another learning experience

Despite my late night, somehow I was roused out of bed bright and early this morning to carpool to the Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival. Leslie, Teresa and I jetted over to pick up Opus, who I had nagged into coming with us (she needs to get out more often). Of course, my motives may not have been entirely altruistic, maybe, since Opus is a champion loom-threader and I’m, well, not. Bless her heart. She actually stayed with me (once we got to Canby) while Leslie and Teresa found food for us and threaded the loom whilst I carded the wool for our weft:

I managed to thoroughly confuse her, apparently, because the way I was taught to thread a loom is “backwards and upside-down”, or something. Right.

Luckily, St M and Jodie showed up to distract us (and actually spin the weft I was carding). Here’s St M with Lennie, working on the blue half of the weft:

And here’s Jodie, spinning away, the brave woman who volunteered to spin the wool I carded:

Very quickly, we had enough yarn to weave with (and Opus finished warping in that time). They were too quick for me, I didn’t get to finish carding the green weft. Tricky people. In a rush this morning, I had picked the lime green locks and the turquoise roving. I had thought they would work well with the yarn Opus’ Mum gave us for the warp, but wouldn’t be too overpowering together:

They did look great and we got many compliments, but I didn’t take into account (as I was frantically grabbing handfuls of wool) that weaving with two shuttles would severely slow me down. And St M down, who was my relief weaver. By the end of the show, at around 5 pm, the shawl was only 2/3 – 3/4 finished. Oops.

A mistake made with the best intentions and I’ve definitely learned from it. So now I’ll have to finish the shawl at home (I don’t have to give Opus the loom back until Thursday), and then mail it to the winner of the raffle. The shawl was raffled off to benefit the OF&FF’s Youth Spinners program.

So, yeah, more homework. I got myself some bribes during the day, to keep myself trucking on the ShiBuiKnits patterns, other knitting patterns, knitted gifts, etc. Here’s a teaser for tomorrow:

The wall o’ sock yarn at one of the booths. This booth was dangerous. Goodness gracious. It also didn’t help that they had fabulous hand-dyed sock yarn for $16 a skein. Oy. Yes, I got sock yarn. Only 2 skeins, though. And, um, a hank of superwash wool to spin into yarn for socks…

Right. I’m not obsessed or anything. Anyway, I’ll post yarn p0rn pix tomorrow. Until, look at TheBon’s pretty-pretty OFF&F 2007 slideshow. She took much better pix than I did.

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