single that I plied with beads strung on cotton perle. I have somewhere between 2 and 3 ounces of this fiber left.
Not Clean Enough.
I read Cute Overload regularly. Today, I stop by and see this:
If you look closely you will note that this child is licking the snout of that pig. Full on, flat tongue to snout-end licking. Now, readers of TheBlog, you may not know that I was raised on a small farm. We had goats, chickens, rabbits, cows and a variety of other animals including pigs. Now, I hate pigs. They have a weird smell to them even when "clean". It's thick and kind of sweet and it tickles the back of my throat. I have heard people talk about how clean pigs are. And I have also watched them eat bucketloads of chicken feet, decomposing kitchen scraps and [my personal favorite] tree stumps. It is true that if you were to knock yourself unconscious in a pig pen and were out for long enough they would eat you. And yet, some adult is calmly taking a photo of a child licking the not-terribly-clean snout of this pig. I'm pretty relaxed about germs and dirt--afterall you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die [thanks Mom!], but I draw the line here. I will never stand idle and watch my [future] child lick a pig's snout. I just won't have that.
An Open Letter to ODOT
Dear ODOT,
I know that the city of Eugene is spending something like 13million dollars to take out a perfectly good and important lane of traffic on Franklin in order to decrease the bus trip from Eugene Station to Springfield Station by a whopping 4 minutes. I appreciate that people could better spend those 4 minutes a day watching their stories. I really do.
I also know that you approved this idea. You had to have in order for the road crews to have been out working and for the road to be all torn up for months. Now that it's almost done in the part right around campus, I was relieved. You see, something like a bajillion students are going to descend on campus on Monday. And on Wednesday night, you went in and started resurfacing the most direct route to campus from I-5 north. So, there are fewer lanes of traffic to accomodate all that extra traffic. And then today, this morning, you diverted us from turning into the University the only way that most of these travelers would know how. Luckily, it's not a very difficult diversion but one would think that you would try to avoid confusing thousands of drivers by making them make a weird and random u around a currently blockaded parking lot. You couldn't have worse timing if you tried [which of course you don't since things rarely ever happen on schedule, you first talk about them for decades before doing anything.]
No love today,
TheBon