renaissance poisson

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if its worth doing, it's worth overdoing. actually made it out of the house today, and went to two (!) events.

first the local fibre festival at the conference centre, a new offering. 25 vendors, and i bankrupted us buying fibre and yarn. mostly fibre: tussah silk, flax, romney/opossum, dyed romney/mohair, chiengora (the name cracks me up; it's the undercoat of samoyed dogs), mohair locks, silk hankies, dyed silk noil, and an entire shetland fleece. yarn: lorna's laces shepherd sock, unwind yarns nebiolo (a sport weight merino/suri alpaca), diamond's alpaca baby lace, and a 100% silk lace distributed by fun knits on quadra island (dirt cheap; C$ 9.95 for 500m).

weirdly enough our local yarn store was not represented; when i was visiting them yesterday they complained that they found out about the event from a random customer. seems the publicizing was directed primarily at spinning/weaving suppliers more so than at knitting stores, and the LYS has just started to carry a wee bit of fibre. that was short-sighted, because the show had a lot of yarn as well, and the LYS would have beaten the drum for them. i'm hoping this will become an annual event.

when carting my treasure home i listened to the radio, which was broadcasting from the cowichan fair, and since the paramour was amenable, we headed down island to check out the brandnew exhibition grounds. very nice. we had some mennonite sausage, which was yummy, and some frozen lemonade, watched a driving class (mmh, draft horses), ambled through the poultry and sheep barns, and looked at the crafts. it's interesting how widely the craftsmanship varies in some of the categories -- the quilts were fabulous; first class, as was the weaving, but the crochet was terrible, and the knitting mediocre. i took lots of quilt pictures; i'll share some of them tomorrow. it also amuses me just how detailed some of the categories get. my favourite one: 1706 NEWCYCLE, a design using roadside plant materials in a recycled container.

chatted with a lady who was demonstrating bobbin lace (this is NOT something i will ever do), and one with a nice 8-harness foldable tabletop loom (i think it was louet's jane). *lust*.

we were both flagging by the time the rain moved in, and headed home early. now i am back to mainlining tv shows (damages and true blood) while fondling my new fibre.

log skid competition i love demonstrations of "exotic" working skills, and here's one: horses are still used in today's logging operations, so it's not a completely dead art. this is the first series of action shots i've taken that actually came out well, thanks to the horses moving relatively slowly. :) next i should clearly work on depth of field (i know how to fake it in photoshop, but am too lazy for all that work today). clicking on the image leads to more pictures with explanations.