The wait is almost over!

The 2011 Michigan Fiber Festival is only a few weeks away.  Are you excited?  How many workshops did you sign up for?  Have you taken a look at the Vendor List on the website and started planning which barn you will shop in first?  Did you know that we have a new hospitality area this year?  Did you enter an item into the Michigan Fiber Festival Art Show?  Did you know about the NEW EVENT?  The Peoples Choice Award Fiber Arts Exhibit.

Are you going to watch the Pygora Fleece Show?  The Wool Sheep Show? The Fiber Goat Show?  The Pygora Goat Show?  The Angora Rabbit Show?  Did you know that there were so  many competitions going on at the Michigan Fiber Festival?

What about the skein competition?  Did you enter your yarn?  Did you know there is an Angora Rabbit Skein Competition?

Don't forget about the Alpaca & Llama Exhibits either.  We have amazing Michigan farms who have brought Alpaca for display and sale along with raw fleece for sale.

Are you going to visit the Old Tractors R Us Tractor Club on Display?

Have you ever considered being a Michigan Fiber Festival volunteer?  You should.  It's fun and rewarding.  You become part of the magic that makes the Michigan Fiber Festival so great.

If you answered no to any of these questions then you need to get your Fiberline Magazine out  or visit the Michigan Fiber Festival Website (recently updated) for complete details.  Some of the event still have registration available.

Mark you calendars!  The workshops begin Wednesday, August 17 and the shopping begins Friday, August 19. Yes!  That's only a few weeks away.

Focus on Workshop Instructor, Marlene Gruetter

Marlene Gruetter is a traditional feltmaker/artist and enjoys promoting one of the oldest forms of textile making to other fiber enthusiasts.  Marlene is from southeastern Ohio and is the owner of Marlene’s Felting Madness. 

Marlene has developed Shambolic felt™, a style/technique of feltmaking which incorporates fabrics and other embellishments in an intrinsic and fluid manner.  She loves texture and color and enjoys watching how the felting process itself creates unusual arrangements of texture and color.  The style of shambolic will often leave raw, rolling and uneven edges throughout the work giving it a unique natural look. 

On day one of the workshop, participants will learn both traditional and contemporary wet feltmaking techniques which will be used to provide depth and interest to their work.  On day two, students will learn how to lay out their project to create a beautiful shambolic work with dazzling arrangements of colors and textures and raw, rolling and uneven edges throughout.    

This class is for all levels of fiber artists.  

#110 Shambolic Felt - Wednesday & Thursday ALL DAY (Two Day Workshop)

Contact the Michigan Fiber Festival office to register for this class.

Here are two examples of Shambolic Felt from Marlene's  Half Dressed Collection.

Salsa

Skater

Focus on Workshop Instructor, Heidi Bukoski

We are pleased to welcome the return of workshop instructor, Heidi Bukoski.  Here are some examples of the projects you will make if you take one of her classes.  Make sure to register soon...workshops are filling up fast.

 Michigan Fiber Festival Workshop Registration forms can be found on our main website.
http://www.michiganfiberfestival.info/

Heidi will be teaching the following classes:

#123 Glorious Gossamer Scarf  Wed AM
#132 Tropical Splendor  Wed PM -- CLASS FILLED as of June 8, 2011
#203 Felted Vest  Thursday, ALL DAY
#323 Wire Woven Bracelet  Fri AM
#332 Wire Woven Bracelet 2  Fri PM

Focus on Workshop Instructor, Sue Kawamoto

Sue Kawamoto has been teaching at the Michigan Fiber Festival since 2005. She has also taught at the Knitting Guild of American convention in California as well as at knitting shops in Southeastern Michigan. Her designs have appeared in Knit N Style and in the on line magazine Knitty.com.

Sue will be teaching the following workshops at the 2011 Michigan Fiber Festival

#106 Double Knitting

#209 Colorful Knitting Three Ways

#307 Let's do the twist

She has recently started her own blog and you can see photos and more details regarding her classes at  

http://letsstartknitting.blogspot.com/

Focus on Workshop Instructor, Nancy Barnett

This year we will have Nancy Barnett teaching four different workshops at festival.  If you are interested in learning new techniques in spinning then check out her workshops before they fill up. 

#322 Spinning Simple Silk  Friday AM
#331 Spin With Some Bunny Friday PM
#421 Amazing Angora Rabbit Saturday AM
#530 Embellish your Yarn  Sunday PM

For complete workshop details and registration forms visit our Michigan Fiber Festival website.
http://www.michiganfiberfestival.info

Nancy Barnett lives in the Missouri Ozarks and has been spinning and raising sheep for 25 years and Angora Rabbits for 22 years.  Nancy raises Shetland,  Border Leicester, and Blue Face Leicester Sheep and French, English, and German Angora Rabbits and sells breeding stock and processed rovings.  She is a popular teacher at several Missouri fiber events throughout the year, The Fiber Event in Greencastle, IN, Southern Indiana FiberArts Festival, Corydon, IN, Shepherd’s Harvest, Lake Elmo, MN,  Fiber Christmas, Kellyville, OK, and Wisconsin Sheep and Wool, Jefferson, WI.   She is the winner of two Sustainable Agriculture Grants, one of which is for her Angora/Wool socks.  She lives with her husband, Bill, in a l935 rock schoolhouse constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Focus on Workshop Instructor, Amy Tyler

Amy Tyler lives and explores the fiber arts in beautiful Benzie County, Michigan.  She has been teaching spinning and knitting at the Michigan Fiber Festival since 2006.  In addition, she has traveled far and wide to teach for fiber guilds, at retreats, at fiber festivals, and at weaving conferences.  Her teaching destinations include New York, Vermont, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and – of course – Michigan!

Amy trained for 20 years as a dancer, followed by many years of graduate and post-doctoral work in the movement sciences and then 9 years as a professor in physical therapy education in Iowa and Nebraska.

Her teaching experience is as broad as her educational experience:  she has taught modern dance and ballet, exercise physiology, neuromuscular physiology, motor learning, motor control, statistics and research methods, and evidence-based practice in physical therapy.  As a consequence, she has a deep understanding of the process of learning skilled movements (such as spinning and knitting).  And she has honed her skills at sharing that knowledge with her students.

In 2004, Amy left the world of academia to devote herself full-time to the fiber arts.  She now spins, knits, teaches, writes, designs, and has even begun to weave.  Her fiber arts work is influenced by her fine arts training and her science training:  common to both is an appreciation for movement skills, composition, pattern recognition, and systematic exploration.  The result is her focus on spinning techniques, yarn and knitting texture, three-dimensional structure, and knit designs that exploit hand spinning techniques.  Central to her philosophy is the notion of spinning as a dance between the spinner and the spinning wheel.

You can find her work published in Spin-Off Magazine, as well as in their recent special issue, Interweave Knit & Spin.

Do visit her blog, www.stonesockblog.blogspot.com, where she writes regularly about her fiber endeavors, including the creative process, spinning and knitting techniques, her occasional forays into the world of weaving, fiber animals, fiber travels, and sometimes the weather!

 

And you can see pictures of her fiber work and lists of her past and future fiber activities on her website, www.stonesockfibers.com.

Amy will be teaching the following classes at MFF this year:

            #103:  Blending Colors at the Wheel, Wednesday all day

            #223:  Plying for Texture, Thursday morning

            #231:  Plying Balanced Yarns, Thursday afternoon

            #321:  Mechanics of Your Wheel, Friday morning

            #330:  Spinning Marl Yarns, Friday afternoon

Focus on Workshop Instructor, Beth Smith

Over the next few weeks we will be featuring the instructors teaching at the 2011 Michigan Fiber Festival.  Our first featured workshop instructor is Beth Smith.

    

Beth Smith has built a strong and loyal following who know her and her world-class fiber shop, The Spinning Loft in Howell, Michigan, as the go-to resource for specialty wools for handspinning.  A passionate advocate for greater understanding of all the possibilities offered by many types of wool, Beth has spared no effort to study with master spinners from all over the world. She brings together a deep and complex understanding of many spinning traditions with a clear sense of the contemporary spinner's goals, questions, and options.  She aims to empower spinners old and new to embark on their own voyages of discovery, to make confident choices to achieve their desired results using all of the tools available, and truly experience the astounding scope of one of humankind's most long-standing resources: wool.

 

 Beth will be teaching the following classes this year:

 

#122 Beginning Drop Spindle Spinning      Wed AM

# 131 Getting more from your Drop Spindle     Wed PM

#222 Beginning Spinning     Thurs AM

#230 Beginning Spinning Part 2     Thurs PM

#301 Wool Breed Study Friday     ALL DAY

#420 Drafting Methods     Sat AM

#430 Mastering Hand Combing     Sat PM

You can register for one of Beth's Workshops by visiting our website 

http://www.michiganfiberfestival.info/ 

or filling out the registration form in the Fiberline Magazine.  

Make sure to send in your registration soon because workshops are filling up fast.