Festival of Folk Arts part 2.

Seeing the pictures from Thursday my boy decided that he wants to see the festival after all...
I said of course, and in fact it was so good that I already seen everything bought most what I wanted, so I could concentrate on letting Chris have fun... and boy, he did.
He loved the pottery:

Tried on this felted hat (and made stupid faces):

We found an other great outfit (mama's son, he is...):

Tried the bird whistle:

The traditional Hungarian instrument, called "citera":

He even wanted to try the traditional way of making lace... and guess what not only he sat in one place concentrating on it for more than 20 minutes, he actually got the hang of it...(which is more than what I could say for myself.):

We both were enchanted by the tiny, carved musical boxes:

Played with clay...made a little pig shaped money saver thingy...(the one where you have a slot to get the money in... to get it out, one has to break the whole thing):

Of, course, since he IS mama's boy, he HAD to try the spinning wheel...

And see how the other one works:

And lastly, but most importantly... he was weaving... this group is from the city I grew up (Szolnok), and there was a man at the loom... and he was happy to show it to Christopher

And again:

And again...

It took me more than an hour to drag him from there, and then I could only do it with the promise of going back:

Even I talked to the man (who is working with orphan kids, or kids who cannot live with their parents -ah, there is where his patient coming from)...I had to show him spinning with a top whorl spindle, and we talked great length about dyeing wool, especially KOOL AID dyeing, since I thought that would be absolutely harmless for the kids...

BTW can you see the utter concentration?

To top it all, Christopher wants to go back tomorrow... and he gave us participants passes, so we might just do that...

And who knows... Christopher might just start to like crafts... Now that would make me a really happy mama :-)

So it was once again a great day (hmm, it seems I keep saying that for ddays where my boy and crafts are involved... does that shows a trend there? LOL), my boy had a blast. I am absolutely thankful.

St. Stephan's day

If you remember from last year. August 20th is the biggest national celebration of Hungary. It is the birthday of the first king of the county, and later many other things were tied with the day, like the constitution, or the first bread from the new wheat. It is partly sad, because it signs the end of the summer, but all the festivities, manly the big fireworks (that were the best ever this year) and the big Festival of Folk Arts almost makes it worthwile.
It is my yearly pilgrimage... I dream about it for months before, and for months afterwards...
This year I managed to get there at the very first day. At the gate there was a huge line to stand in for the tickets, but the wait was eased by a cute guy playing the harp...

Inside there was the usual miscallenous craft stuff... like pottery:

Also in colors:

Corn husk dolls... just look at those details:

Ceramic figurines... not your usual ones:

I guess this is one place where cuties are all around... this one was making corn hust figures:

Someone was selling carved walking sticks:

Of course there were candles (Jenny, thiy pic is for you ;-) :

And though we our country is in a dire need of widening the wool and yarn selection available, but one thing we have in aboundance... Beads... lots of them:

More cuties... this one playing some strange instrument... but the music coming out...was gorgeous.

The usual array of interesting outfits:

I just had to take a picture of this orange set:

Once again I determined that one craft I don't care for is the traditional way of making lace:

No matter how enchanted I am with some of the results:

Supposedly the theme for this year was cane-weaving, but I've seen little of that.
But there was plenty of weaving:

Even by a man:

And some of the most gorgeous weaved stoles (orange again... I wonder if you can see a trend there LOL):

It seems that if knitting has not felting finally reached the country. I found wonderful gloves:

Hats:

In detail:

More hats:

Felted this and that:

And my favourite dragon (it was there last year too... It is not for sale):

But one thing that was really lovely that this year I didn't only saw spinning
wheels:

But there was someone spinning with a spindle:

There were wools around (though most of them intended for felting):

And mostly in rather strong primarly colors:

Even some yarn:

And there was a spinning wheel that wasn't only adecoration, but actually working:

The lady even showed me how to use it:

And she even let me try it :-) :

This was my very first time at a spinning wheel. Thank you Piroska, I will never forget it.

There was an air-parade, the air race, and the best fire works to day, but this is what I remember the most.

This got a bit long, but if you looked at through and didn't got bored... thank you.

Making yarn

For years and years the idea didn't occurred to me... I was (and still AM) annoyed at the lack of yarn-selection, but making my own ... then I fighted the idea because I realized getting supplies for spinning would be equally hard. But then as you might remember one spring day I cave in.
You can see the results of my very first tries in that post. I would have give up, but I do have a stubborn streak... I have a hard time accepting I cannot do something... so I kept trying, and here is my first skein of plied yarn, all about 25 meters of it... thick and thin and all the bad of a starter's yarn.

But by now, I wasn't about to give it up and I kept on spinning the single.

And plied up. One hundred meters. The thickness still varies, but I could see improvement. Can you?

The next step, was to dye this... Guess what color I though it would be fitting to use???

Orange of course... The bottle is to weigh it down a bit to release all the kinks that occurs as the result of spinning. I use a KOOL AID like drink powder mixing colors of orange, mandarin and some Mango Ice tea to have a bit of rusty shade...

Re-skeined... With all its faults I love it...

Now someone tell me what to knit with it!

It is about 65 grams, 100 meters .

I was thinking of a beret, maybe this one, but that calls for more yarn than I have... a cowl maybe or this thing... what do you think? Any suggestion?

And just to hope that I managed to spreading the fiber bug...Look who wanted to try spinning with my spindle...

Since I am NOT a sock knitter...

LOL. I guess. I just have to admit that I am... partly at least... When I took my son to the lake I didn't want to take any of my bigger projects, so where was I supposed to turn... maybe because I started to listen to the Lime and Violet podcast, in which there is awful lot talk about socks and sock-yarn...
First I finished up the socks I had on my needles for EVER...

My simple toe up ribbed pattern. Made them up from bits of leftover yarns I got at the second hand shop... it is actually striped (stripes of three different yarns), but doesn't look stripey at all...

then...

I had these Regia stretch yarn in my stash. Got it on sale from here. When it arrived I was kind of meh about it because it looked much more red on the screen, and in real life there was more pink and yellow in it... But once I started to knit it I loved it, and it looked more orange, which is much more to my taste.

The pattern is the Back to basic socks from Knitty. I choose it because it let the yarn play up its colors, but still gave me the opportunity to learn something I wanted for a while... Flap heels for toe up socks.

The finished socks look rather idiotic while not on the feet, and in fact they are extremely generous at the arch... I do have a high one, but this is too much even for me.

But it does have an interesting construction and I love the the finished sock.

Baby stuff

My best real life friend had a baby in March. We were classmates in high-school, and friends ever since.
We were pregnant one and half month apart... her daughter is that much younger than my boy.
She is the one who helped me get the job in the bank... and she is a wise one.
When she got pregnant he second time I had conflicting emotions... I missed talking the details with her, and I envied her as hell... but our life turned to different roads now...
That was partly the reason I kept putting off visiting her, along with, of course dealing with a full time job, Christopher and the major de-cluttering project I did...
Anyway I went and I took these as a baby present:

The yarn came from the second hand shop, all cotton. The pattern is the eyelet yoke baby cardigan. And there is a pair of baby-booties to go with it. (Saartje's booties) I knitted the bigger size of both pattern. They will fit the baby in the fall.