After I got home from NZ I was delighted and somewhat terrified to discover that most of my wool inventory had sold while I was away. The terror part was largely because I only had 1 week to prepare for the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival, a huge annual fiber show where I was planning to be a vendor, sharing a booth with the lovely Linda of Northwest Wools. So, 1 week, less a few days of drying time, meant I had to dye a ridiculous amount of fiber in 4 days… all while coming off some wicked jet lag. I am proud to say that I pulled it off, though not without some serious sleep deprivation. By the time the festival rolled around I was in a kind of zombie-like state, and only marginally functional as an actual human being. Fortunately my very helpful husband saw how useless I was, and agreed to come down and help out, though of course we had to come down separately so that we’d have room for all the gear.
I went down early on Friday morning so that I could run a few errands, set up the booth and get everything ready to go. The set-up went fine – we had the same space as last year, which we really like because it allows us a little bit of overflow room so our booth isn’t so crowded. Even though I was compounding tiredness with tiredness, I also couldn’t resist going out afterwards for Sushi and Gelato with a Portland friend, before heading back to the farm for a few hours of precious sleep. Yes, I know - I do this to myself. Dh and the kids rolled in at Midnight, so they weren’t a whole lot better off than I was. Saturday morning, I was up with the sun – pulling out of the driveway at 7:15, and getting to the fairgrounds an hour later. I let the rest of my crew sleep in – no sense in dragging crabby children out before they are ready. The weather had been the subject of much speculation, but it turned out to be a spectacular sunny day. The mood was awesome and the festival was packed – which made for great fun and lots of busy. Dh and the kids showed up in the late morning and Dh grabbed an apron and got to work checking out customers and helping out in the booth – giving me more time to relax and chat with fiber friends. The kids took off and went exploring – mostly watching the sheepdog trials and visiting with the animals. Fortunately, they took some pictures for me, because I really didn’t have much of a chance to get my camera out or even walk around the festival much,. I barely even got pictures of my own booth.

Here’s one where you can see our resident fiber-dude in his apron..

Here’s Alex showing off how he’s now taller than his Grandma…

Most of the kids’ pictures looked like this…

And this…

and of course, this…

It looks like they managed to convince people to let them hold and pet the animals, I hope they didn’t hassle anyone too much. As an added bonus, Z’s best buddy showed up with her mom so the kids had fun playing with her as well. Z and B also managed to purchase matching angora bunny toys:

Later in the afternoon (she was supposed to arrive earlier but had a harrowing adventure that cost her some time), we also had Symeon North, (author of Get Spun: The Step-by-Step Guide to Spinning Art Yarns
) come by for a book signing and set up her table of gorgeous creations in our booth. No, she’s not in this picture, but this is her table…

It was fun to meet her, and she also stayed overnight at the farm with us, so we got to chat with her further over dinner, and again at the festival on Sunday.
Ah, Sunday. The second and final day of the show. The weather was not as kind to us. On the drive in, the fog was incredibly thick, casting a very eerie light over everything. The fog turned to drizzle, and by the time I had pulled into the fairgrounds, it was raining in earnest. The first few hours of the show was more of an exercise in keeping our stuff dry than really trying to sell anything… just maneuvering tarps this way and that, and moving a lot of stuff back into our cars just to get more dry space in the tent. I phoned Dh and told him not to bother coming – just to take the kids back home to Washington so we wouldn’t all have to huddle together under the tent all day. Around 1:00, however, the rain stopped, and things picked up again. I still ended up with a bit of wet wool, but nothing too bad. Of course I still hadn’t had any quality sleep by this time, and I doubt my slow-wittedness impressed any of our customers as I was trying to tally up their purchases (very sloooooow and using a calculator for things a normal person could probably do in their head) but I muddled through as best I could on the numbers stuff, and of course enjoyed chatting with all the fab fiber folks. At the end of it all, we loaded out and I hit the road (in retrospect, probably in a somewhat unsafe condition to drive) pulling into my driveway at 11:00. Whew! It was nuts, but I’m already looking forward to next year.