WeFF

It's enough to cause me to hyperventilate. Once a year, on the first Sunday of November, the Southern California Handweavers Guild (SCHG) puts on a Weaving Festival in Torrance, CA that is a favorite. With vendors that support weaving, spinning, knitting, felting, beading, and many other fiber arts, women and men travel for miles (in my case, over 35) to attend. And it's well worth it.

This booth is Nancy's Custom Handweaving. You may remember Nancy when I mentioned her at the GLASG meeting as being so kind and helping me get settled in September when it took all my strength just to make it there.

This is Morrow Fleece Works and Shari McKelvy. I don't remember how I came to know of Shari, but she owns a cottage "factory" in which she takes raw fleece (mostly wool although she will work with anything), washes and combs it, and then returns it pin drafted and wound in a beautiful nautical coil to it's owner. I sent some fleeces that I had won at various silent auctions (yes, I have bid on and won dirty sheep's wool with glee on more than one occasion) to her, and was thrilled at the results. I was even happier when she started making a trek down for WeFF several years ago. Of course, that does not alleviate the embarassment of having yet again failed to find the purple-dyed border leister fleece that I wanted to give her at the event to process. I don't know if this is the 2nd or 3rd year that she's heard that lament from me, but I suspect, based on the depth of fiber in my hall closet, that it will not be the last.


Newton's Knits. Spectacular prices on ready-to-work-with yarn.

Ya know, I can't remember who was sporting this wall of exquisite color, but it was luscious.

UPDATE: Thanks to Elena, I now know that this wall was from Chameleon Colorworks.

Kahn Fagen Beads. I had just bought from them a week ago at the beading bazar, but couldn't resist adding to my collection.

Eric waiting for the fashion show...

And Mom - who also attends this event - waiting for the same.

Women weave their own cloth, fashion it into clothing, and model it for the rest of us to admire. One of the strongest points of the fashion show is that it has everything to do with achievement, and nothing to do with age or physical attributes.


About an hour after the show, it's time to draw tickets for the raffle! The woman in purple is Kathy Gould. She is lovely, she recently moved out of state to Las Vegas, New Mexico (yes, New Mexico, not Nevada) and then got married.

Who are the winners in this crowd?
Dave Larson, a very interesting friend.
Miles, Eric's son, watching the spinning.
Elena, also spinning. I wish I had taken a detailed photo of her jacket. She spun the yarn, wove the cloth, designed the jacket, then sewed it.
Heather at her wheel.
Eric & Miles at the end of the day.
And speaking of days, Thirty posts in thirty days. This is day 4.

Aggitating Situation

As long as I've brought up the laundry so many times as of late, I thought I'd reminise about a story that I heard several years ago. Elissa and I had decided to attend the Fibers Through Time Conference sponsored by the Arizona Federation of Weavers, and we were staying in a small hotel just off of campus. These conferences tend to be very social events, the women and men attending gather in the lobbies of their respective abodes after the day's events conclude to spin and knit, compare notes and finished projects, and just have a good time in general. This conference was no exception.

I wish I could remember the names of the women we were sitting with, outside by the pool with our spinning wheels in motion in front of us. I do remember that one of them was a teacher. I still find that odd; I always think of teachers as lofty individuals and when one that is teaching me in the daytime comes down to socialize with the group as an equal at night, I enjoy it immensely but am usually startled that they have strange kind of lives similar to mine. No matter what our status in the fiber world, we are all eccentric to the same degree.

Anyway, we were discussing odd pets, and the teacher brought up her son's habit of collecting snakes. I told her the story of L- and her snake "Muffin" that had disappeared for several weeks at one point, to finally be discovered curled around the seat of her neighbor's toilet. Apparently Muffin had spent a good portion of his time transversing the plumbing system of L's apartment complex. And so the teacher told the story of her son's snake getting lost.

It had been missing for weeks. Unlike L- who generally believed that the absent reptile would eventually turn up curled in one her shoes or something like that, the teacher figured that her son's snake was gone for good. She went about her housework like nothing was amiss, and that's how she perceived the situation. Oh how wrong she was.

One day she was doing the laundry. She opened the lid of the washer and removed the majority of the clothing out of the barrel. Looked in, and was shocked. There was the missing snake, angry as all get out. She quietly shut the lid of the machine and left the room.

We were all hysterical at this point. Of course. I mentioned that since snakes can make their way through plumbing, it was apparent that they can swim. I figure that, during the wash cycle, it just swam around like a merri-go-round horse or a sea serpent waiting for the ride to be over. That would probably not make it angry. But I figured that the spin cycle would be enough to do it. After all, that would make me pretty mad.

First we speculated on whether the snake had been mixed in with the clothing in the hamper or made it's way into the machine via the plumbing. But we were all anxious to know the outcome of the story. "What did you do?" we asked with gleams in our eyes.

"Well," she replied. "I did what any sane woman would do. I called my husband at work and told him he neeed to come home immediately to remove the snake from the washing machine."

"Did he?!?!" we responded.

"Not at first. He was really annoyed with me and wanted to know why I could not take care of the situation myself. To which I said, 'I'm not having anything to do with it. That snake is clearly aggitated.'"