SAFF 2007

This is going to be a really long post. I thought about breaking it up over a couple of days, and I don’t think I will. Instead, I think I’m just going to hit the highlights of the trip. If you’re not interested, I suggest you not bother with the jump. Because all I’m going to talk about is this:

Thursday:
Driving to pick up ESC was…interesting. Parts of it were not so fun because my car is old and decided to be ornery. And apparently thought it would be fun to give me a few heart attacks. Suffice to say, I was a little later than I intended picking up ESC. So we were a little later than we intended on getting to Jen’s farm. Where we did not take a single picture, but did pet some of her goats and got to see the llamas up close and personal like.

ESC got fired for being late to get Jen which in turn made us late for our dinner reservations. That was pretty awesome since all the lateness was “technically” my fault. Really the fault lay in construction, bottle-neckers, my car trying to give me a heart attack and the po-po being EVERYWHERE.

Anyway, we finally made it to dinner.

ESC is channeling the exorcist because she didn’t want me to take a picture of her eating. Talk about a temper tantrum! Thank goodness she wasn’t eating pea soup. Jen is wisely pretending that ESC is not even there. It’s never wise to encourage a temper tantrum.

Friday:
I took two classes on Friday and did not bother to take a single picture during either of my classes.

I took Hand Painted Roving in the morning. We hand painted 2 oz of Australian Top each. This is what I did:

Mine is the one on the right. I used a red, blue and green. I wish I could remember the names of the colors, but I didn’t write them down. She also dyed 2 lbs of the Australian Top in a pot and let the class choose the colors. We ended up choosing blue, pink and purple. It turned out quite nice, I think. Both of them. I loved this class. The teacher was Phylleri Ball. I highly recommend taking a class from her at SAFF if you can. Or anywhere else she might offer classes.

The Kool-Aid dyeing class was in the afternoon. We dyed small hanks of kool-aid in 7 different colors. Then we hand painted 2 larger hanks with whatever colors we chose. It was a lot of fun. The sucky part of the class was that I was really hungry and the kool-aid smelled SO. GOOD. And I couldn’t eat it.

If you click on the picture, there are notes that tell you what Kool-aid I used on each hank.

I took a few pictures of the Friday afternoon meet up in the blue barn.

ESC with her brand new spindle and roving.

Friday night we went to Jack of the Wood Pub. We were all a little loopy, high on wool-fumes and possibly a little drunk. And having a fantastic time. We had one of the best servers I’ve had in quite awhile.

There was a lot of this going on, because, you know, we’re all a bunch of bloggers:

And for the record, I would like to state that I do not like to take pictures of boobs, but rather boobs like to be my in pictures. I can’t explain it. It’s just the way things are.

That’s our waiter up in the corner taking a picture of our table. He was also very fond of ESC.

I missed getting a picture of him trying to lick her. He also spent a good deal of time hanging around Jen.

I really have to give him credit that he was funny, on top of things and not in the least bit scared off by knit bloggers.

Saturday:
This was my heavy shopping day. Oh! I forgot to show you mohawk boy. I saw him Friday, but whatever. We can have one eensy teensy thing out of order. He’s that cool.

I wish we could convince The Boy to do this over the summer.

See? Totally worth it. That is one bad ass mohawk. Anyway, lots of shopping happened Saturday. Lots of enabling and what not. Lots of being high on the fumes of wool and having great fun. I took two pictures of my loot while I was at SAFF. And not even of all of it. Here’s one:

I ended up with a little over 2.5 lbs of roving, one silk hankie, 8 jars of Jaquard dye and 2 hanks of sock yarn from Creatively Dyed Yarn. All in all, not too bad and I managed to not go overboard. Really. See? (Click on the photos to see the notes)

We also got to see a sheep being sheared.

I have never seen an animal so relaxed while being sheared, but this sheep could care less about what was going on. It was kind of funny.

Saturday, the barn was packed out. I didn’t get any pictures of that. In fact, at one point, Blog-Free Ginny and I ended up leaving the Blue Barn to go look at the animals. Alapaca, llama, sheep and goats. Oh my!

I didn’t get pictures of the goats and sheep, but Ginny did. They were great.

Saturday night, we split off into smaller groups. A couple of us had a good time chilling in our PJs, knitting and/or spinning in Elizabeth and Ginny’s suite.

Sunday we headed back to SAFF for a few hours to do some last minute shopping and then we were on the road by noon. We had a fantastic time and I think this picture of Jodi really sums up SAFF better than anything else I could say.

Also, on the way home, I ended up with a low tire, which would have become a flat tire and me stranded on the road somewhere in between exits and probably without cell phone coverage because that’s how it is in the movies. More than likely someone would have come along, cut me up into tiny pieces with a chainsaw and then taken off with all my loot. HOWEVER, because ESC has the coolest husband ever (other than mine, of course) none of that happened. He fixed my tired and I made it home all in one piece.

I think I made even more friends this year at SAFF than I did last year and I had the best time. I know I haven’t named and/or linked to everyone and I’m sorry about that. My head is still reeling. I could go on and on about all the silly stuff and what not, but I think I’ve blathered on enough for one post.

It was a blast guys, and I can’t wait to do it again next year!

Oh yeah, and ESC? You’re fired.

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