ENDLESS MOUNTAINS FIBER FESTIVAL SEPT. 10-11

It’s almost time for Endless Mountains Fiber Festival again Sept 10 and 11 in Harford, PA! Harford is just off I-81 north of Scranton, PA.

Here are a couple of beauties we will be bringing to this fun show. The first is a PA German wheel with the typical sliding tension and sturdy, very wide rim. It was in great condition when we found it - - except that someone had tried to make it into a lamp and drilled out the mother of all. The maidens were also missing. Fred made new ones and it spins like champ.This one is nearly identical to the one on page 20 in Pennington and Taylor and came from north central PA as far back as we could trace it. $500 SOLD

The second one is probably a marriage, but a very happy one! The wheel has a single deep groove which is as great for keeping the drive band in place as the extra wide rim on the wheel above. The barrel tension is beautifully turned and looks great with the delicate appearing wheel. This one comes with an accelerator head for $500. SOLD

Riverrim has test driven both wheels, but even mere mortals can spin on them. We’ll also have the double hole rigid heddle looms and several Saxony wheels including a couple of Scandinavian ones.

Chroma yarn

A friend was using a strand of Chroma along with some alpaca to knit some great looking socks so I ordered some from Knitpicks.

I guess I was thinking sock yarn, since it is 70% wool/ 30% nylon so was surprised to see that it was a singles yarn. Then it isn't superwash, either so I wasn't about to make socks out of it after all.

Much preferring plied yarn, I added more twist to the fingering yarn I had purchased and then plied two strands together and we were off!

The patterns are a syntheses of Charlene Church's Hat's On! with some ideas from Anna Zilboorg.

Oh my,

So much has been going on I can't keep track. From the time the old rose was blooming up in the apple tree and the black raspberries were ripe, the gardens have gone completely out of control. There has been an enormous supply of cukes and four kinds of summer squash. And then the beans came. Yikes.

I've made black raspberry jam and accidently made "BerryGrapey' jam which turned out much better than I expected. I thought a frozen container of dark purple liquid was black raspberry juice, but it turned out to be grap juice from last fall. Turns out frozen blueberries picked last summer make a nice jam with grape juice. It tastes like grapes, but has a certain je ne sais quoi.

Once the berries were safely in jars, I froze beans and squash and canned my first ever cucumber pickles.

A wonderful completely original J. Sturdevant double flyer wheel was here briefly. Riverrim spun wool on it with both hands at the same time.

Oh and this sign got finished. Fred planed it, cut it out and ran the the router around the edges to get it ready for carving and painting. I was pretty happy with the way it came out.

The tomatoes aren't ripe yet, so we are having fried green ones for supper. There are scary quantities of green tomatoes. I replanted lettuce and spinach so maybe we will have some in September. The spiders are moving indoors and doing their darndest to set up housekeeping where I haven't done much in that direction. I saw online that one can cut broccoli plants down to the last five or so leaves and they will make new broccoli heads by fall so we shall see if that works....that is if we can find anything in the garden by then for the weeds which are flourishing.