MDSW: The Take

Most times when I go to a fiber festival, I have a list of what I'm looking for or, at the very least, a list of vendors I want to visit. This time, other than buying the hackle, I didn't really have any specific thing in mind, though I thought maybe I'd look for yarn for a sweater and then just browse. There were certainly plenty of vendors I like there, so I knew there would be no shortage of things I could buy if I was so inclined.

Our first stop of the weekend was at the Needles Up event on Friday evening. This is a small event (only about six vendors total), but my friend Lisa of Fibernymph Dye Works was one of the vendors and I knew I wanted to go to support her -- and of course I love her yarn, too! I'd just received a club shipment from her before I left, so I limited myself to just one skein of her Bounce fingering weight:

I also stopped by the booth of AmyBeth, aka the Fat Squirrel, to get one of her amazing bags -- but really only because my Boxy was already getting too big for its project bag. Yeah, that's right, it was a necessity.

In plotting with my traveling companions on Friday night, I decided that if I was going to buy a sweater quantity of yarn, I really wanted it to be Jill Draper's new base, Kingston, a tweedy DK weight. That was perfect, because the sweater I was shopping for calls for DK. My friend Susie, who was a sheep and wool festival first-timer, also was interested in looking at Jill's yarn for a sweater, so that was where we headed first. We were not disappointed -- Jill has some amazing yarn, as she always does. I came home with five skeins of Kingston:

After that, I didn't have anything specific I wanted to buy, but I still wanted to support some friends. So I picked up a skein of delicious Shetland sport from the Ross Farm booth (a lighter shade to go with the dark brown I brought home from Rhinebeck):

And of course I bought some more Hobbledehoy battlings (which you saw in my last post) because I got to know Liz a little bit at SSK and she's a real sweetheart in addition to being a very talented fiber artist.

Finally, I made one last yarn purchase on Sunday morning when we went back for one more brief visit (and let me recommend that you go back on Sunday morning because it's so much less crowded and there's still plenty of stock there). I'd popped into the Into the Whirled booth on Saturday but was much too claustrophobic to make a purchase. Somehow with more room to browse, these two skeins hopped into my bag:

I think these two skeins will become a new shawl design -- I just love these two colors together!

So that's it, and I think I did pretty well this year. I also brought home a little felted sheep pouch and some honey sticks for Rainbow, which she was thrilled with -- most of the honey has already been eaten and the pouch went with her to school today to be shown off. Now I'm off to knit so I can use up some of this stash!