Maryland - Part Two

As much fun as it was to hang out in the sheep barn watching the breed shows, there were way too many other things to ignore.

Sheep dog herding demonstrations.... Two handlers, a group of five Blue Faced Leicesters, four border collies and much controlled maneuvering through gates, around cones and being brought into a small pen next to the handler.

The fleece show and sale.  Last figure I heard from the people at the check-out table was 960 entries - an easy all-time record, for sure.  All categories were well marked and fleeces thoroughly tagged for easy shopping and/or retrieval of unsold fleeces after the event.  Wall to wall wool!  In the second picture down you can see the queue of people at the back of the building checking out with their purchases.  This was mid-afternoon so the most eager buyers had already taken out many fleeces but there were still hundreds of bags of excellent quality wool.

Hey look!  The two natural colored medium fleeces I entered placed second (Carmel) and Honorable Mention (Yahtzee) in their class!  :-)

Then we took a good long time admiring the entries in the Skein and Garment competition.  Both of these Champion entries were made from fleeces from sheep (Beanie Baby and Rebecca Boone) enjoying life at Punkin's Patch.  Happy sheep make amazing wool and awesome talent makes beautiful things!

An entry didn't have to be large to be worthy of a purple ribbon.

I loved this hooked rug.

And so many great paintings and photos.

Look at that face!

And of course there were hundreds of vendors to investigate.  This was a decoration at a new vendor's booth.  She was selling.....wait for it.... felting supplies.  WOW!  What an advertisement!

If you can ever get to the Maryland festival you'll come home with more inspiration than you'll ever have time to execute!