Celtic Festival--The Event

Shetland Sheep & Scottish Lassies (or is that Lasses??)

Shetland Sheep meet Shetland Sheepdog

Shetland Sheep & Clydesdale
Believe it or not, while the boys were highly curious, it was the horse that got scared and pranced her way past, snorting loudly! I do love this photo .

A River Runs Through

After we had moved the table to the other side of the tent, out of the
middle of the river

I think one word would just about sum it up---WET! It had rained here for about two days, so the ground was good and saturated. The forecast of Saturday was for storms off an on all day. The key part being off and on. When I loaded the sheep up early in the a.m. they were sodden, and it was very foggy, but not raining. Once there I got the sheep unloaded and my display set up, before it started a light intermittent rain. I had brought some clear plastic so I covered the display, but not the sheep, up. 'Twas shaping up to be a very dismal day indeed!

Allena and her family came and saved the day with a light weight blue canopy. After 'we' got that set up I was able to put my table/display in the dry. Allena unpacked all her stuff and got set up to give drop spindle demos. Both her and her husband, Beau answered questions about the wool, sheep and spinning. However it was slow going, with not allot of activity or interest from the crowd. By now the light intermittent rain had turned into a steady rain. Slowly, a river started forming right through the middle of our tent. Later on that river eventually turned to a small lake, with the table and me perched on the only speck of dry ground available under the tent. Allena decided to call it a day a little after noon, since it was so wet, and there wasn't much activity. Graciously they left their canopy for me, so I was able to stay somewhat dry. My feet were sopping wet from the river/lake in the tent, and by the time I got home, they were all wrinkly and white, with callouses quite softened! Who needs a foot spa?

As the afternoon went on, we got a burst of heavy rain and then finally around 2:00 p.m. it quit. There were quite a few people wandering about through out the day, considering the weather. I've never seen so many different colors, sizes and shapes of umbrellas.

I was proud of the little Shetland boys, they did quite well to be out in the big world for the first time. Shane the black wether was more shy and very selective about who he wanted to pet him. Ringo of course was willing to give everyone equal opportunity. They only startled a couple of times, with two separate incidents of little kids racing from one side of the pen to the other. When that happened I would simply tell them not to, as they might cause the sheep to panic and jump out. This would inspire the parents to rein in their kid and all would be well. Sometime in the afternoon we had a heavy downpour and then someone took up their bagpipes quite close to the sheep display. At that point the boys became very restless and started baa-ing quite a bit. Being proper little Shetlands, surely it wasn't the bagpipes was it?

We were set up away from the main activities of the games and other booths, so I didn't get a chance to really see much of what was going on, so I still can't tell you what exactly a Celtic Festival is! We had a nice place though, in 'livestock row', next to the Highland Cattle, Clydesdales and pony rides (they didn't last much past noon--just too rainy). We were also located about 25 foot from a cook tent, which was operated by the folks with the Highland Cattle (also the people who invited me to come). They had some very good sandwiches called 'coowiches' that were made from the Highland beef and some kinds of spices etc. They also had these lovely Scottish Springerle Cookies and even more marvelous plate size Scottish Shortbread cookies! One of those made it home with me. Both the Scotch Collie and the French Mastiff love them! Most importantly they had coffee--free coffee. Things are always more bearable with coffee.

Since this is getting a little long, I'll continue the experience in another post.