Fresh, Pretty Fabrics!

Loads of lovely spring fabrics are here, including three new collections that have all of us at Fancy swooning...

Mixteca from illustrator Eleanor Grosch is crisp and bold with hot colors and geometrics inspired by Native American motifs. Mixteca is part of Cloud 9 Organic's price-sensitive line, which means this eco-friendly fabric runs about the same price as conventionally grown cotton prints. How can you resist that!

Marisa of Creative Thursday just released her new collection, Locally Grown, full of adorable farmy goodness, like sheep, goats, chickens and tomatoes. We see Locally Grown knitting project bags in our future!

2wenty Thr3e by Eric and Julie Comstock is here and we are loving the soft modern palette of mustard, clementine, rose and grey. Vintage camera illustrations and nostalgic ticket stubs? Yes.

See you soon!

Estes Park Wool Market: Cutie-pie roundup!

Last weekend we went up to Estes Park for the annual wool festival. We love this local event--especially  because we get to meet and cuddle so many kinds of adorable fiber animal!

For your browsing pleasure, here are some of our new best friends:

Shy mohair goat babies

Curious and friendly cashmere goat

Jaime almost came home with Blaire, the American Fuzzy Lop.

Desperate to cuddle baby Shetlands.

Peg and Doc Adams, her cuddliest Shetland lamb.

Primitive breeds show, featuring Jacob sheep and Shetland Sheep

Sheep faces galore!

Gang O' Sheep

Wendsleydale shearing--Before...and after

Naptime in the goat tent! Baby angora and cashmere goats are passed out!

Happy alpaca

Jade Sapphire Cashmere Yarn

Jade Sapphire hand-dyed cashmere is here!

This yarn is the absolute softest thing we've ever touched. Jade Sapphire is a 100% Mongolian cashmere yarn--known for it's long staple length and extremely soft fiber, Mongolian cashmere is top notch!


Did you know that one cashmere goat only produces about 150 grams of cashmere a year? That is just 3 skeins of this luscious yarn! During the spring the cashmere goats moult, and their warm, downy undercoat is combed out by hand. It is then cleaned and any coarse hairs are removed, leaving this lofty, lightweight and super insulating fiber. It's pretty special!

We love this free cashmere cowl pattern. It's the same cowl that Amber fell in love with at TNNA and is a simple slip stitch colorwork pattern. Just ask us and we'll give you a free copy when you purchase a skein or two of Jade Sapphire.

Estes Park Wool Festival Report: 2010

Fancyporters Emily and Cat visited the 2010 Estes Park Wool Fest this year to check out the cute and woolly madness. And they did not come home empty handed--we are happy to welcome Queen Victoria, baby English angora rabbit, to team Fancy Tiger Crafts! Shop dog Branwyn is excited about sharing her customer greeting and cuddle receiving duties with Queen Victoria when her new sister gets a little older. For more on the Wool Festival fun here is Cat and Emily!

Cat

Hello! In spite of the cold, rain and mud, Emily and I had a great time at the Estes Park Wool Fest. We fell in love with the angora bunnies, especially Queen Victoria (little lady on the left above), but there were so many other super cute creatures to look at as well!

This cashmere goat loved the camera! And how adorable is the girl in her green knitted cap?


Lambs and llamas and goats, oh my! Here are just some of the animals we met at the festival. The Southdown Babydoll lamb's face (top left below) was just like velvet. Her wool was thick and heavy with lanolin. We're considering getting Amber one for her next birthday...their insanely cute smiley faces make Southdowns sheep her favorite!


Daybreak alert! We saw several folks sporting their Daybreak shawls, one of our favorite knitting patterns by Stephen West. This lovely lady stopped to pose for us in the rain.


In addition to the sheep, goats, llamas and bunnies there were also yaks. This little guy was just five days-old. His family is starting to bottle feed him to keep him really sweet and tame. What a cutie!

Emily

Hey guys, Emily here! The picture below is Queen Victoria--taken at the exact moment that Cat and I realized that we were in love. We tried so hard to resist the gravitational pull of Victoria's cuteness! We actually left the festival, went to get coffee, and realized in a panic that we had to go back and bring home our little queen. She is from Backyard Rabbit Burrows where Cassi Swanson breeds angora rabbits, the most magical of little fiber animals.


Soon we will go visit Backyard Rabbit Burrows. Cassie has a new batch of baby bunnies and Victoria has dreams of finding her Albert. We'll keep you posted when that happens!

Thanks Cat and Emily! And, thanks, cute woolly fiber animals that came out to Estes Park!

Estes Park Wool Festival 2009

Jaime and I had a super fantastic time in Estes Park last weekend at the Wool Festival! We were real excited about cuddling with all the adorable animals and checking out all the locally produced goods.

The Angora rabbits were first on our cuddle list. They were irresistible! We ended up buying a few bags of fairy-soft angora fluff from Woodlake Woolies. We hope to bring some of their angora fiber into our fiber loft soon!

Next stop--cute goats! Or could they be baby unicorns? Look at how pastoral they are with their curly locks and magical baby faces!

The highlight of the trip was being reunited with our favorite lamb, Diamond Lil. First we had to fight our way through crowds of her admirers.

We were lucky enough to be asked by our friends Peg and Woody to lamb-sit Diamond Lil' while they showed their Shetlands. Lil' was getting really sleepy in our laps watching the show. She was a little bigger, but she was still the smallest, cuddliest lamb in the barn!

We were super excited about the presence of Gotland sheep at this year's wool market. Gotlands are an ancient Swedish breed of sheep who were made famous by the Lord of the Rings films - it was Gotland wool that was used to make all of the Elvin invisibility cloaks. There are very few Gotlands here in the US (mostly they live in New Zealand today) so we were super-lucky to meet them. They were so pretty with their lustrous grey locks! Jaime and I acquired some sweet Oregon-made Gotland yarn and Jaime is already planning her invisibility cloak-lette. We hope to stock some Gotland yarn and roving soon for all of your Elvin needs. Nerd alert!

Here are some other highlights from the animal side of the festival - from top left moving clockwise: a Jacob sheep with totally sweet horns, a sleepy Wensleydale sheep, the leaping llama competition, a close up of Diamond Lil's adorable wool, the craziness of showing 7 Shetland lambs, and a freaked out Wensleydale!

Of course we had to visit the vendor barn - this is where you can buy everything from a whole fleece to hand-carved drop spindles. One of our favorite booths at the wool fest is Stephania's naturally hand-dyed rovings and yarns. Jaime had a tough time deciding, but ended up choosing a really pretty madder and tesu flower dyed corriedale.

Thanks Estes! We've got our fiber fix for the summer!

Norwood Fiber Farm Trip (Pt 2): Walkabout Ranch

The first fiber farm we visited in Norwood was Walkabout Ranch, where it was shearing day for the Angora goats. Our friends Jeannie and Howard Davis keep the adorable, friendly goats for their soft mohair fiber.

The little guys were very curious. The bravest goat of the herd became friends with Jaime, and shared a goat kiss with her.

The unsheared goats were really interested in what was going on in the barn, where shearing time was happening.

The shearer, Sunny, specializes in shearing small flocks of fiber animals. He is known in Colorado and surrounding states for his care while shearing the animals.

The ranch is also home to Cara, an Anatolian Shepherd who lives with and guards the goats. Cara was separated from her herd while they were getting sheared. She watched and worried while she couldn't be with them.

This is Cara when she got her herd back. She was literally jumping for joy.

Jeannie and Howard also raise buckskin Tennessee Walking horses. When the last goat had been sheared and the clippers had been turned off the horses decided it was safe to come back from the pasture.

They were the sweetest horses I've ever met. I got so much horse nuzzling action, it was out of control. This is Buddy and little Sheila giving me soft horse kisses.

Stay tuned for part 3, our trip to see alpaca and Shetland lambs at Piñon Wood Ranch. It gets even cuter!

Norwood Fiber Farm Trip (Part 3) Shetland Lambs and Alpaca

Norwood Fiber Farm Trip (Part 1) Buckhorn Gardens

Do you like Angora Goats? We do!

We think these cuties are the cutest things we've ever seen. They produce some of the softest, most lustrous and silky fiber around. We just received a shipment of 100% kid mohair yarn from Wagtail Yarns, a small farm in Queensland, Australia. They raise, shear, spin and dye all their mohair - from little curly guys like this. Do you know why they call their farm "Wagtail"? Have you ever seen an angora goat that is happy to see you? They wag their tail like a happy puppy. Omg, we want to live on their farm!



You might want to come by and see this stuff in person. It's irresistible! We also have some fantastic one skein patterns for it.