Pendleton Woolen Mill Party

Friday was the big international Craft Party - Erin and I went to the Pendleton Woolen Mill to check out their festivities - what fun! Awesome party favors, lots of woolen needle felting - I made a bookmark, there were also stations to make felted soap, felted wrist cuffs, and felted banners.

Also it was a great opportunity to shop! For one thing, in the picture above, the gallery space we were crafting in is use to showcase Pendleton blankets and tapestries. There are a number of tapestries that were designed by famous artists and a portion of the proceeds from sales from these tapestries goes to the Pendleton Native American Scholarship Fund. AND these tapestries are on sale now! It seems they are converting the space into a gallery for their blanket inventory. The sale is huge. Some are only $99! I may not have the details entirely correct, but seriously, there are some amazing deals going on!

I meanwhile shopped for wool. Visions of a set of woolen blankets sewn into a sleeping bag of sorts guided me through the aisles at the mill. The night before I went camping with Tim and we froze our butts off with three blankets on an air-mattress. All night I had wakeful dreams of wool blankets to keep us warm. Even better - a woolen sleeping bag the size of a queen airmattress! Oh yeah baby. So there I was at Pendleton, shopping for wool for this project. I don't want to spend an arm and a leg, and I don't mind getting crafty. There are remnants that they sell at $5/lbs, which I thought I'd felt (so they are thick and soft) and then sew together like a patchwork quilt. Then I saw there were entire bolts of a few old patterns that were 80%OFF. That made some of them only $12/yard. Holy crap! So I bought 4 yards of 60" wide Pendleton Wool for only $12/yard. Shocking.