Ewes-ful Fiber Arts

1. What is your website?
www.prismportal.com/fiberarts

2. Your Ravelry username?
Not on Ravelry



3. What do you make?
Handspun/Hand dyed yarns from my own sheep, angora rabbits, and alpacas. Also, Handspun baby camel down yarn (soft as cashmere) Original Patterns developed to give away with yarn purchase. In addition, felted wool covered hand made soaps that last a LONG time.

4. How did you get into making stuff?
I bought sheep 11 years ago to train my three border collie dogs to herd. Turned out they had nice fleece for spinning. Gave spinning a try and it became a passion. My love for all things fiber related grew from there and I obtained angora rabbits, and then started getting rescue alpaca boys. Still have the working border collies!

5. What is your favorite thing about the local fiber community?
It is a friendly, supportive, and interconnected community. People are willing to share ideas and skills to teach and help others. I find that other fiber artists, particularly ones who raise the animals are very much like me and can appreciate the same things I do. That is something that the "real world" sometimes doesn't "get."



6. How does what you do/make influence the rest of your life, and vice versa?
I am a kindergarten teacher, and I take my passion for the fiber arts into my class. Every year I bring a lamb to school, and at shearing time, the kids help me take a fleece from raw wool to finished yarn that they have washed, picked, carded, spun and dyed. I have run a fiber arts camp for kids during the summers for a week where kids spin, weave, dye, felt, meet fiber animals, and see a working sheepdog demo. I LOVE to demonstrate spinning, and have done so many places. Spinning gives me a feeling of peace and a real appreciation for and connection to, the animals that I have raised and cared for day after day.

7. Any funny stories, words of wisdom, something else to share about you or your business?
As mentioned above, this all started when I bought six woolly and very expensive "dog training tools." A quilting friend of mine asked me if I'd become a spinner and I said "NO, I'm busy enough" Within six months I was spinning with a drop spindle, and three months later bought my FIRST spinning wheel. I did not know how to knit, crochet or weave, so skeins of yarn were beginning to take over the house. I decided I'd better learn to do something with it, so I learned how to knit. I can knit simple things, but I soon found that knitting was not my passion. In fact, it was often a source of extreme frustration for me! SO...the business was born. I'll spin beautiful yarns from many different fibers, and let someone who can do them justice buy them to enjoy! To this day, I only have a few pairs of socks, a couple of pairs of mittens, a scarf, a shawl and a couple of hats out of my own hand spun yarn. There IS a sweater in the making (Row one and two K2, P2, K2, P2.......row three and four P2, K2, P2, K2 the whole thing!) but, it was started three years ago, and MIGHT be finished in another three!