Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival

It only took me a month to put together, but I finally finished it! Clearly I need more coffee in the mornings. Before we get into the fun that is a fiber festival, first a great announcement!

Little Knitty Bird is partnering with Little Washington Winery to run a knitting day up in the mountains on November 8th! Join us for Yarn and Wine by the Fireside a lovely day in the shadow of the Shenandoahs with wine, yarn, guest speaker Joyce Hall from Posey Thisisit Llama Farm , and a gift bag with yarn, a pattern, and custom Little Knitty Bird stitch markers! Get tickets now so that we know how many to expect and can get enough supplies, I can't wait to meet everyone!

Now time for Fiber!

Last year was the first time I was able to attend the Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival and this was just as fun! Last year's bright sun was replaced with clouds and a chill in the air, but considering we were all there to marvel over all things fiber related it didn't seem to hurt anything. Littlest Owl and Mama Bird were my stalwart companions, following me around as I tried to not drool over the yarn and took perhaps far too many pictures of goats.

How could you not love these faces though?

There is never any lack of fiber animals at the festival which makes it a real treat for Littlest Owl. We made sure to let her visit all her new friends as soon as we got there. The alpacas in particular were rather friendly and eager to make her acquaintance.

                        New Friends!                                                                                           Owen the Rabbit is happy to pose.

These sweet visitors from Central Hill Alpacas were ready for their close-up.

One of the awesome things about this festival is that it's not just a large yarn show, but truly is a fiber showcase taking you all the way from hoof to yarn and exhibiting all the steps along the way. In about every other exhibition tent is someone actively spinning and supplies are bountiful ranging from the "pick-a-fleece" table, to both dyed and un-dyed roving, non-wool raw and un-dyed fibers, dyes, looms, spinning devices, and finally the yarn. 

Pick a fleece, any fleece.

Raw and undyed fibers from the folks at Hipstrings who also make some beautiful drop spindles.

Roving as far as the eye can see!

This includes some more unusual forms of spinning and fiber work, such as the doctoral project from Spindlebars. Julie Obenauer-Motley and her fellow doctoral candidates were posed with a challege: use a bicycle to solve a problem in the developing world. What caught their attention was the problem many fiber producers have in actually milling their own fiber. Fleeces are produced, but then have to be sent to a third party manufacturer for processing. The resulting yarn is then sold back to the fiber farmers for prices they can scarcely afford. So Julie and her team mates contacted Terry Clark of Three Peaks Crafts to see if he could collaborate with them. Their answer was to convert a bicycle to use as a spinning wheel. Bikes are particularly common in developing nations and relatively easy to access. Converting one into a spinning wheel would give a small fiber farmer the ability to make their own yarn, avoiding having to send everything they would personally use to the third party producer, putting production back in their own hands. The students are in the research phase, testing out their design and getting feedback and I was able to learn about the process from Julie and Mrs. Clark. The team is looking into commercial viability of the project to see if they can create a one-for-one model to enable consumers to purchase a Spindlebar for themselves and accordingly gift one to a fiber producer elsewhere. Check out their site and let the team know what you think!

Of course the festival wouldn't be complete without tons of wonderful, beautiful yarn! Yarn makers from all over the Shenandoah mountain region were featured including some right near Berryville itself, where the festival is held.I'm still trying to knit through the stash that I bought last year so I managed to limit myself to only one skein this year. I had difficulty prying it away from Littlest Owl, however, once I let her check it out. 

Fiber Appreciation starts early. 

The festival is always full of various learning opportunities, whether officially through the scheduled set of classes and demos, or casually from the fiber workers at their own booths. 

Here Valerie Kellam of Frolicking with Fiber shows how she can use her wool blending hackle to blend different colors of roving together before spinning. 

In one of the exhibition buildings was the Blue Ridge Spinning and Weaving Guild and their teaching and demonstration area. 

Littlest Owl gets to learn about using a loom. 

Now time for more views of the festival and some of the wonderful vendors that were featured this year. 

Blue Ridge Yarns at the Misty Mountain Farm booth. 

Lovely yarn and super cool 3D Printed drop spindles from Turtle Made.

The always lovely Shalimar Yarns.

Neighborhood Fiber Co. I was really excited to see these folks. I got my degree up in Baltimore and I love the idea of an urban yarn company like this taking inspiration from Charm City itself! They just opened up their new retail shop on 700 N. Eutaw St., hopefully I can get up there soon to see it!

It's a yarn truck! I've been reading about these new businesses taking off and have been absolutely fascinated by the concept. Knitting Addiction is one of the few (if any others indeed!) of these on the East Coast, based out of North Carolina. I may have been a little too excited to see them!

Candy Hargett and Bill Kimsey from fiber.ing at Calluna Farm Studios were enough to make me homesick again for Colorado with their style of weaving and yarn making! Candy is working here on the quietest electric spinning wheel I've ever seen. She fell in love with the brand so much, they became an authorized dealer for them!

And speaking of unusual fiber work, check out this Civil War sock knitting machine from the folks over at Appalachian Sock Company. It was fascinating to get to watch this machine do it's thing!

It was a another wonderful event and I look forward to what they'll have going on next year!

Smithsonian Folklife Festival- Peru!

One of the best things about living in the DC area again is that I get to attend my favorite yearly event in DC, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The festival focuses on a country or countries every year and seeks to provide as much of a cultural picture of that region as possible. Exhibits and demonstrations include art, history, music, food, farming, religion, handicrafts, dance, and more. The participants come from the featured countries and share their industries and culture with the public. I get so excited any year that I can make it! 

This year the featured country was Peru and while it's taken me a couple weeks to put everything together, it's finally here! This year I was only able to stay one day at the festival and of course found myself pretty much stuck in the textile tents, there were other exhibits, I know there were, but I could barely see them over the awesomeness of the extremely talented textile artists who were being featured and their beautiful work! At some point I was made to go eat food in the wonderfully air conditioned Museum of the American Indian, which conveniently housed the festival marketplace in its atrium. Of course there was a display right at the front of amazing yarn. I may have taken ages to pick the perfect skein and it's beautiful! I don't have a pattern for it yet and still have to figure out exactly what the yardage is, but this plum colored giant hank of fingering weight wool is destined to become a beautiful shawl and it'll probably take me a year to decide on which one!

Of course it's never enough to just talk about beautiful textiles, there must be pictures of them as well! I was lucky to be able to photograph several of the artists and dance performers and am doing my best to credit them appropriately. 

My first stop was in the Cusco Textiles Tent. In here the emphasis was on traditional types of handweaving. 

Quitina Huanca Quispe (left) is both a weaver and a singer and Epifania Choque Quispe (right) is a weaver and a farmer. Both are demonstrating traditional forms of handweaving. Their work is rolled up beneath the unwoven surface as it progresses. The knowledge is passed down generally speaking from one generation of women to the next. I could have sat all day watching Quitina and almost did before I was pulled away to watch some of the musicians performing near by. 

Working beside these ladies was Timoteo Ccarita Sacaca.  He is largely self taught and is enthusiastic about explaining his work. One of many moments where I wished my Spanish was better as hearing his story in his words is always better than working through a translator. 

            

Timoteo explained his work as an extension of the traditional processes. His designs are based largely on traditional motifs, but also include references to colonialism. The inspiration for these comes from all around him and he charts out the images in his mind, keeping them there as he weaves. Considering I can't even manage cable charting without a physical pattern in front of me, he has my immense respect for his talent and sheer skill!

A couple tents over was a separate demonstration area that focused on the creation and dying of the yarns used in the various forms of textile creation. There I got to sit at the feet of Leandra Gutiérrez Sallo as she worked on some truly awe worthy color work. 

She was gracious enough to let me interrupt her knitting to ask her about her colorwork technique. Assuming I understood her correctly, it takes her nearly a month to finish a project like the one she currently has in her hands. In yet another example of me wishing that my Spanish was better I finally had to call over the translator because as it turns out, I never learned knitting terminology in any language other than English. This ended up being an amusing exchange as two knitters talked through a translator and then I had to stop and explain to that very translator the purpose of DPNs and why she would be using them, and what the parts of the yarn dying process further back in the tent were. I was very much hoping to glean some color-work pro secret of not getting the yarn all tangled up, but Leandra said that it's just simply constantly untangling and trying to keep the yarns as neat as you can as you go along. The snarled mass of my current colorwork pattern in the design stages would probably make her weep in it's messiness. 

I don't pretend to know much about weaving though I have friends who are weavers and so their work is still largely "and magic happens" to me, but I was very excited to find another knitter and loved how that immediate connection was made when she realized that I actually understood what she was doing and wasn't just a random curious bystander. Leandra's work is absolutely stunning and I wish I had had a better list of questions on me to ask her about her patterns, design, and technique, but I was so easily distracted by the beauty of the finished projects themselves. 

Behind her in the tent was the whole process of yarn dying and had I not seen Leandra sitting there knitting away, I could have spent a very long time indeed in that part of the tent! I got to show Littlest Owl the process from a demonstrator holding a hank of undyed yarn to the dying kettle and the various ingredients in the tent. She was offered to be able to stir the contents of the kettle, but she declined. I, however, happily took the demonstrator up on her offer!

For this particular yarn the dye source comes from a type of lichen. Arrayed then on a near-by table was a series of other dye sources with the yarns that they would produce and a couple mordants. 

There was yet another tent that had some fiber awesomeness going on in it, but I unfortunately didn't get to go in, left to my own devices I would have seen little else at the festival other than fiber and textiles! However, of course, there was much more to learn from and see and so here are some of the other sights of the day. 

Dancers performing several of the atajo de negritos dances that is one of the Afro-Peruvian cultural dance expressions that celebrate local religion and culture while also making commentary on the effects of slavery and colonialism. 

A contradanza troupe providing a glimpse into La Fiesta de la Virgen del Carmen. The festival has several groups of dancers who each perform a different part of the story and history of Paucartambo.  This particular performance makes colonial references both in its subject matter and in the music itself. As in many of the other dance styles included in the Folklife Festival, this particular one serves as a reminder and commentary on a history that includes ancient traditions and European colonial ambitions. 

Other demonstration areas included farming (with lots of information on quinoa), woodworking, reed boat building, story telling, cooking, more dance styles, visual art, and more. If you are looking to come visit DC during the summer, please make a point of looking up the Folklife Festival dates for that year, it's worth making the trip!