The Middle Tennessee Sheep, Wool, and Fiber Festival

let's just say...it is not the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. not even close! but it was fun! a friend of mine called last week to let me know that the cost of one of the classes we were both looking at had been reduced from $60 to $45 plus the materials fee. so we decided to do it! so saturday morning she, i, and another friend of mine took the Dyeing Varigated Yarns class with Gail White. we had done some dyeing before with koolaid and wilton's cake dyes but never with the acid dyes. this was a great class. we each dyed 6 skeins. one thing that i really liked was that you dye the yarn in the wound cakes instead of skeins. that was new to me. so you put the wet skien down in one color...

then when that has all been absorbed you flip it into another color.

she had a little dye leftover and an extra few minutes so we were allowed to dye some of our own yarn if we brought it. i had 2 skeins of knitpicks bare in a sock weight. i did one skein in a vat of blue dye. one of the girls said it looked like smurk sphegetti. fa la lalalala la lala la...
the other skein i dyed this vibrany pink! it is to pretty. so those are the two that you will see in the pciture that are not varigated.

aren't they pretty! here are some snap shots of us during the class:

this is Learning from Chavah. she overdyed one of the varigateds. gail says anytime you don't like something overdye it blue! it turned out kinda pretty.

here i am with the smurf spaghetti yarn!
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this is my friend veronica who went with me. she is skeining yarn with a knitty knotty!

after the class we did a little shopping in the vendors' booths. we got in the most trouble at Gail's booth (whom we took the class from). learning from chavah fell deeply in love with a merino yarn that was in it's natural color. you can see here that it is talking to her telling her that it wants to go home with her which it did minus the 6 skeins that i bought!


veronica fell in love with another of Gail's undyed wool. this time a bulky weight in the natural shade of cream. it is really pretty. she couldnt' figure out what to do with it exactly so she just bought all of it. here they are counting:


i bought a few skeins of the one that learning from chavah loved so much and i also bought this:


this is a superwash wool, bamboo, nylon blend that i am just itching to make the Diamond Fantasty Shawl out of. it is a brilliantly wonderful blue color! for now i am resistin starting it. too much stuff to get done with first!

ok here are the three of us as we are leaving our fun day at the Dickson Fiber Fest 2008:


FO next time...promise!