Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair 2011

SAFF was amazing & magical this year! Asheville is such a beautiful place, and especially in the fall of the year with all the leaves putting forth their best show of color; this year we had spectacular weather too, T-shirt weather in the sunny afternoons. And what a crowd! I think all the awesome vendors were very happy this year, I taught 5 classes in 2 days and didn't get to shop until the very end of the day, but even then things were still pretty busy as folks shopped for every imaginable yarn, fiber, handmade button, needles, tools, even finished wares. And I loved the new teaching venue! All the classes were held in the new building in the back of the Agricultural Center, we had lots of space, great tables, and I was just steps away from running water for all my wet-felting classes - a dream!

My Wild Wooly Flower class is always popular, and this year was no exception as one class quickly filled up and we had to add another flower class Friday morning. I was thrilled to see familiar faces all weekend, even some friends from Salisbury had driven up to take a class, what a great time we had! All the flowers turned out gorgeous, you can see some of them in the photos above. Saturday I taught 2 Wool Geode classes, hard to photo as the students have to wait until their geode has dried before they can cut into it to reveal the beautiful swirls of color hidden inside. Several of my students made longer geodes so that they could cut them in half and have one pincushion to keep and one to give away, and one student even made a long narrow one she could slice into segments and use for a necklace or bracelet for some one-of-a-kind jewelry. My last class was the Wool Beads Bracelet, I was thrilled to see several young folks in this class who made beautiful beads and wore their finished bracelet out of the class. We even had 3 generations at one table, with mom, grandma and granddaughter all making beads together, the youngest was a real go-getter and even made her mom a pair of earrings, what a sweetie! And I even learned something from her; as she was adding her sparkling Angelina fibers to her wool beads, she commented on how like angel hair these metallic fibers were. "I'll bet that's why they call it Angelina," she said, duh! I never thought of that, and I learned something from my youngest student that day. You can see my wonderful students and their creations in the photos above. All in all, a great show, and I can't wait for next year!