CNCH 2008

Last weekend was CNCH 2008, the annual Conference of Northern California Handweavers. For the first time, I was there as a vendor, not a registrant. It was a great experience - good sales and lots of fun meeting friends both old and new. Thanks to all who stopped by to say "Hi."

Here are a couple of shots of the booth - one showing the scarf display rack and wall-hung pieces, and one showing the table of wood items that DH selected as being likely to appeal to an audience of fiber-oriented (and predominately female) folks. (Normally, when we share a booth, he has more space and can display all his bowls and sculptural pieces, but this was only an 8x10-foot booth so the selection was limited.) The rolling pins are always a hit, and the bottle stoppers, needle cases, and flower arrangers were popular too.





You can see a basket of wood chips in plastic bags at lower right. I had prepared 8-ounce ziplock bags, each labeled with the type of wood chips, plus a display board that has yarn wrappings labeled by wood type so buyers could see what color each type makes. I also prepared a handout explaining my process for extracting color from the wood chips and dyeing yarn with it. I'll be putting that handout on my website in PDF format. As soon as it's in place, I'll post a link here.

Here's a shot of the display board:



There was a good level of interest in the wood dyes, so I'm hoping more dyers will discover the joy of using a waste product to get wonderful color.