All Things Wool and Wonderful

All Things Wool and Wonderful

All Things Wool and Wonderful

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

The Shepherds' Extravaganza is once again being held in conjunction with the Puyallup Spring Fair April 10 through the 13. The Extravaganza will offer craft booths of finished wool and fiber related products, classes on spinning, dyeing and weaving, as well a class on sheep nutrition. There will also be demonstrations on the ancient medieval art of "blessing" or waulking wool. Amy Wolf, a coordinator with the Shepherds' Extravaganza, expounds.

WOLF: There's a bagpipe player that will come, he's like a herald, and so he'll get people interested. Then there's almost a chanting - the songs are almost chanted because there's a rhythm when you pick the cloth up and you set it back down the hands hit the table, and in doing so it makes a rhythmic sound. And then the singers will sing their individual songs about the wool.

Wolf explains that the act of waulking the wool is an ancient way to preshrink the cloth.

WOLF: We have a large piece of cloth that they have to waulk, and what that does is it shrinks the fibers together. When it's woven there's space in between the strands of yarn, so when you take it off the loom you want to make sure you shrink it a little bit so that when you're using it for garments that it doesn't actually shrink up on you after you've worn it for awhile. They measure it beforehand and then they measure it while they're doing the waulking.

Where the cloth used for the waulking demonstration comes from is a story in and of itself.

WOLF: We have one weaver that is fantastic. I go shear her sheep and then she takes it from that process on. She does all the spinning, the preparation and the weaving to make a ten yard cloth.

For more information on workshop times and a schedule of events visit shepherds-extravaganza.com.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray on the Ag Information Network.

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