First Snow!

Okay! It's not a lot of snow. But yesterday I woke up and saw the snow falling outside! First Snow! Remember last year how excited I was! First Snow! Yeah! Well, it didn't last very long, and it was windy and cold all day long. Light flurries flew around, but not much sticking to the ground. There was a light dusting. This morning I woke up and still snow flurries, and my deck was covered! Yeah! First Snow!

Be aware that this will probably be the last time I am excited about winter. I don't like the darkness, I don't like the windy cold, and I don't like the mucky that comes after the snow. Or ice-I hate ice.

Enough of that. Have a few alpaca pics from the alpaca show this past weekend. I love alpacas. It was so neat to stand there and listen to the humming. I went early on Friday to just watch them unloading them and putting them in their stalls. But the spinning guild provided spinners both days, and I went both days.

Being beautiful is tiring work. Sometimes a gal just has to take a nap!

The photo on the poster is Helga. She really looks like that. They did not groom her to look like that. The woman who owns her told me she had to have her when she first saw her. She thought she might really be a Dr. Seuss animal in disguise.

So a fun weekend with lots of fiber goodness. It was so good to get to know the animals. I have always been one to know the farmer and the animal that provides the fiber I spin. It was fun to watch a little bit of the showing. The animals were superb, although by Sunday most were ready to go home to their own barns. There were not a ton of vendors. Mostly the vendors were the ranchers themselves with a booth at their spot. Lots of sweaters, hats, socks, and gloves knit somewhere outside the U.S. I don't want to say where to avoid an international incident. I guess I should have taken my knitting and walked around with my knitting in my hand. I thought I was doing good wearing my homemade socks and sweater.

It reminds me that we really need some help here. There is a wide gulf between the knitters, spinners, and weavers and the farmers. They asked the spinning guild to judge the fibers. So several folks in our guild did that. But the judging sheet was not adequate for our needs. But we were not allowed to change it. Also, the fiber itself was poorly chosen. The guild members were appalled at some of it.

So education seems to be in order here. I personally think that the farmers have no clue how the fiber is processed. They really don't care. They ship it off. It either gets sold off, or it is processed into something they can sell. They are unaware of how the fiber should be treated, or how it should be gently processed. They are out of the loop. So until the education is done, the farmers will continue selling yarn processed at a mill somewhere out there, and they will sell sweaters, hats, socks, and gloves processed somewhere outside the U.S.

So end of lecture for today.

I have to finish making my birds a treat for the day. I baked some cornbread, and now I am going to add it to some suet mixture. They need the extra protein and fat today with the wind.