I have had a very hard time letting go of summer. All September, I kept pretending it was still August, even as we restarted our early childhood program and the school was full of people. I watched my tomatoes ripen and ate them. I cut my plants for the natural dye CSA and dried them. I even took a small rainstorm in mid-September in stride, hurrying off to harvest sage, lichen and lodgepole pine bark in the high country on a damp day, knowing that vacationers were all back home and winter was coming. But look... it warmed back up! I was happy.
However, this week just ending brought an early but cold and very wet storm system through, and I finally had to concede defeat. Now, I am searching out the best place to go in search of glorious color in mid-October, when we have fall break.
The highlight of the past few weeks has been spinning all of last weekend at the annual Celtic Festival put on by my favorite public radio station, KVMR.
This photo was taken from the grand parade that officially opens the fair each day.
The music is grand, there's a wide variety of yummy food, and we all end up seeing old friends and wondering how another year snuck by.
I particularly liked listening to Molly's Revenge, Old Blind Dogs and The Young Dubliners this year. If you haven't heard any of them, be prepared for traditional tunes that have been electrified and make you want to get up and dance. Celtic music just warms my heart!
Our fiber guild sets up a double booth, dons our Renaissance-era costumes and talks fiber to the public. We also get a lot of yarn out of it!
This next photo shows Susan on the left and Mardi on the right... happily spinning away. I delight in the interest that spinning at the wheel generates. Young children come running up and have to be warned off sticking their fingers right into the spokes (ouch!), then stay and beg for a bit of soft roving to carry around with them, or ask if they can give it a try. We are on the lookout for a 'learner's wheel' that we can set up at such demonstrations, one that nobody minds if a beginner works on with instruction, as frequently a spinner is right in the middle of something and doesn't feel comfortable having a novice fiddle with their wheel.
We are also researching buying our own pop-ups so that we don't need to beg and borrow in the future. We make more public contacts at this event than all others combined, even our County Fair, where there are so many things to see that many pass us by.
I did take some time to work on my current favorite bit of knitting, And So Are You. Mine is made from Wooly Wonka Celestial (a blend of 60%alpaca, 30% wool and 10% silk) in Milky Way, a silvery-grey, that I overdyed with lodgepole pine bark. The photo doesn't quite capture the silvery-green of pine needles that resulted, but I was awestruck (expecting a deeper brown than if dyeing on white), and everyone that saw my project loved that it still smelled like the piney woods.!
I only have four more rows to complete before starting the lovely pleated section, and just got an update notice from Rose, ahead of tackling that section, which makes some corrections. Before I started tearing my hair out! Life is sweet, even if summer is behind us.