Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival From the Vendor Side

What a busy and cold, wet spring!  The weather has hampered everything from cleaning the barn to doing field work.  Andy and I have been doing a lot of shop work, turning wool and wood into spinning fiber and tools.  We have a full spring festival season mapped out and need to build inventory so the shelves stay full.

The biggest festival of the season is the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, and Nistock Farms was a vendor there for the first time.  We were accepted into a tent space in the upper gravel lot, but being in a tent gave me pause as I know how wet it can be there.  Setting up on gravel felt as safe as possible though, so off we went with great optimism the first weekend in May!

Julie and I drove on Thursday so that we'd have all day Friday to set up.  New space, new dimensions, uneven floor.... we knew it would take a while.  Here was our home for the next two days.

I was alarmed at the lack of sidewalls, especially since it was raining and foggy, but was assured that the tent company would be back at some point during the day to put them up (and they were) so we forged ahead with unloading.

"Trailer full of heavy stuff?  Sure, no problem!"

Our tent walls were clear, thankfully, and despite not having electricity it was quite bright inside, even on Sunday which was raining and dreary.  With the tent wall pulled up to function as a door we looked inviting with sort of a bedouin flavor.  ;-) 

We are a fiber provider of Cotswold for the Livestock Conservancy's 'Shave 'Em to Save 'Em' program which works to connect fiber artists with the producers of rare sheep breeds' fleece.  We had raw Cotswold available by the pound, prepared roving and Cotswold yarn so we had all angles covered and sent a lot of folks home with wool from a breed they had never sampled.  Awesome program, Livestock Conservancy!

One happy shopped discovered that we had the same taste in colors - I had created roving that matched both her blouse and her shoes!

We made one purchase prior to the festival season and ordered the grid panels and hardware to construct a free standing "H" shaped display.  Andy had cut some nice shelves and it functioned well for small, lightweight items. 

The far wall displayed yarn and our Cotswold blankets and then there were two tables and upright grid wall for Andy's fiber tools.  I spent a fair amount of time demonstrating Oxford rug punching and punch needle embroidery, both of which are easy to do and the Oxford rug punching has the added allure of being able to eat up handspun yarn - a plus for spinners like myself who have totes full of yarn with no specific purpose.

All in all, the tent space worked out well and I've already signed up for next year.  The major downside of being a vendor is that it's tough to get out of your booth and see the festival!  Spinning guild friends stopped by to say hello (don't know where the group hug picture went, darn it) and my only trip to the sheep barn was on a mission to steal some electricity for my phone.  Not ever having dealt with a non-electric booth I didn't think about phone battery life - and one needs it to process credit cards.  Yikes!  Thankfully I was able to park my phone in the sheep show office and bring it back to life.  First purchase upon returning home - a battery pack with USB ports for just such situations.  Apparently the world has been using these for some time and once again I'm firmly behind the technology wave.  :-/

I was really sad that I didn't get a chance to peruse the display of fleece types.  Apparently there was an extensive collection of breed samples including the rare and foreign and I should have found time to see it.  I hope it might come back another year.  One event that I did manage to get to was the Skein and Garment display and that was because the festival committee members were generous enough to keep the building open for one hour after the festival closed so that vendors could enjoy it.

As usual, the talent and artistry was astonishing.  Every entry deserved a photo but I grabbed a few of the items that most caught my eye.

Knitting...

Photography and graphic arts.....

Thecrazysheeplady's wool house image earned a blue!  :-)

Amazingly realistic felting.....

Items that are both artistic and functional......

I don't remember if this was hooked or punched but the design is the artist's original.

And my favorite entry.....

The Travelling Fleece.  A 'handspinner's basket' entry featuring wool spun from Buddy, a sheep from our flock who moved to Equinox Farm at a tender age and lived a long happy life there.  Buddy's sire was British (thank you, artificial insemination technology) so England, New York (our farm), Kentucky (his lifelong home) and Pennsylvania (where the spinner worked her magic on the fleece) are all involved, hence the 'passport'.  How clever is that?? Far beyond what I could have come up with and very worthy of the blue and purple ribbons adorning it.

Having been initiated to the rhythm of being a vendor at such a big show I will be better able next year to plan some time to get out and see more of the events, even if it has to be 'after hours'.  That's one of the fun things about such events - the sheep barns never really close!