Post date: Oct 5, 2014 12:18:23 AM
Now Taos is an artsy town. So today I went to the Wool Festival. This was definitely artsy, more artsy than rural. Kit Carson Park (yes, Kit Carson was from Taos and lived here most of his life) was filled with vendors of wool, woolen goods, spinning wheels, sheep and alpacas and even a few Angora rabbits.
The non-wool vendors were there, too, but shuttled off to the side, and not very many vendors of ceramics, wooden goodies, and stained glass. Nice of the organizers (a tight-knit community) to make the centerpiece the actual wool.
And there were knitted goods, woven goods (including some excellent Navajo rugs), spun goods, dyed goods, and felted goods, as well as a few (very few - this is not a 4H show) live animals. There were also wool sculptures, including sculpture kits where you buy patterns and cleaned clumps of dyed wool.
We saw a shearing demonstration, or rather three. The shearer sheared three different breeds of lamb, to show the differences in fleece. The sheep must have been bred (over thousands of years) to be docile when stood on their rear ends, and the technique is partly how to hold a sheep to shear and how to shear close to the skin while separating the belly fur (which gets very dirty when the sheep lie down) from the leg, neck, and back fur.
We chatted for nearly half-hour with a vendor of bison wool goods. He gets his wool from the bison meat processor now, using the soft winter downy fur, as well as shearling hides. We learned about economics of using all the parts of the bison. These folks had previously combed the wool out of live bison, but they are very big and very dangerous.