A Colourful Saturday

Apartments aren't usually the best places to live in if one likes to use toxic substances, so one of my favourite events is Dye Day at my guild, when I get a chance to work with acid dyes that I normally wouldn't use at home.

The three good-sized skeins at the bottom, and the fall-coloured roving at the top is what I came home with (the bit of dyed roving top left was done for a friend): as they've dried, they are now more subtle, but not quite pastel. I've got some ideas to use them up that I hope to sketch out this week.

And this weekend is another fun event, as I captain our team at the Millarville Fair's Sheep-to-Shawl competition. We start with a prewarped loom, then three spinners and one weaver use fleece from a freshly sheared sheep to card, spin, and weave off a shawl within three hours.

It's a blast, and I really enjoy getting out to show the public that what we do isn't complicated and still has relevancy in our high-tech world: I'll have pictures of it up next week.

But the best part of the weekend will be Sunday, as we are going hiking up at Sunshine Village. We'll be too late to see the alpine meadow flowers, but I don't care: if the day is clear, we'll get to see Mount Assiniboine and, with luck, some wildlife.

I was up about the same time last year, and saw four bighorn rams by being the first person up the Grizzly/Larix Lakes trail in the morning. If I could spend eternity in just one place, it would be there.