It has been quite a busy weekend, and quite a lovely one as well, despite the very rainy start. Friday was a crazy busy day where I had little control over time or schedule until I boarded the train for Manhattan at 3:30. The dinner and the concert were lovely and we had a great time. Sometime during the concert the rain stopped, and it had mostly stopped at home as well by the time we returned around 2 AM. .
Needless to say we did not rise at dawn to make the opening bell of the NY Sheep and Wool Festival, but wandered in around noon, probably during peak crowd. I had a wonderful time. This fair is certainly much bigger than it was 10 years ago and that is a very nice thing. The sheep, llamas, alpacas, and bunnies were still there and they still had the animal shows and shearing contests etc, all of which are part of what makes the event fun in my mind. There were far more vendors and many more sophisticated ones that a few years back and I had a lot of fun looking at all the wares and wandering around the stalls talking to people and fondling fibers.
Oddly, I did a lot of looking but not a lot of buying. The whole thing was somewhat overwhelming. Now, at the end of the weekend, I have a much better sense of the thing and a much better idea of what to expect next year and how to go about the entire “fair experience” in a more manageable way. I had fun anyway. I did buy two yarns on Saturday, shown here:
This is Haiku by Alchemy yarns. I couldn’t get the color to come out right. It is really much more red, a deep burgundy wine color, with bits of purple, but more red overall. I got it from the Amazing Threads stall, even though the store is just in Saugerties, a few miles up the road. Still, I saw it now and knew I had to have it.
This color is much more true. This is a blended yarn I got from a place called Potpourri yarn by Greta Dise. She had a lot of fibers for spinning and was quite busy.
I was amazed at the quantity and variety of rovings and fibers for spinning and felting. I admit I was sorely tempted to take up spinning, just to be able to spin some of the wonderful fibers; some of them truly took my breath away. I am not opposed to the idea of spinning, I have been tempted before, but I don’t know how I would ever fit it in. Some of the things I saw definitely lead me closer to accepting that I eventually will learn to spin. I enjoyed looking at wheels and hand spindles and think that when I do decide to learn to spin, I would start with the hand spindle type of spinning, just because it is a more modest investment and I have a tendency to go whole hog investing in things and then dawdle along before I fully utilize them. I do believe that if I do start to spin, I will eventually move up to a wheel and I dream of eventually using my great-grandmothers walking wheel, assuming that Mom would pass it on to me.
At any rate I did purchase some bits of fiber and rovings, dyed beautiful colors, which I intend to use playing with felting, although I think of felting as more of a sewing-related activity and will post those rovings and my progress there at my other blog, sewdistracted. I suppose I really did not need two blogs, but I felt, and still feel, that the potential for a combined blog was just too cluttered with different kinds of stuff, especially if I wanted to go into all the boring detail of work on projects. Besides sewing gives me opportunity to explore all the whole fabric, fabric creation, and fabric embellishment ideas that I am interested in and knitting and the meanderings of my mind as I knit offer another whole range of topics and explorations.
After Rhinebeck on Saturday I still had to go grocery shopping. My order had arrived at Adams and I picked up two cases of Old Chatham Sheepherding Yogurt ( a two week supply) and was assured that I would have a standing order for two cases every two weeks. I am so lucky in that I love this stuff and now I get to indulge in it on a regular basis. My daily yogurt fix is my idea of the ultimate luxury. So I got to go home from the Sheep fair and have sheep yogurt. How wonderful!
There was no yogurt indulgence until after I drove around two counties in search of the new Vogue Knitting. I don’t know what happened to my subscription; it is possible that I just renewed a little late and it got delayed, but I could wait no longer. While I was in Kingston, after going to Adams, I ran down to Barnes and Noble to buy the magazine but they did not have it!!! I had not been able to locate it in Grand Central Terminal on Friday either. Desperation set in. I knew I had seen it at the Barnes and Noble in Poughkeepsie a few days earlier, and of course I was crazed with desire. All rational thought and reason had fled my body by that point so I drove to Poughkeepsie where I did manage to get the magazine. Once I was back home I was able to constrain myself long enough to put away groceries before opening the VK, and I made myself a bowl of yogurt and honey to enjoy while I perused the magazine. Nothing quite like dessert before dinner. I am glad I did buy the magazine, there was a sweater that instantly made me think of a yarn I had seen up the Sheep&Wool festival, and several other things that I think have potential.
Luckily, my darling husband had gone to the gym after we left the wool festival and had stopped by the office after that so he was not home until late – good because it was nearly 8 when I got home – nearly 10 before he rolled in.
I made a wonderful, simple, dinner of rainbow trout, pan roasted with a glaze that I made by boiling down a cup of balsamic vinegar until it was thick and combining it with a syrup made by boiling down fresh grapefruit juice. This balsamic-grapefruit glaze, drizzled over the trout, offset the sweetness of the trout and glossed over that little bitter aftertaste that I often find in rainbow trout. I also picked up fresh kohlrabi, sugar snap peas, and shiitake at a local farm stand, so we had peas with shiitake, and a slaw made of the kohlrabi, red bell pepper, slivered poblano pepper, and aioli. Mmmmm Good!
Sunday found me back at the fair, then busy at home while we rewired the stereo system because we were getting some fuzziness in the sound and some unpleasant rumblings. There were a couple of bad splices in the wiring, which I replaced and things are much better. The entire system is old and needs to be upgraded but it will all have to wait until after the rebuilding of the decks, which has now been scheduled for spring, After that I had to catch up on laundry and ironing, basic important weekend tasks, and we drove up to Saugerties, to our favorite restaurant, Café Tamayo, for an early anniversary dinner.
I still have to photograph Sunday’s take from Rhinebeck and catch you up with my knitting progress over the last several days. Needless to say, nothing has been finished but significant progress has been made on a couple of fronts.
