Friday, April 29, 2005

MD Sheep & Wool Festival

There is a big fiber happening here in the Mid-Atlantic region coming up called the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival. Last year I attended for the first time and I had a wonderful time. Howard County fairgrounds gets transformed into a big yarn and sheep and fiber extravaganza. You can buy all things wool/fiber-related from a live sheep, the raw fleece, cleaned, prepared fleece, ready-to-spin roving, and then there are vendors large and small with a huge selection of yarns, books, and tools of every description. I was overwhelmed as we walked from barn to barn in the warm May sunshine ogling the beautiful spinning wheels, handmade drop-spindles and knitting needles. I was truly overwhlemed, but I managed to find a few things to take home with me. One of the highlights of the festival is the Sheep to Shawl competition where teams of people shear a sheep, clean, process and spin the wool and then weave a shawl within a three hour time limit. I missed this event last year, but I plan to watch the event this year.

Several of us knitters in the D.C. area plan to car-pool on over to Howard County next weekend and catch the festival. It will be a wonderful time of seeing old friends, getting to see acres and acres of spectacular yarns and just get inspired.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

First Post

I've finally got this knitting blog set up. I plan to post about all things knitterly and fiber related that are going on in the D.C. Metro area and beyond.

I am the organizer for a knitting group that meets at Teaism, Penn Quarter. We had been using the meetup.com web site to organize our meetings, however, since they decided to impose a $19 per month fee for the use of their site, we decided to move on over to use the Knitting 'N the City yahoo group. We'll still continue to meet in the same place at the same time. People are also free to check out the other groups that meet elsewhere on other days according to their location and schedule.

We had ten people at Teaism last night and we had a wonderful time. There was a nice mix of knitting ability represented amongst us. We ate and laughed and knit the evening away. It's a really fun group.