Sheep to Shawl

JM - Judging Sheep to Shawl, a photo by Project Pictures on Flickr.

Do you know who this is? I'll bet you do, but if you don't, I'll let you know that this is Judith MacKenzie (she wrote The Intentional Spinner and is generally known to be one of The Major Authorities on spinning). We were privileged to have her judge our Fiber Arts show this year.

Here she is judging the Sheep to Shawl entry. There was only one this year, but they really put their hearts into it anyway and once again received a perfect score on their work.

Judith talked for quite some time about this shawl. She was particularly impressed that the yarn was not uniform, but had a consistent-inconsistency. That is, it was lumpy, bumpy and noily, but it was that same way throughout the entire shawl even though four different women worked on spinning it. That's pretty impressive and harder than spinning a machine-like uniform yarn.

She also pointed out the lovely weaving, and here she is holding the shawl up to the light. You can see her body right through it. That's very nice weaving!

The other thing I found really interesting was that she spent quite a bit of time discussing the fact that weaving isn't done until the cloth is washed. Washing completely changes the cloth. So what she's holding up is really only half-way-done. She was also able to display the group's swatch, which had been washed, so that you could see the difference in between the two.

It was really amazing and wonderful to get to see her speak.

And then I had to run to class!

But I'll have more about that, next time!