Today, Mr. QuiteAYarn and my Mom and I went to the 1st annual Mat-Su Fiber Festival, and we’re glad we did!  For those of you not familiar with Alaska geography, Mat-Su refers to the Matanuska-Susitna valley, which is a little bit north of Anchorage and contains the towns of Wasilla and Palmer.  The event was held at the Alaska State Fair grounds, which hosts this type of event between state fairs.

As previously mentioned, this was the first episode of this event, so it was pretty small.  However, what there was was pretty good!  There were a couple of food vendors, and a few goat and sheep adjacent vendors (goat milk soap, etc), but most of the stands and displays were pretty on-point.

There were lots of fiber producers, including the musk ox farm, biggest and probably best known quiviet producer in the area.  (I intend to tour the farm one of these days, and will most certainly blog about when I do – stay tuned!) There were also some sheep and goat farmers. One of these sheep is partially sheared to show how the locks grow, and the other has a little coat on 🙂 I kept trying to take pictures of their faces because they were super-cute and had hay all over them, but they were adept at shunning the paparazzi.

These goats had figured out exactly where to stand to avoid the band of little  girls who were stalking them.  (There were more sheep than this, but I suspect most people have a limited capacity for pictures of sheep.)

There were also several people raising rabbits for their fur.The rabbits were cute and silky soft as the dickens as well!

There were also plenty of educational stands – some people were demonstrating spinning, others were talking about different fibers.

For a smallish event, there was a lot to see and do.  I can’t wait for next year’s fest!