Shepherds Harvest Festival's Got Legs

Four shepherds, four breeds, three countries, six years and one very bohemian festival. That’s what has gone into these legwarmers for my daughter. She ought to be able to dance to the moon and back in these things.

She had been asking and I needed a traveling project so the spark was lit and the project a go. As a spinner, I’ve been purchasing fiber for six years, most of it at the Shepherd’s Harvest Festival. After much hemming and hawing over my stash, I opted for a bit of old Black Blue-Faced Leicester wool top, some new llama from Carothers Country Farm and some Icelandic/alpaca dyed with onion, black walnut and marigolds from Spinner's Web in South Dakota. The color of these natural dyes is hard to describe. It is as if the sunlight is shining back at us through the wool.

These shepherds are also my friends. My daughter saw a cria (baby llama) born at Carothers farm when we were delivering our own wool for processing. The yellow wool, boiled in onion skin and other potions, came from Kelly Knispel in the booth next to mine at Shepherd’s Harvest. A gentle, friendly and creative person, she walks her Dakota countryside to find the plants to make her dyes. I am not truly certain of the source for my Blue-Faced Leicester but I am sure it is connected to Shepherd’s Harvest.

So I spun the Leicester then blended the Carothers llama with the Dakota blend and plied the fibers of my friends and my community. Hard earned, home-grown, hand-dyed, handspun.

Shepherds Harvest Festival is known to blend urban and rural communities and my rural yarn was about to go jet set. We were traveling to Rome, Florence, Nice and Paris and this yarn was along for the ride. 33,000 feet in the air, I passed the measuring tape to my daughter and said “give me numbers!” I drew a diagram on an index card while she whispered inches over her shoulder… under the knee…around the ankle…ankle to mid calf…the people in the seats around us couldn’t hide their curiosity. But I’d made my swatch and my mathematics were in full swing. I wrote the pattern as I knit. A little bit in the hotel room in Rome, more on the train to Florence and the finishing work in the car ride in Nice.

My daughter was thrilled when I finished and even though it’s hot now I know these will come in handy at the festival next spring when the floors at the fair can send up a chill. But I still marvel at the magic: The generous animals who donated their fiber, the sunshine from the vegetable dyes, the labors of so many shepherds, the earnest festival that brings us all together and the technology that sent me spinning around the globe to deliver these humble stockings to tend my darling. The twisting together of so many energies is a big part of the inspiration that keeps me tending my flock, my craft, my family and myself. The life of the festival goes on and on….