Wool festival and SNOW!!!!

Hey ya'll! Last night I returned from a busy and exciting day at the RHINEBECK SHEEP AND WOOL FESTIVAL IN NEW YORK! I learned/saw so many awesome things. This, of course, will be explained in photo. In addition, it's snowing like mad here in Rutland! It's cozy and nice. All of the animals are huddled together with the exception of two goats, Ren and Stimpy, who have taken advantage of the lack of peeps policing the farm and were eating carrots from the Peru gardens in the snow.
There were tons of tiny felt animals that people had made from wool and then sold as either toys or sculptures. They were adorable, but quite a bit more expensive than I could afford. I would love to one day be able to make these, or at least be able to afford purchasing them as gifts. These things leaned towards the toy side.

Yarn galore! There was so much beautiful hand spun yarn, sold in big hanks, balls, or skeins, in a wide variety of color. I bought myself one hank of chunky colorful yarn to make a big scarf for the winter.

A fine example of the many variations in yarn available.

An overview of one of the many many buildings that were filled with yarn, wool, spindles, etc etc etc.

Since I am not a highly educated knitter, I attended this festival primarily for the sheep, which I ended up learning a lot about. The entire experience encouraged creativity on so many different levels, as wool is extremely diverse and useful. I shouldn't take for granted the raw wool that I have available to me right here on the farm. I would eventually like to learn to clean and spin (using a drop spindle) raw dirty wool so that it can become something practical and beautiful, like a sweater or socks.

OH MY GOD! There were so many cute animals, like this tiny square bear-esque sheep.

And this very sly sheep.
There was a 1-classroom school building that was on the fairgrounds that was built in the late 1800s. We were allowed to enter the school and check out all of the old decorations and flags. Notice the old halloween decoration!

Here I am knitting on the world's longest scarf project. I knitted a total of 4 stitches, hardly a contribution, but one none the less. The world's longest scarf project was sponsored by the Keep the Fleece program, which is attempting to raise 250,000 dollars for the Heifer project.

Here is their information card sitting on top of several sections of the world's longest scarf.

Here are some more felt animals.

This was an amazing hat made out of felt. This same booth at the festival had all kinds of gorgeous creative hand-felted hats. I would have worn most of them. I wish I would have had the money to purchase this gorgeous crazy head decoration.

Bear sheep!

This woman made this huge distracting hat herself out of, guess what, wool!

There was a featured artist on at the festival who made tons of punny sheep paintings, like this one. Also included in her works: Sheep in the box, Silence of the lambs.

Baby alpacas! They made the same nervous sounds as adult alpacas, except they sound tiny and cute, which is the opposite of what these animals are trying to be when they are nervous. Poor alpacas.

And, the icing on our cake, overlook farm's own miniature goat, escaping the herd, to much on carrots. Have a good one, ya'll!