England Travel: Weald Wool Fair!

This past Saturday the fine folks in Wadhurst hosted the Weald Wool Fair. I was seriously torn about whether to go there or to the London Guild of Weavers Spinner and Dyers. In the end I opted for the Wool Fair, and I'm so happy to report that I returned with 4 whole fleece and part of a 5th! All of them are just suburb, amazingly clean examples of wool fleece and 2 are rare breed. I'm the happy owner of;

• a lovely portland fleece that has a sort of strawberry hint to the cream;
• a fabulous romney marsh fleece with lustre, gloss and lovely locks;
• part of a wensleday fleece - curly locks lusciously soft and also lustrus;
• a crossbred icelandic shetland fleece in a fabulous chocolatey caramel;
• a fabulously fine jacob fleece, so unlike the Canadian Jacob's I've seen in being fairly uniform in length and fineness.

To get to this venue we'd taken a bus from our neighbourhood to the London Bridge Station, which was jammed with people trying to buy tickets from the insufficient machines and non-existent humans. Once we got our ticket we'd missed our planned train, but another came along in half an hour so we were set. Once we got off the train at Wadhurst we discovered we were in the deep country, and not a pub at the station! An English rail station without a pub is like a dog without a bone!

Anyway, we walked uphill and discovered a gentleman gardening who advised us to keep on walking as we'd get there in another mile or so. We did get there, and I was very happy to see that the location chosen by the organizers included a pub! After the shopping we had a pub lunch which we were happy to share with some fellow spinners. In fact, one of the spinners had coveted the chocolate shetland/icelandic fleece which was a good introduction. Sue and Julie are from the East Sussex Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, and Sue was kind enough to offer us a lift to the station in her station wagon with all our wool.

Sadly, the camera was out of memory! I've got no pictures to show of this fabulous day.  Turns out CJA took some... thank goodness