recommended daily allowance

Yesterday was a blustery, dreary, gray day. Remedy? Hook up with a friend first thing in the morning and head north to the Franklin County Fiber Twist, where we exceeded our recommended daily doses of color, friendship, and inspiration!

It all started with a hooked rug display -- finished rugs, works in progress, kits and supplies, knowledgeable and fun folks. This art form keeps popping up in our lives and it's soooo tempting to give it a try. I don't even want to start with the wool fabric collection and strip-making, but didja know you can do it with yarns too? Hm. ;-)

Then into the room of vendors of other wonderful wooly goodness. Ran smack dab into our friend, Leslie Wind, whose cable needle necklace, a gift from Leslie, Leah was wearing because she's using it for the current cabled neckwarmer-in-progress.

There were supplies for fiber arts of all kinds, demos, finished items, patterns, kits. Ooh, the colors, the textures!

We bumped into a lot of folks we know as we wandered the booths and met more along the way. An incredible number of people recognize Leah at these events and stop to talk to her, ask about her current WIP (handwarmers w/ a sideways stranded cuff, a design she's making up on the fly), or compliment some piece of knitwear that she has on for the day.

For years, Gail, the Kangaroo Dyer, has made a point of chatting with Leah whenever we stop in at Webs, where Gail works. Leah must've made an impression on her during some visit long ago because Gail never fails to recognize her and strike up a conversation.

As I was paying Gail's husband for some dreamy handpainted roving at their booth yesterday, Gail suddenly turned and handed Leah these two huge, GORGEOUS skeins of laceweight yarn in shades of deep cranberry red to black, along with a coordinating skein of black w/ red undertones...something fuzzy...mohair?...again, GORGEOUS...and says, "I want you to have these!" The Goob, as you can imagine, was blown away by the kindness and just happens to also be ga-ga over the yarn.

By the time we left the Fiber Twist, my bag looked like this...

There were also some other bags of fluff hanging from the outside of my backpack. OMG, the colors.

Inspired by Gail's dyeing demo at the Fiber Twist and others we've seen in the past, we popped in at Webs on the way home. While browsing the dye colors, another customer struck up a conversation with us and offered some suggestions. Her colorful fingers identified her as an avid dyer. She sells as DK Knits and it's a good thing she dyes for a living because her enthusiasm for it is contagious. She bubbled over with ideas for blending the dye colors we were buying and helpful hints for achieving certain goals.

Dropped our friend off back at her house, swung by our house to pick up Jesse, then to get nephew Zach and off to see a performance of Willie Wonka, in which a family of friends has been actively involved. It was a colorful, fun, clever performance that we all enjoyed immensely. Saw my sister's Dominican Republic vacation pics, schemed some Halloween costume ideas, and helped my mom learn to do magic loop on a wee bunny she's making to tuck into the chest pocket of a sweet dress she's knitting for a friend's daughter. A short night of sleep and I had to laugh this morning when I saw that one of the DK Knits lines is Wonka-inspired semi-solid/tonal colorways. Yum!

Recommended daily allowance of fibery goodness achieved!

contagious

A couple of weeks ago, Leah asked me to show her how to do hardanger. She reminded me of this request a couple of days ago and was thrilled when I pulled out my needlework pattern and linen stash to get her started.

Scott walked into my office at one point when we had it all scattered about. His eyes got big and he exclaimed, "We still have our patterns?!" You see, I taught Scott how to do cross stitch when we were first married and he got into it pretty seriously. We worked on some projects together and then headed off on his own, stitching a detailed Christmas stocking for baby Jesse and eventually sweeping the Best of Cross Stitch, Best of Needlework, and Best of Show awards for his Angel of Spring and Angel of Summer in the Big E's needlework competition one year. We both stitched a lot back then, but we set the needlework aside when the kids were toddlers and projects requiring concentration and attention to detail weren't as easy to fit into our days. Anyway, Scott only asked that one question, but I could tell from his expression that he'd be stitching again soon and I knew what he'd choose to make too.

Leah and I pulled out supplies, I gave her some directions, and later that evening, her first hardanger heart was complete.

As is her way, she then gathered some more supplies and headed off to her room to do more on her own while listening to a book on CD. She came out the next morning to show me half a dozen hearts that she had stitched in assorted handpainted perle cottons with floss filling stitches. She decided she was ready to visit the local needlework shop to spend a gift certificate she received for Christmas. By the time we were ready to head out, Scott had prepared a little shopping list of the few more floss colors he'd need for his chosen project. ;-)

He took the first stitches while we were at the store, but soon discovered that the intervening years made it much more difficult for him to see the linen clearly. (I noticed this same little challenge when finishing up a needlework project a year ago.) We borrowed a magnifying lamp from my mom and his project is now solidly underway. He chose Celtic Christmas, a project he made about 10 years ago and gave to someone he worked with. Somehow we ended up with enough green linen background fabric for two of these projects and of course we had most of the floss in our stash, so it was easy to dive in again, as he always intended. Leah is into some new stitching projects too, so the father-daughter creative team is on the loose again!