This, that and another thing

Well I will finally post about the Almonte Fibre Festival which happened on September 7 and 8. Kathryn did quite well and it was a lot of fun. We saw quite a few friends and acquaintances, the usual suspects, and lots of new people too. Kathryn made quite a few batts, and of course they sold out pretty quickly. The batts are on the back table with a customer deep in thought…There were a lot more booths with ready-made crafts here, I managed to get a few Xmas presents, which I won’t be showing 😉   I was a very good girl indeed. Just bought a couple of natural skeins of BFL DK yarn from Windblest Farms, to round out the 3 blue ones I bought when we actually visited the farm – I’m thinking something stripey. I love BFL, love the sheen, the hardiness of it, no it’s not super soft but not everything in life needs to be super soft. I love spinning it too and am kicking myself for not buying some fibre, but then maybe I should spin up the fibre that I already bought from them. It’s funny how time is different with knitting and stashes (for me at least). Something I bought 2 years ago, seems like just a few months ago, and the more special something is, the longer it takes me to figure out what to make with it. Which makes me feel bad when someone gives me something fantastic because I might not actually get to it for a few years, but the doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it, I’m just waiting for the perfect idea, and it will come to me.

And I scored a Jordana Paige bag, on sale (and so did Kathryn but in a different colour) from Kelly’s booth, Just Knitting. She had loads of stuff on sale, so I also stocked up on circular needles, because when you have about 50 projects on the go, you run out of needles. If I ever get them all done, I’ll have a sale on needles.And there were buttons! Buttons galore! You could have spent ALL day looking at buttons and not have seen them all. So I almost blindly bought a few handfuls of vintage buttons.

And then there were these:

I realize, these days, there are a lot of alpacas around and most of us have seen them at most fibre festivals, but how could you ever get tired of anything this cute? With the biggest eyes in the world, aside from Japanese Anime characters.

(By the way, if you want to be really creeped out, there is a Ukrainian girl who has turned herself into a real live anime girl, it is truly weird – Anastasiya Shpagina – if you must look…)

I will have to take a pass on having my own alpaca, but maybe I could manage something like this (as long as I don’t have to water them!):Maureen recently went to Montreal’s botanical gardens and this was one of the exhibits.

I finished a sweater for myself. It’s a top-down pattern, that is more of a recipe than an outright pattern, from an Estonian designer, the internet CAN be a fantastic place! I used one strand of fingering cotton, Araucania Lonco, in beige and one strand of mohair lace from Handmaiden, in peridot. It is light and airy and yet has just enough warmth.And I finished these:So guess who’s coming for dinner?