Mangrove Mountain Country Fair

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This year’s Mangrove Mountain Country Fair was one of their biggest ever. The turnout was massive. We had a lovely day as per usual. We had lots of interested people asking about what we were doing. Our gazebo was directly across from the animals, so we had a lively bunch of alpacas, sheep, cows and horses across the way from us which was lovely. The local doctor has a lovely dark brown alpaca called Flora, and she most generously donated Flora’s freshly shorn fleece to us. Annalisa from Bumble Hill Alpacas also donated a couple of bags of alpaca fleece to us, so we have plenty of alpaca fibre for spinning. About three years ago Annalisa gave Naomi some brown huacaya and some cream suri to spin. Naomi spun the fibre and knitted a hat which she gave to Annalisa at this year’s fair. You can see her happily wearing the hat in a couple of the photos. We had a great production line going with Katie selecting the wool from our hangers and carding it with a little help from our friend, a young local girl who comes to help us every year. She explains to everyone how the carder works and gives away our bracelets for us and this is her third year of helping us out which is pretty awesome. After Katie had carded the wool, Naomi did the spinning, making plenty of bracelets to hand out to the children, and also making long plied pieces to weave on the sampleit loom which we had this year. Antje wove in the morning, and Naomi’s husband, Simon, manned the loom in the afternoon, entertaining the onlookers with his weaving stories. The most amazing part of the weaving story is that none of us had done any weaving before, so I think we did a pretty good job really. By the end of the day we had woven just under two metres worth of fabric all with yarn that had been carded and spun on the day.