It was a good time. Orchid people are INSANE. I mean, totally insane. They come up with things like this:

(The theme of this expo was Carnaval, and that's how they spelled it.)

The market was a wonderland of interesting orchids and the occasional related plant, plus one very intriguing service:

(I think orchid boarding would make more sense if you'd spent the $200 some of those orchids were priced at.)

I got a couple of orchids from a friend last year, and I've been enjoying having a cat who doesn't eat plants, so it was fun to walk around and daydream about building a massive orchid garden, or think about what we wanted to do with the greenhouse when we build it. We enjoyed the exhibit area, with lots of really lovely plants at the peak of bloom.

Then afterward we drove to another event downtown in the most glorious sunset. It's been so overcast the last several days that having such a stunningly clear evening was a real pleasure. I think I've driven down this street a hundred times and I've never seen such a clear view of the two Eastern spans of the Bay Bridge (one under construction, of course, but when it's built this view will be terrific on the rare clear day). (And yes, of course they're not as in focus or clear in the photo as they were in person, but usually you can't even tell there's an island out in the bay from here, much less see the bridges on the other side.)

And yes, I admit, I was glad to spend the day shoveling mulch around the garden rather than walking around on another concrete expo center floor. Although the funniest thing has been talking to people today and having them say, "Oh, yeah, we went to the orchid show yesterday." Apparently everybody we know was there.

Technorati Tags: flowers, garden show, orchids, san francisco

Anyway, I took two classes, my first time taking classes there. On Thursday afternoon I took "Fiendishly Difficult Stitches" With Merike Saarniit. It was tons of fun. We did four different Estonian stitches (well, one wasn't Estonian, but it might as well have been). Here's my swatch from the class:

I recommend the class to any advanced knitter who is looking to try something challenging for a change.

Yesterday I took an all-day class on pattern writing which was very useful, if not exactly what I was hoping for (I was looking for something more about sizes and math and that sort of thing, while this was more about technical writing; it was still a very good class). The exercise for that class was hand-writing a sweater pattern, and I will spare you that one.

I also enjoyed the market preview and visiting the market during breaks on Friday. I usually like to go on the Friday to the market, because it is less crazy than Saturday, but this Friday was still totally effing insane.

I got a fun little range of things. From the top left, clockwise, a combined measuring tape and pen freebie from a vendor, a roll of highlighter tape for charts, a spinning gauge tool, a package of tubes for storing double-pointed needles, another package with a couple tubes that are slit open so you can store a work in progress, a little pink plastic case that securely holds stitch markets (I seem to lose lots of stitch markers), and a little plastic freebie case from another vendor. I also got a set of blocking wires for lace, but they don't photograph particularly nicely, so I left them out.

And of course I got some yarn.

The big red hank is 500 yards of singles silk from Blue Moon Fiber Arts (you have to dash right to their booth at the beginning of the market preview to have anything like selection), then moving right a hank of Malabrigo Sock (superwash merino), Girl From Auntie sock yarn, and Madeleintosh Sock. Yes, I do know I bought two skeins of the same colour. Apparently I really like orange.

It was a good time. I'll probably skip Stitches classes next year and maybe do Madrona instead, but I always enjoy looking around at the market.

And since I had to be in Santa Clara at 8:30am, I stayed over in a hotel Thursday night. Not internet access, so I brought my spinning wheel, and finished one bobbin and got a nice start on the last one:

I am really getting much better at long draw, and if I hadn't had to stop so often to remove vegetal matter from the fiber, I would have made even more progress. I have one more batt of the black alpaca left to spin, and it has to get done before the end of the Olympics. I think I can do that in a few hours, maybe tonight. But now it's time to go to an orchid show, because I really don't have enough obscure, expensive, and time-consuming hobbies.

Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, spinning, yarn

I think the more saturated purple works much better.

Also, because it is a rainy Sunday, I give you a little glimpse into how we spent our morning:

Technorati Tags: crafts, dogs, dyeing, ravelympics 2010, yarn

I used the direct warping method, and it definitely seems a lot faster than using a warping baord would be. One step in the process is re-threading every other thread, which was a laugh riot.

But to be honest, it went very quickly and a lot faster than I expected.

And pretty soon I was doing some of the most wobbly and terrible weaving ever. Yes, I do consider this object mostly a learning experience.

Mostly I think the trouble was with the warp threads and how unevenly I tensioned them. There's some crazy stuff happening there.

I did all this while re-dyeing my purple skein. As you can see in this photo, even with the bad colours (I blame the fluorescent fixtures), my purple skein, the last of the dyeing for my dyeing event, came out really, really pale. So after dithering over whether it would matter, I decided it would, with all the saturated colours in the other skeins, so there was nothing to do but stay up late and overdye it a deeper purple.

Technorati Tags: crafts, dyeing, ravelympics 2010, weaving

I finally decided to use some of my masses of undyed worsted-weight yarn and dye it up in the colours I want. I won't get them right on what Mick has, but I do hope to get close. And I have just three days to do it. (It wouldn't be the Ravelmpics without a challenge like that.)

Technorati Tags: crafts, dyeing, ravelympics 2010, yarn

Using photos of Mick's sweater (like the one above), I figured out the number of colours in the sweater plus their distribution in the sweater. I made a spreadsheet to figure out how much of the yarn I needed to use for each colour, and then used a brute force method to decide which skeins would be dyed which colours.

Rather than risk getting dye on my laptop, I noted the weights of the skeins for each colour on my notes.

I arranged the yarn according to my notes, so I could easily find the skeins I wanted as I began a batch of dyeing. The key to large projects like this is to do as much mise en place as possible before you get started, so you don't find yourself making dumb mistakes, or running all over the house looking for gloves or a thermometer while overcooking your yarn on the stove.

I decided to start with bright red, since that is one of the easier colours to get. I began by soaking the yarn in warm water with a little detergent (I used Dharma Trading's Synthropol substitute, called Professional Textile Detergent). The detergent acts as a wetting agent to help get the yarn good and soaked, and it doesn't need to be washed out because it is neutral in this application.

I filled up a dye pot (I bought some cheap stock pots for the purpose, since they cannot be reused for food) with warm water. I mixed my weighed dye powder with a little warm water, stirred it smooth, and added it to the pot. Then I dropped in the yarn and stirred it around. I let that soak for about ten minutes, so the dye could distribute evenly through the yarn.

Then I gradually brought the temperature up to about 120F. At that point, I mixed citric acid crystals (1 Tbsp per pound of fiber, which was 1/4 Tbsp in this case, not an easy measurement, but it didn't need to be super precise) in hot-hot water, then poured that solution into the pot and stirred it in well (but not vigorously).

I used citric acid because it smells better than the white vinegar that is the cheap/low-tech way to acidify the dye. I don't mind the vinegar smell too much, but I'm going to be dyeing for several afternoons, so I decided to spring for the less smelly version. Dharma Trading, just up the bay in San Rafael, is a great source for dyeing stuff, and I'd gotten a one-pound bag of crystals the last time I was there.

I had a selection of acid dye powders to choose from. I used cherry red for my first batch of yarn, then pink to get the range of pinks, then turquoise to get a light blue.

It took nearly an hour to get the temperature in the dye pot up to 180F, which is the temperature at which the dye sets. I didn't rush it: just kept the heat low, stirred every ten or so minutes very gently, and checked it often.

Once the temperature was at the right point, the dye was also exhausted from the dye pot. You can see here that the water is clear, rather than coloured. All the dye is now bound to the wool.

Then I let the dye pot cool down. Just turned off the heat and let it sit for another hour or more. Then I rinsed the yarn with hot water (the water in the pot was still quite hot), and put it in the dryer (I have a rack for drying delicates in my dryer; otherwise I would have hung it up to dry).

I was quite happy with the colour, The red came out exactly as I wanted.

And because I'm going to begin knitting with it relatively soon, I balled up the skeins as I finished them. I got bright red, two shades of pink (I was going to do three but decided to make the pale pink a brighter pink for this sweater), and the turquoise (which came out too bright) done in the first round of dyeing.

And we had only one mishap, when Mr. Kitty stuck his paw in a cup of dye solution that I was letting dissolve on the counter (that cat gets into everything). He turned a little blue and got little blue footprints everywhere, but seems none the worse for wear.

Don't be impressed: I got both the dragon and the Obama picture at the party store. You can be impressed by my outrageously good freehand-cut hearts. I made those with scissors. I rule.

We also had a few decorations from our wedding shower lo those many years ago, so I hung them around:

Those are so pretty I'm just going to leave them there for a while.

Also, we had a minor miracle. Somehow we invited 23 people over and everybody said yes, so we needed more chairs. We went and bought some at IKEA, but we were still going to need to borrow chairs, when one of our neighbors set some perfectly nice chairs out at the curb. Noel dashed down the street and picked them up, I washed them, and we had enough chairs for a very weird dinner party. (Actually, we ended up running out of tables, which is a bit harder to compensate for.)

Anyway, it was fun, but it was too many people. My dinner party brain can only keep track of the needs and desires of guests up to about ten, and above that it's more like "there are many people here, wow."

Now we have a week's worth of dishes to run through the dishwasher (no, we were never in danger of running out of dishes), and Noel put in a special request to just go out to eat tonight rather than cook anything after two solid days of cooking. After that, I'll be eating leftover pasta and meatballs for a week or so.

I decided to do a few events to help motivate me to finish up some projects (or get started on them). This afternoon I organized all the pieces for those projects.

This is my kickoff project: a baby romper I started five years ago and stopped because I didn't like the shape (and was making it from acrylic for washability, so it couldn't be blocked into submission). I decided to rip it out and reuse the yarn.

My second project, the big one, is finishing spinning the black alpaca I'm going to use to make a sweater for Noel.

I'll also be doing some dyeing. I'll use chemical dyes rather than natural ones because I want specific colours that aren't easy (or even possible) to get with natural dyes.

Technorati Tags: crafts, dyeing, fiber, knitting, spinning, wool, yarn

Then I drew those balls out into skeins that have lots of surface area (better for dyeing).

I also went and got some appropriate dyes for cotton (the dyes I have are good for protein fibers), because I got 800 yards of doubleknitting weight cotton from a giveaway last week and I want to overdye it less offensive colour.

Anyway, the romper was my kickoff project for the event, so sometime after the torch was lit (we made an emergency trip to IKEA for chairs, since I invited some 20 people over for dinner and we only have 9 chairs) (also, we have no TV, so I'm not sure precisely when things happened, so I began late just to be sure), I began ripping out the finished pieces.

Then I balled it up for reuse. And there's one project down.

I spent most of the day doing animal handling -- that's pretty interesting to me and it seemed like they had plenty of people to deal with the fleeces -- and she spent the day dealing with the fleeces.

I've put my (numerous) photos after the cut, and I'm still editing the video I shot.

Technorati Tags: fiber, shearing, sheep, wool

The sheep were penned on one side of the shearing barn, and the shearing happened on the other side. Here's Phantom and her baby, born only a few days ago, waiting in a special mommy pen. Beside her are the white sheep that will be sheared. Behind her are sheep that will not be sheared on this day (the process goes slowly enough that it has to be done over several days. So you, too, can participate in a shearing in Orland!).

The process starts with moving some sheep from the holding pen to the shearing pen, down a little temporary chute.

We worked on coloured sheep in the morning, then whites in the afternoon. Here are the sheep waiting for shearing when we arrived in the morning:

And the line of sheep in the afternoon. The separation is mainly to make it easier to keep the white fleeces from getting bits of grey or black fleece in them, or vice versa. I've mixed up the images in this post in order to choose the better shots to tell the story.

The shearing itself was done by a professional shearer. He uses a trapeze thing to help him keep his balance and save his back while wrangling heavy sheep around. He starts by removing the wool that won't be part of the fleece: the stuff from the belly and butt, which is caked with sheep poop and stuffed with foxtails and other junk from being dragged around through pastures all year.

(See the heads back there? That's where the fleeces were being handled.)

When that stuff has been swept away, he quickly and efficiently removes the fleece all in one sheet. A good fleece will kind of stick together in a blanket.

As you can see, the sheep are totally complacent during the process. Once sheep are on their backs they go completely still and let themselves be handled, which is pretty handy for the shearer (and safer for the sheep).

After the sheep were sheared, they went into a little pen to be processed. Here we have an unsheared sheep (right) looking in on the sheared sheep (left).

In the little pen, I picked the foxtails out of the sheep's skin, picked them out of their noses and the odd little ducts by their eyes, cleaned out their ears and basically made sure they would not be poked by chunks of stuff in their coats for the whole year. This meant that by the end of the day my hands were covered in lanolin; it took four washes to get the thick layer of oil off my hands.

Once they were picked clean-ish, the shepherd vaccinated them (different vaccines for year-olds and adults), then she sprayed them with bug spray to keep lice off them.

Then they got new coats, an elaborate fitting process, because the coat needs to be large enough to accommodate their future fleece, while small enough that it won't drag and get pulled off before the next shearing.

After that they got to go out into a nearby pen to be observed for adverse vaccine reactions and have something to eat (they'd had to fast so they wouldn't poop during shearing).

On the fleece side, events began before the shearing was even finished. As the sheep was being sheared, the shearer would take a hunk of wool from the shoulder and hand it over the wall to be saved as a sample. Those were labeled with the sheep's tag number and stored in this box:

Once the fleece was off the sheep and the sheep moved on to the next stage, the sheared fleece was bundled carefully in a sheet and handed over the wall of the shearing pen. It was immediately weighed for raw weight:

That weight was recorded in this book, along with a sample lock of wool, the final skirted weight, plus some comments on the fleece from the people doing the handling.

Then it was time to lay the fleece out for skirting. Skirting is the process of removing bad or unusable bits of the fleece, so that a spinner who buys the fleece knows the weight of the fleece she's buying is the weight of total usable wool. Unskirted fleeces should cost less per pound, because there's more wool in them that is not usable (due to felting, gunking up with poop, or excessive vegetal matter).

Each fleece was oriented with its head end toward the door, so they were all lined up the same way, then the sheet was removed.

Then the fleece was gently shaken to knock out the second cuts (places where there were very short pieces of wool from a second pass with the shearing clippers) and any loose pieces of junk in there.

Here's an adult fleece laid out over the table. With this set of sheep, we were lucky to see a fleece this large; most were half this size. I think this one ended up being about 6 lbs altogether.

This year, the shepherd had a huge problem with foxtails in the hay; the seeds were in the hay, then the foxtails sprouted in the pasture, and there were foxtails everywhere. So we went over the fleeces, pulling out as many foxtails as possible.

The fleeces were gorgeous.

Not so gorgeous was the junk that fell off the table. As the day went on, the pile of junky bits grew. Better on the floor than in the fleece, of course.

When the fleece was skirted and cleaned up, we rolled it with paper to keep it from jumbling together. This way, the fleece can be unrolled and laid out in the shape of the sheep again.

It took a couple of people to roll the fleece up like this, going carefully to keep from pulling the fleece apart.

The rolled fleece was then itself rolled in more paper:

And tied into a neat bundle:

Which was labeled the the sheep's tag number and a few other small notes.

Then carried off into the wool room for storage. This is the wool room after two fleeces had been sheared, quite early in the morning:

And this is the wool room at the end of the day:

But there's more! One of the sheep had figured out how to open the gates and so a couple of the ladies (like the afore-pictured Phantom) had babies in tow. This is little Henry, Hester's baby. (Maybe he should be Harry with that lightning streak on his face.) He's a couple days old.

He was mostly with us in the post-shearing processing area, and sometimes he curled up and fell asleep in the most odd places.

And this is Joe, who is INSANE, like all Border Collies. Joe was not allowed in to the barn, for reasons that are probably pretty obvious.

Yes, I did kick his ball for him. I'm not cruel to animals or anything.

Inside, we had two lovely fleeces, one from Sue Reuser (Flora, about 5 lbs), and one from Merry Meadows (Chloe, about 3 lbs). Both white, obviously, both Cormo. Both nice (though Sue's was the nicer, I admit).

After trading some with my lovely fiber buddy, I have slightly less of each plus a bonus bag of Merino. I'm not sure how it worked out that I thought I gave away a bunch of fiber and yet I think I ended up with more than I started with. There's some kind of fibermath going on there that is not entirely obvious to me.

Anyway, I think I might be set for fiber for the time being.

Technorati Tags: fiber, spinning, wool

It was lovely. Here's the view from our hotel room:

We were a couple blocks from the Space Needle. It's much prettier in the fog than the last time we were in town, when the weather was warm and sunny and clear.

We saw the library, which is far more beautiful in context than in the publicity photos that somehow remove the entire city. We saw the Experience Music Project (hard to miss it, really) which still looks like a pile of dirty laundry. We had a nice dinner at Flying Fish. And on the way home, we went to Voodoo Donuts in Portland and got hassled by the recreationally homeless, which is apparently a local sport/tradition.

Technorati Tags: portland, seattle

Anyway, this will just graze over what I've been doing. I've put it in the extended entry because it ended up being a LOT of photos.

Technorati Tags: county fair, crafts, fiber, knitting, lace, spinning, wineries, wool

That seemed to take forever, in part because I spent precious little time actually doing it while doing a lot of complaining about how dirty the alpaca was. I finally finished the last one last week.

From that I have thus far plied two skeins, though at least another full bobbin worth of singles awaits.

Part of why I delayed so much on the spinning was that I was finishing this shawl:

Whereupon I started a new shawl (Evelyn Clark's Shetland Lace Shawl):

That's using my spindle-spun merino/silk yarn.

And a cardigan knitalong (Diminishing Rib, which is in one of this year's Interweave Knits):

I also started a new spindle project:

Noel and I drove up to Boonville to go to a wool judging (very educational)

And apple show (disappointing):

We carefully read this informational poster:

And I bought three fleeces, all Cormos (Corriedale/Merino crosses of one sort of another):

Those are all off at Morro getting made into something usable. Two of them are coloured fleeces and should arrive before November.

We also bought some Navarro wine, because when you drive up to Boonville, you really must go to Navarro.

Then this weekend we drove up to Dixon to go to Lambtown, where I was signed up for a couple of spinning classes and wanted to see the dogs and shearing. Well, I didn't get much chance to see those, but in the market hall I came across this used Lendrum for sale, and it came home with me.

Now I'm going to finish fixing and sell the Clemes & Clemes wheel. At the same time, Noel suggested we should just get off our butts about fixing the wheel I got from his grandmother.

The first class was about mordanting. Kristine uses aluminum sulfate, which is a garden additive and thus relatively safe as a mordant. Many mordants are made from heavy metals like chromium, and they can be difficult to handle and dispose of.

We did our mordant bath in this large aluminum pot. Usually aluminum is a bad choice for dyeing, because it is highly reactive -- even the aluminum in this pot has an effect on the mordant. But if the effect is what you want, then what the hey. This almost looks like one of those crazy turkey fryers, but it is actually for making fair food, which brings us right around to my theme for the summer, which is Stuff Yourself Silly With Fair Food.

The mordant pot can be reused many times, adding more aluminum sulfate and water as you go. Eventually it gets really murky and needs dumping. If you happen to have hydrangeas, they love the stuff. So do most acid-loving plants.

After we'd weighed out our fiber and put it in the pot to stew for an hour, we sat around and talked about dyestuffs. You can buy concentrates of many natural dyestuffs if that's what suits you -- the benefits are a certain kind of predictability that is useful when you are dyeing on a commercial scale.

These are (dead) cochineal bugs. They live on prickly pears, and they make everything red. They are a foodsafe red dye -- any natural red colour in your food comes from these bugs. I'm thinking of giving some to a chicken as an experiment -- will the bugs turn the eggs red?

The concentrated powders are interesting to handle. This is a pot of Lac, which is where lacquer comes from. Many people have a strong allergic reaction to this, plus it smells terrible. That's why there's so much in the pot.

We talked quite a bit about the properties of each kind of dye, how mixing different things in changes colour, and on and on. My interest in natural dyeing is pretty academic, at least on this scale. I'd like to plant some dyestuffs and dye with my own plants, but I'm less interested in dyeing from concentrated powders produced in a plant somewhere.

Our next class, we dyed. The fiber had been sitting, damp, soaking up mordant all week. Now we mixed up a concentrated dye solution, put the fiber in it, and then put the fiber into mason jars.

We put the fiber into a dye bath in a bucket first, to get it all soaked up with dye. Then we stuffed it into the mason jar.

We set the caps of the mason jars on top loosely, then put them in water baths on the stove to heat up for an hour.

When they cooled down, they were set aside in their jars to sit for a week. You can get different effects by soaking the fiber for more or less time.

This is what greeted us this last Sunday. Twelve shimmering, jewellike mason jars full of fiber. You can see the dyes we used: pomegranate, madder, madder with cream of tartar mixed in, quebracho red, logwood grey, and logwood purple.

Our last class was all about washing. You can use a lot of water in washing that just gets wasted (if you don't have some kind of greywater system). So Kristine showed us how to waste less and get more out of the water we did use.

The key to not felting the fiber together is to handle the fiber as little as possible, but the key to saving water is pressing as much water out of the fiber as possible before each dunk. It's a balancing act.

When we finished, everybody had about an ounce of each colour to take home and finish drying. I'm thinking of carding mine together to make some batts of a larger amount of fiber so I have enough to make a real project.

I'm looking forward to taking more classes on natural dyeing, especially a dyer's garden class they're still working on developing.

Technorati Tags: art, crafts, fiber, dyeing

This month's theme is Fleece to the Finish, and the goal is to go from new fleece to finished yarn in one month. Now, I don't have much for new fleece hanging around the house, but I do have that black alpaca I've been very lazy about spinning. So I'm using this month to motivate myself to spin up as much of that alpaca as I can. It's destined to be 3-ply yarn, to be knitted into a warm (VERY VERY WARM) sweater for Noel to wear while biking across San Francisco every day. I'd like it to come out somewhere in the fingering range, which it might be; I'm not consistent enough to be sure of what my gauge is before the yarn is finished. When it's made into yarn, I'm thinking of overdyeing it with a purple to give it a more inky colour, and reduce the rusty look that naturally black animal hair always gets.

Here's my starting point: I had 19 batts of alpaca. Of those, I'd spun up one and a half onto two partial bobbins (I started one, took it off for a class, then misplaced it for a few days, during which I started another).

Here's bobbin #1 (which was really the second one I started while looking for the real first bobbin; sorry for being confusing, but I decided to number them by the order in which they are completed, not started):

And bobbin #2 waiting in the wings:

Hmm. I should count my remaining batts, because it kind of looks like there may be two and a half batts on these guys, not one and a half.

Anyway, last night I sat down to spin for at least an hour. We ended up watching a couple of movies (one documentary on TED, and Spies Like Us, both of which were disappointing in their own ways). But I did get a lot of spinning done, and ended up finishing the partial batt I had in the project bag. And here we are:

Tonight I plan to spin at least half a batt. That'll fill this bobbin and get me onto bobbin #2. I'll try to be less sloppy about my bobbin, too; filling it this unevenly can lead to twists and knots in the singles, which is Not Fun.

The plan is to spin three bobbins full of singles, then ply them together until all bobbins are empty, repeat until done.

Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn

That's washed on top, of course. Both locks were about the same size; this stuff poofs up very nicely in the bath. And the lanolin is very light, which is welcome. I just gave it one go-round in the soapy water (well, I actually use shampoo, because if it works on my hair it should be OK for fleece), and all the grease was pretty much gone.

The fleece is a cormo, entry #1193 from Sue Reuser, who as far as I can tell pretty much doesn't know how to produce a bad fleece. I'm thinking I may buy direct next year, if I have any need of fleece at all (which seems a little unlikely given how much fiber I have now and the fact that I'm going to two more fiber events before the end of the year).

Technorati Tags: crafts, fiber, wool

I loved this fleece, but it went for way more than I could have possibly afforded:

Also, looking at it, I realized that I really do not want massive amounts of coloured wool. This was light enough that it would dye decently, but still, being grey took some value off it for me, as lovely as it was.

Not that there was not plenty of fleece:

Anyway, for the next few hours I sat and followed along on my auction list while knitting away at my latest project, which is the Icarus Shawl that was in Interweave Knits a few years ago. It's a nice, mindless lace pattern for most of the shawl, so modulo needing to be able to count while the guy was calling all sorts of numbers out, I made decent progress.

(I'm knitting it in some laceweight hand-painted alpaca I bought a couple of years ago and wanted to use up. There's nowhere enough shawl to use all 2400 yards, but I have a sort-of plan for the leftovers.)

Fiber buddy hlf bought three fleeces, one of which we're splitting (um, I think it might be the one under her at this point; she was a little giddy). We dropped them all off to go to Morro Fleece Works. It will eventually be delivered around November or later.

I think I'll end up with a few pounds of pencil roving, which is nice and easy to spin. Although I am happy with the fleece and excited about getting the end result, the drawback to buying at auction is that prices are very high (in auctions, the winner always ends up paying more than the object is worth because by definition nobody else was willing to pay that much). I think I like events like the Spinning at the Winery day better; the pressure is lower and the prices are better.

After the auction, we had lunch then made a brief tour of the livestock pavilion. This sweet grey alpaca flirted with us when it kind of looked like we might have edibles in our bags (if we did, the alpaca wasn't getting any).

And then the long drive home in the usual terrible Sunday traffic. I forgot how backed up it gets even on 101 coming North. I was always driving against it back in the school days; Noel was the one who'd get hit with that stuff coming back from a weekend with me in SLO.

I was intrigued by this place:

I guess they had really sold out, then.

Technorati Tags: county fair, crafts, knitting, lace, spinning