This weekend Two Fish Fibers was at the Shepherd’s Harvest Festival at the Washington County Fairgrounds in Lake Elmo, MN. Shepherd’s Harvest is Minnesota’s big spring fiber festival. There are yarn and fiber vendors (like us), demonstrations of everything from weaving on a warp weighted loom to sheep shearing, food trucks, and lots of very knowledgable and enthusiastic fiber geeks.

Our booth is known as Two Fish Fibers because the three of us  – Becka, Jen and Doreen – have been partners at this show for about 16 years. It’s really hard to do a show all by yourself, so Jen (Strawberry Moon Fibers) said “we should do this together”. Doreen (Goldfish Love Fibers) and I met as a blind date for the first time setting up a mock up booth so we could submit photos to apply to the very first show. Years later, we applied to another show and the organizers insisted we couldn’t go by just our names so we had to invent a new one. Since two of our logos had a goldfish in them, we decided we could just be “two fish” when we are together. So now anytime we are out in the world as any part of our group we go by Two Fish Fibers.

Doreen and Jen are both spinners; they met at a neighborhood spinning group. All of us are teachers; Jen and I met as school residency artists for the now-retired Textile Mobile program about 20 years ago. We’ve always done demonstrations in our booth. This year we had a huge warp-weighted loom that Doreen set up with rocks-in-socks as weights while she talked to people. And we set up a “card your own batt” station with a drum carder and let people pick out their own mix of fibers to blend together.

We got a new goldfish neon sign for the booth this year and it was really fun. We got a lot of questions about “do goldfish really love fibers?” and “where are the two fish?” but it was easy for people to find us. Just look for the neon goldfish sign!

We have a big variety of things in the booth. I bring digitally printed zipper bags for notions and projects that are packed with puns. Our booth literally has the most puns per square foot of any space at the festival. I also have mini craft kits and wool eye glass cases. Jen brought hand-carded batts, handdyed and natural colored wool top from local sheep, and some beautiful handspun yarn. And Doreen had dye kits, handspun yarn, and embroidery threads.

Shepherd’s Harvest is our favorite weekend of the year.