Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Cummington, Part Two

I know, I know, this is shocking: two posts in two days. Well, Fran loaded her photos of the festival into Flickr and kindly allowed me to use them here, so ....

(Psst: Here's yesterday's post. Read it first, if you haven't already.)

So, when last we left off at the MA Sheep & Woolcraft Fair, Fran and I had bought the Grand Champion fleece, a lovely white Romney from Mary Pratt's farm.

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Mary was thrilled her fleece won! Fran and I were thrilled to buy it!

And after the fleece sale came the Short-Draw Spinning Smackdown between Jesh and me, with our antique wheels.

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Five minutes of practice with some Texel x Friesian roving (the first fleece I ever bought, btw, at Rhinebeck in 2006), then ten minutes of furious, foot-stomping, wheel-whirring, all-out spinning our hearts out!

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Finally, we wound off the two singles together on a niddy-noddy. This involved some serious yarn-wrangling skills.

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And lo! One single ran out - whose was left? (The crowd was breathless....) Why, it was mine! I won!!!! I won by 21 meters!!!!

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On the left, the two singles wound together. On the right, the yardage I spun beyond what Jesh spun. Impressive, eh?

Next year, it'll be a long-draw contest. Be there!

6 comments :

Marcy said...

Congrats on the win! I knew that young whipper snapper would have to get off of your lawn.

I can't tell you how disappointed I still feel that I missed the smackdown. :(

Laurie said...

I am in awe, and in the dust.

Fran said...

Wow -- you're fast and ahead of me (as usual)! If you can link to the video I made of the Smackdown, feel free to add it to this post (and 'specially for Mizz Marcy!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMVtIYlxoUk

cyndy said...

Ha! Looks like it was fun!

Congratulations!

Manise said...

What fun spinning like a madwoman for the win! Nice job. I *love* that photo of Mary Pratt and her winning fleece! Congrats on scoring her fleece. So gorgeous. After all of that whining about how you never get to go halvsies-lol!

Unknown said...

I kind of wish the whole singles were measured instead of just the overage.
The fleece is quite lovely!