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Spinning and sales in Jordan, MN
Sep. 13th, 2014 08:09 pmToday was Autumn Fare, a small autumn craft-and-fiber fair in Jordan, MN, about 35 minutes’ drive from where I live. The organizer was pushing hard for the Northern Lights Handspinners Guild (one of the two guilds I’m involved with) to have a booth to demonstrate and sell stuff.
As a sales event, it wasn’t a huge success for any of us, but it was a nice day to get together with fiber friends and spend most of the day spinning. There were five or so people selling stuff, knit goods, yarn, roving, fleece, pelts, and miscellaneous other stuff. I sold four skeins. I bought $45 worth of stuff (roving, catnip, and a set of wire mesh shelves), plus I paid $10 to the guild toward the $100 we'd paid for the booth.
One of our group, who’d had a flock of Shetland and Finn sheep, had been downsizing the size of the flock for several years and has now sold off the entire flock. I’ve never bought any of her roving, but I know that when it’s gone, it’s gone, so I bought an 8-oz bump this time. It’s striped brown-and-white Finn, very soft.
I also bought a jar of catnip -- that comes under miscellaneous other stuff, I guess.
I looked at the sale fleeces, because they were very inexpensive -- Finn and Shetland fleeces marked from $5 to $15, but unskirted and with bits of straw and other vegetable matter. I looked at this lovely fawn-colored ram fleece, like you do if you're a fiber-obsessed person like me, and discovered that it didn’t pass a ping test -- if you grasped the two ends and snapped it, it would break in half. We agreed that at $15, it was still okay to sell it, as long as the buyer was made aware of the fault.
I was very good and didn’t buy any of the $5 Finn fleeces -- but then the seller gave me two of them. One is brown-black and fairly heavy (five pounds, maybe?), though there was a chunk of felted fleece at the top of the bag. The other is dark brown lamb, and is about a pound and a half. I’ll have to see if there’s anything salvageable once I skirt them, but the fleece from these sheep is very soft, so anything I can save should be quite nice.
As a sales event, it wasn’t a huge success for any of us, but it was a nice day to get together with fiber friends and spend most of the day spinning. There were five or so people selling stuff, knit goods, yarn, roving, fleece, pelts, and miscellaneous other stuff. I sold four skeins. I bought $45 worth of stuff (roving, catnip, and a set of wire mesh shelves), plus I paid $10 to the guild toward the $100 we'd paid for the booth.
One of our group, who’d had a flock of Shetland and Finn sheep, had been downsizing the size of the flock for several years and has now sold off the entire flock. I’ve never bought any of her roving, but I know that when it’s gone, it’s gone, so I bought an 8-oz bump this time. It’s striped brown-and-white Finn, very soft.
I also bought a jar of catnip -- that comes under miscellaneous other stuff, I guess.
I looked at the sale fleeces, because they were very inexpensive -- Finn and Shetland fleeces marked from $5 to $15, but unskirted and with bits of straw and other vegetable matter. I looked at this lovely fawn-colored ram fleece, like you do if you're a fiber-obsessed person like me, and discovered that it didn’t pass a ping test -- if you grasped the two ends and snapped it, it would break in half. We agreed that at $15, it was still okay to sell it, as long as the buyer was made aware of the fault.
I was very good and didn’t buy any of the $5 Finn fleeces -- but then the seller gave me two of them. One is brown-black and fairly heavy (five pounds, maybe?), though there was a chunk of felted fleece at the top of the bag. The other is dark brown lamb, and is about a pound and a half. I’ll have to see if there’s anything salvageable once I skirt them, but the fleece from these sheep is very soft, so anything I can save should be quite nice.
