Mom, DH and I went to our local fiber festival today, and had a great time! Well, Mom and I did. DH had a good food-truck lunch and got in some reading and napping in the car 🙂

I went to this festival a couple of years ago, and had a good time then as well. In the years since, it has grown quite a bit. This year for the first time, they are having a shearing school for local sheep farmers. A fiber mill that started up a few years ago in the Fairbanks area, Coyote Trail, sponsored the shearing school in order to encourage the fiber industry in Alaska. One interesting thing Coyote Trail has done recently is to work with local reindeer farms to get reindeer hair, which they have spun into yarn! They did have some at the festival, but at $100 a small skein, it is a little rich for my blood! It would be neat to try out, but hopefully it will come down in price a little bit at some point.

There were quite a few spinners and dyers, vendors of all kinds of yarn and yarn-adjacent items. The lady I learned needle felting from was there as well, and I believe was having a class at some point in the day, but we were mostly there to shop! And I did come away with a pretty good haul.

Ewe Can Do It! was the theme for the festival, and of course I could not pass up that t-shirt!

I bought this cool drinks print project bag and my Mom gifted me this lovely gray gradient of squishy worsted weight yarn from Carolyn of Handmade by Carolyn, who apparently works and sells her stuff at Tangled Skeins, that yarn shop in the next town over that for some reason I just cannot get myself to. So another reason to get there!

These lovely skeins come from the lady with the bunnies in the first picture – Fairy Tale Fibers (sp?)

These yarn and pattern kits come from Calypso Farms near Fairbanks. They put together very nice kits 🙂 I’ve bought from them before, and the yarn is always good quality and the directions are always clear.

And finally, grab bag find of the year – matching 60 gram skeins of sock yarn in shades of blue with some sparkle spun in! $5!

All in all, wonderful day of shopping! There were a bunch of classes, but we were not organized enough to take advantage of them this year. Maybe next year!