It turns out awesome things can happen when you get up and out of the house early-ish on a Saturday morning. L and I live really close to one of (in my opinion) Toronto’s best neighbourhood farmer’s markets. Truly, Wychwood Barns is a credit to the city, and it’s one of our favourite things about where we live. We don’t always make it on a Saturday morning, but we try – it’s where we buy our coffee beans (we get the Wychwood Barns blend, of course), it’s where we buy a lot of our hearty produce, and now, it’s where I can buy wool. That’s right. Locally grown and milled wool, just steps from my house.

For most of the year the Stoddart Farm booth is only at the market on the last Saturday of the month, but in the run up to Christmas, Silvia (farmer extraordinaire) tells me she will be there every week, and I am pretty friggin’ excited about that. I mean, look at what I got!

That’s 408 yards of locally grown wool – 70% Romney wool and 30% mohair – in a 100g light fingering weight. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet (it is beautifully soft, so I’m thinking shawl), but I know that I’m going to save it for February, when I need to see some green lusciousness. And really, would you look at that colour? It made my day.

Silvia raises the sheep and the mohair goats herself, and then hand paints the wool using environmentally friendly dyes. The wool itself is milled just a few hours from the city, in Elora, making the whole enterprise super-local. I didn’t have my camera with me, but her market table is a riot of colour, with yarns in numerous weights and batts and roving too. That she is the sweetest person just tops it all off. Honestly, I can’t wait to go back next week and pick up a skein of fiery orange/red laceweight I saw.

That I got this alongside Fair Trade coffee and an awesome breakfast cinnamon bun probably means that this weekend is too good to be true and I’m now bound for disaster, but oh well, I’m thinking this yarn was worth it.