handmade by stefanie

Being a handspinner has its perks: you can create the exact yarn you want in terms of fiber content, color, and structure, provided you have the proper skill and materials. If you don't spin, you have to rely on the yarns you find in shops and at fiber festivals, which means that you can't always get your hands on a specific fiber, especially if it happens to be rare. The good news is that yarn producers are starting to get hip to the whole breed-specific thing, and now there are all kinds of unusual yarns and blends available to folks who might otherwise not encounter them outside of a fiber festival. Over the years I've enjoyed exploring specific breeds of sheep, from Polwarth to Gotland and all points in between. Last year, I purchased some Shetland batts at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival from Whispering Pines , a small farm in Wisconsin that raises registered Shetland Sheep. My fiber came with a photo of their sheep and some stats on the specific one who...

Last weekend, I did pretty much all my favorite things in the span of 72 hours: I went on a brewery tour in New Glarus, Wisconsin on Friday afternoon with my husband and in-laws; on Saturday, some friends and I drove back up to Wisconsin for the Sheep & Wool Festival, and on Sunday, I stayed closer to home and met up with a few friends at the Renegade Craft Fair . Whew! I seriously need another weekend to recover from my weekend, but it was worth it. Plus, I got lots of knitting done in the car! I took the most photos on the New Glarus tour - it was seriously the coolest brewery tour I've ever been on, and the facilities were stunningly beautiful. You can see all of my photos on Flickr if you are so inclined , I've just chosen a few of my favorites here: The Wisconsin Sheep & Wool Festival is one of my favorite events all year, but I really fell down on the job for documenting the experience through photos. I did manage to take a few c...

Today didn't start as expected. I woke up in Kansas City, after spending 7 hours on the Amtrak train from Chicago to KC yesterday. I was hoping to see my grandmother one last time, but very early this morning (around 3am), I'm told she passed peacefully while all of us were sleeping. I thought about postponing this entry until next week, but my grandmother actually read my blog regularly (with the help of my mom) and she would have loved to see this post, especially all of the sheep photos. So after debating all day, I am finally posting what I wrote on the train ride down here.  One of my favorite fall traditions is the annual trip to Jefferson, WI with my upstairs neighbor, Lauren, to attend the Wisconsin Sheep & Wool Festival. My husband had the weekend off and decided to join us this year, and all three of us hit the road on Saturday morning.  There were a lot of the usual suspects at the show, along with some new faces, too. Every year, I look at the Jennie t...

It's been such a busy week, I haven't had a chance to share all of the awesome stuff I bought at the Wisconsin Sheep & Wool Festival last weekend! Being on a budget and having some very specific pre-Spinzilla needs, I made a list of what I was looking for at the show ahead of time. Believe it or not, this is me sticking to that list - really! My only yarn purchase was a skein of Xanadu  yarn from Bijou Basin Ranch. It's their new fingering weight cashmere and I had  to get my mitts on it. So soft! Are you surprised to see that I chose grey?? My next quest was to find some gradient roving for my yak cardigan because I want to use a handspun gradient for the yoke colorwork detail. I was 99% sure that I would find what I needed in the Fiber Optic booth - and I was right! I also wanted to get a fair amount of either grey or black alpaca fiber to blend with colorful bits of fiber on my new blending board. Naturally, I ended up coming home with both. Oops! The ...

This past weekend, I spent an afternoon at the Wisconsin Sheep & Wool Festival with my fiber friend Lauren, which is one of our favorite regional shows to attend (second only to YarnCon in the spring). I had a specific shopping list in mind which somehow I managed to stick to: L-R: Cloudlover Spinning Fiber, Green Mountain Spinnery Weekend Wool, and Bijou Basin Ranch Tibetan Dream in Seaside, a limited-edition color dyed by Miss Babs. Besides shopping the vendor marketplace, I spent a lot of my time talking to people at the show - I ran into a friend I haven't seen in a while, met up with Sarah of the excellent Knitting Sarah blog, and chatted with a few of my clients who had booths at the show. As always, there was plenty of temptation, but I was somehow able to resist. We didn't get a chance to see the sheep shearing demonstration (though we caught it last year ), but I did get a chance to make some sheepy friends and snap a few shots. We also...

On Saturday, I headed up to the Wisconsin Sheep & Wool Festival with my pal Lauren and my husband Tyler (who was our official photographer - you can see all of his photos here !). This is my second time attending, and it's always worth the drive up north. It was fairly hot for most of the day, but that didn't seem to deter anyone. There was a pretty good crowd on Saturday! There was plenty of temptation - so much wool to squish! I'm in heaven! Amazingly, enough, I managed to only come home with spinning fiber. With SOAR next month and VK Live in November, I've got to pace myself! I think I did a pretty good job. My first purchase was 8 oz. of undyed Organic Polwarth from Gale's Art (click  here  to view her Etsy shop) which I might try dyeing as roving before I spin it up: After surveying both vendor buildings, I decided to head back to the Hearthside Fibers booth (click here  to view their Etsy shop), which had some lovely breed-specific ...