This Weeks feaured Giveaway from Inspiration Fibers!

Here are the sweet fibers for this weeks giveaway! It's 1.4 oz. of fiber. The breeds are alpaca, Finnsheep and Bluefaced Leicester. Perfect for felting!
Tell us a little bit about yourself...  I'm Amanda Hartrich, and my husband, four kids and I live in the country in Western New York, near Buffalo. I've had a long history with yarn and fiber, beginning with teaching myself to crochet when I was 8. Fast-forward 18 years, and I walked into the LYS (The Embraceable Ewe), and asked the owner, Erin, if she needed any help. No, I didn't know anything about good yarn. No, I didn't know how to knit. No, I didn't know how to work a register. To this day, I have no idea why she hired me, but what a blessing that she did!
I learned to knit really quickly, ran the store's help hours, taught knitting and crochet classes and managed the website. I loved every minute of it, especially when Erin let me borrow her spinning wheel for a while, and I taught myself to spin. After a few years, though, my husband and I felt called to a change in our lives. We feel we've been given direction to start a farm and open it up to inner-city children for them to learn about animals, food and alternative lifestyles.
We got chickens, I started volunteering in the city, and we've been working for four years now to accomplish the dream. Though, as followers of Christ, we feel it is all in His time and refuse to take out any loans to make things happen any faster.
The past two years have seen the most change: I opened my Etsy store, Inspiration Fibers, and we moved further into the country. We were given the opportunity to purchase my in-law's house (they built a new one right next door!) which is on more acreage than we could have hoped for, and better houses our brood of kids. This summer begins our adventures with sheep! I plan to start a small flock of three Shetlands and expand from there. The kids in the city are more excited than ours are (my kids know the chores associated with animals!!)

What do you love about wool and the creative process of dying and spinning wool...

As an artist, I'm endlessly fascinated with wool. Though it's a single medium, you can find infinite variations: from breed to breed and from animal to animal. It's full of life and energy as it springs and crimps, some is shiny, some dull, some rough, some soft, some long, some short: the extremes are limitless! I've worked with it so much that very rarely do I think it's rough, I'm forever asking my husband if something is soft, because it's all soft to me (well, let's not get carried away, Navajo Churo is not soft).
My absolute favorite thing to do with wool is to wash a fleece. There is something magical about taking smelly, yellow wool, pushing it into hot soapy water, and pulling out icy-white fluff. I also really get to know a fleece and sheep by working with it right from the beginning. As it comes out of the bath, it usually goes directly into a dye pot. At any one time, I'll have wool washing, dyeing and drying all over my studio kitchen. I even keep some just sitting around to pet it as I walk by!

When I prepare batts for spinners and felters, I get most of my inspiration from the colors I've already dyed. Sometimes batts are a single breed, so that the artist can really play up what that breed offers. Most of the time, though, I'll mix breeds together along with some sparkly nylon or bamboo. Each element adds a different characteristic to the finished project. It really helps, though, to know who will be purchasing. I have a regular customer who is a felter, and when I make batts for her, I'm constantly thinking of how the colors will lay out for her scarves. If they're just batts for the shop, I prep them for spinners, and base them on how I prefer to spin.

What is your favorite wool to work with...

My favorite breed right now is Bluefaced Leicester. I found a wonderful BFL farm that is producing wool almost as fine as Merino, but with a longer staple length which adds shine and easier spinning. I've purchased more fleeces from them than anywhere else, and I plan to have BFLs after we learn what we're doing on the little Shetlands! The finished yarn, spun with BFL is springy, round and warm. I'm planning on spinning enough of it for myself to make a full sweater. We'll see if that actually happens though!

To enter this giveaway:

1. Visit Amanda's shop here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/inspirationfibers?ga_search_query=inspiration+fibers&ga_search_type=seller_usernames and coment on this blog what you love in her shop.
OR 2. You can blog about this giveaway and post the link in your comment.
To get to know more about Amanda and her wonderful fibers, visit Amanda's blog here: http://www.inspirationfibers.com/ and also become a fan on her facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Inspiration-Fibers/112818845449556#!/pages/Inspiration-Fibers/112818845449556