Sheep to Shawl

10 September 2005 at the Salmon Arm Fall Fair we, 6 members of the Monashee Spinners and Weavers, competed in the Sheep to Shawl competition. As I mentioned before, this was my first competition, though some of the others had competed in Sheep to Shawl before.

Ahead of time, the 4 spinners (Barb N, Rosalie, Kitty and myself) spun the warp yarn which then went to our plyer (Lynette) and was made into a 2 ply yarn. Then to our weaver (Louise) who dyed some of the yarn, then "warped the loom", all except for 20% which had to be warped at the competition. The morning of the competition we carpooled to Salmon Arm in 2 vehicles, taking our spinning wheels, loom, carders, and anything else we would need that day.

At the competition you are given part of a sheep fleece that has been washed and dried. We had to card, spin, ply the yarn then put it on bobbins for the shuttle which the weaver uses to weave the fabric. When the weaving is finished the fabric (in this case, shawl) is cut off the loom and wet finished. When we made the practise shawls told about in previous posts here, it was all timed just to be sure we could finish in time and found it would be no problem. However, sadly, in reality we were given much less time than we were led to believe we would get, so our shawl was not finished in time. We went "over time" to finish it, so lost a lot of points for this. Therefor, we came in third. Oh well, there's always next year, and we had a really good time.

There were 4 groups competing, 2 finished on time, we went overtime, and 1 had problems with their loom so didn't finish at all which was a shame as it really was a very nice shawl too.