Yarn School '07

Yarn School was a blast! It is held annually at the Harveyville Project, a sort of residential art co-op occupying an old school campus smack in the middle of rural Kansas. The classrooms have been converted to guest rooms, sparsely furnished but very roomy. Mostly we gathered in the auditorium for classes & just to generally hang out. It was a big crowd this year, about 30 spinners of varying experience levels. This is my roommate, Marsha, who has been spinning for a year or so -- she showed me the ropes on the first evening & got me spinning on one of the school wheels.

This is Cathy, another brand-new spinner like me. She was quite frustrated on Thursday night, just felt like she would never get the hang of it. (In fact, her cell phone rang about an hour after she started spinning with Marsha. It was her husband, asking her how it was going. Marsha & I both burst out laughing when she said in tones of maximum exasperation, "Honey, I suck!") Needless to say, by Sunday morning, it had all clicked for her & she was spinning like a pro.

My first skein! A natural brown wool. It's tragically overspun, so don't look too close. By Sunday I had learned that you don't have to treadle like hell to make yarn, so the overspinning problem cleared up.

The old chem lab had been converted to the Dye Lab, where we had lots of fun with acid dyes and microwaves and crock pots.

The dyed roving was hung up to dry in the breezeway between the grade school and high school buildings -- doesn't it look pretty?

There were alpacas! (This was our field trip on Friday.)

There were goats! These are Pygora goats, a pygmy-angora cross.

There were bunnies! Epically puffy Angoras.

And just for an added bonus, we found on Saturday that the town fair was going on! There was a parade in the morning, some cheeseball rides on the main drag, and... ribbons to be awarded in various craft categories. Naturally, with a school full of fiber artists, we all rifled through our bags to look for an item to enter in the Knit or Crochet categories. I dug up my Blueberry Waffle socks and entered them in the Small Knitted category. Imagine my surprise when I won first place!