Weddings and Wool

My dear sister is now a Mrs!  What an exciting day we had on Saturday.  The wedding was beautiful, and the bride and groom were absolutely glowing.  Now they are off on their honeymoon, having a marvelous time, and those of us back home are slowly getting things back to normal.  Or the new normal, anyway.  :)

Aside from the paper flowers, I was assigned two projects for the wedding: the ring bearer pillow, and Sarah's honeymoon dress.  Both turned out pretty cute, if I do say so myself!

For the ring bearer pillow I used a simple quilt square pattern.  The button in the middle is a vintage one from my huge jar o' buttons.  It's difficult to see in this photo, but the button has a little floral design in the center.  Cute!

Ring bearer Pillow

Sarah's dress turned out exactly as planned, and looked darling on her!  She wore it with a brown leather belt, which I thought looked very cute.  The fit was perfect.  Doesn't she look adorable?

That's all the wedding info for now.  On to the wool!

My Nigora goat, Dean, is moulting his wool right now.  That's one thing I really like about Nigoras--you do not have to shear them.  During moulting season (late spring), you can easily pull the wool right off of the goat, with no pain on their part.  So the other day, I distracted Dean with some food and was able to get about half of his wool before he noticed that what I was doing and started playing hard-to-get.  

Dean's Wool

Dean looked pretty humorous with half of his wool pulled out...

This is the first time I have been able to harvest wool from Dean, as last year he was just a baby and didn't produce much.  I did my research and washed the wool the other day.  It was an interesting process that took a few hours, but the wool came out shiny and clean and smelling pretty!

The one thing I did wrong was I forgot to skirt the wool before I washed it.  Skirting is when you pick out all of the large, noticeable pieces of dirt and debris from the wool.  So I still need to do that, and I might have made it harder on myself by washing it first.  Ah well--live and learn!  I just can't wait to see how this fiber spins up!

Well, off to start the day!  

~Bessie