Fiber festival time!

Today is the humans favorite weekend in Billings, MT… the annual fiber festival. This event is every fall and it’s where the human gets most of her wooly crafting supplies 🙂 she is always happy when it’s fiber festival time! Which means we get extra treats lol

Human here: and yes I LOVE the fiber festival! It is sponsored by “the prairie handspinners” group and people from all over Montana and Wyoming show up for this event. This year’s event is spectacular and I wish I could just pack up everyone’s stuff and bring it all home with me lol. But I had to restrain my glee…

I did splurge on two hand woven kitchen towels that are so luxurious that I may not allow anyone to use them lol (just for show lol). A beautiful bunch of alpaca roving that is so soft that I can’t wait to spin it into some yarn. And a new drop spindle style that I have never seen before (each country has its own variation and this one is a Turkish drop spindle) that makes the most adorable little ball of yarn I may not want to use the yarn after spinning it! I also found a local lady to give me some weaving lessons on my antique weaving loom and to help me fix anything that may need repaired on it to get it up and running! Sooooooo excited!

Without further ado I’m going to stop talking and just show you some fabulous photos to entice you to visit the fiber festival next year (or make you drool over all those fabulous crafts like I did)

This is my Turkish drop spindle I found at a friend’s booth.

There were some beautiful pieces of fiber art equipment for sale and some of them were antiques that had been brought back to life by a local craftsman (drooling over the double spindle spinning wheel in the last photo!)

Craig from “weaving side by side” out of Powell WY made my gorgeous kitchen towels and his wife Barb gave me a quick show and tell lesson on the pattern she was working on her table top loom.

I found the weaving guild to get my antique tabletop loom repaired and some lessons so that I can do demonstrations with it next summer at the museum! Super excited about that!

I fell in love with these felted items at the willow creek alpaca booth and would have taken the whole booth home with me if I could have lol… and I tried on several cloche style hats that I fell in love with but unfortunately cloche hats just look weird on me 😦 my round face just isn’t made for wearing a cloche hat unfortunately or I would have come home with one (or two or three… lol)

And the prairie handspinners group had several booths. Things to buy of course… but also show and tell items like this touch and feel area for different types of material one can use for spinning! They also had various classes you could take and quite a few lovely hand made items donated by guild members to raffle.

Overall it was a glorious day of fiber artists and fiber art supplies and me trying desperately to make up my mind on what I was going to purchase out of all that lovely stuff!

Now to wait for my neighbors kids to get home from school so we can make another visit to the festival because the girls want to go check it out too… maybe I can get the girls to make me a knitting bowl like I saw at the fiber festival since they are taking pottery classes in school! 🙂 This one was made by a high school pottery teacher and I bet his students just have the best time! I wish they had pottery teachers at my school when I was a kid! (Soooooo jealous!)

Ahhhh… life is good when you have a craft to rely upon and a couple good dogs like Conestoga Chuck and lil bit to keep you warm and snuggled all winter. Find what you love and go enjoy it everyone! Life is too short to not live it happily!