What's in a name

This post nearly didn't happen at all - I went outside to set things up for a little photo-shoot and turned my back for a minute only to return to find Her Royal Mollieness in position:

Would you argue with that?
Then, when uploading the pictures to the computer, we had a power-cut that lasted an hour and a half. Now, I know that that's nothing compared to what people in the Gloucester area are having to contend with at present but it was still pretty annoying. It happened about 8pm as the light was starting to fade so I had to be pretty ingenious to carry on knitting. I never realised that those clip-on book lights could clip onto a bra and be angled to throw the light onto your busily-knitting hands.

Yesterday we went to the Rare and Traditional Breeds show at the Weald and Downland Open Air museum near Chichester. There were, as the name suggests, lots of traditional breeds of sheep and goats on show as well as pigs and cows, but as far as I know, you can't make yarn from pigs and cows so I wasn't very interested in them. There were also some alpacas and ducks, geese and chickens, organic food, country crafts and lots of fibrey goodness for sale.

The first purchase of the day was some baby alpaca fleece from an alpaca named "Strawberry Shortcake" - who could resist with a name like that? (Not me, obviously).



These alpacas are from the same flock as Strawberry Shortcake and are all one-year-old males. I think the black one may need psychiatric treatment as he seemed to show an inordinate interest in his own pooh!


Next purchase was a whole fleece of shetland wool from a sheep with the original and interesting name of... wait for it... "Lamby"

Lamby herself wasn't at the show but I did spot other Shetland sheep:


Next up was some Wensleydale, a rather stunning mix of colours that kept calling to me every time I walked past so I had to buy it

Beautiful!
As far as I know, the animal that provided this fleece did not have a name, but I thought "Curly" would be appropriate, what do you think?
We saw a fine example of a Wensleydale who had won first prize in its class (he may or may not have been called "Crimpy"):

(Bethany admitted later that she had been wondering why I was talking about curly Wensleydales - and how on earth curly cheese is produced!)

Purchase #4 was 100g of bamboo fibre (no picture this time) - I can only assume that the plant it came from was called "Grassy" or maybe "Panda-bait".
How much longer can I spin out this dreadful "joke"? Well, not much longer now, I promise.
Next up we have Bobby the bobbin and Katie the lazy-kate:

Plying will hopefully be much easier now as this lazy-kate has a brake to stop the bobbins over-running - I had terrible trouble when I was trying to do some "Turkish Knot" plying which is why there are no photos. One big turkish knot would be a better description. I'll have another go now though, so watch this space...

Finally (hurrah!) we have Rosie the rosette:

Second prize in the novice spinners' category (just don't ask how many entrants there were, OK?)