Millheim Fiber Festival, Sept. 13 at Bremen Town Ballroom

The inaugural Millheim Fiber Festival on Saturday, September 13 has it all–a fiber show full of yarn, clothing, and craft vendors, live spinning demonstrations, kids crafts, knitting areas, and live sheep.  Festival events take place all over downtown Millheim.

Millheim Fiber Fest Banner jpgThe importance of fiber crafts in our daily lives has increased dramatically in the past 10 years. A goal of the show’s co-sponsors — Ecovents in Millheim and Main Street Yarn in Rebersburg — is to promote the life-cycle of fiber arts, from the farmers who raise sheep and other fiber animals to the spinners to the artisans that create crafts and clothing.

Shoppers can choose from a variety of vendors at the Fiber Show at the beautiful Bremen Town Ballroom from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.  Whether you’re looking for that perfect wooly gift or beautiful hand-dyed wool or hand-spun yarn to start your own projects, the fiber show is the place to start.  Some vendors at this year’s show include Main Street Yarn, Steam Valley Fibers, Bald Eagle Valley Alpaca Ranch, Lazy O Ranch, Live Creative, Turtle Made, and Tamarack Farm.

Stock up now on hand-dyed fibers from Steam Valley Fiber Farm. For many years yarn and roving from Steam Valley have been hugely popular with local crafters. The Millheim Fiber Festival is the last stop in Central PA for the farm and its creative genius Phylleri Ball as she and her husband are selling their farm and moving to Colorado to be near their sons.

There also will be beautiful ready-made knitted and crocheted items for sale from “Live Creative” and “The Knotty Knitters.” “Scraps and Skeins,” a fund-raising project for Strawberry Fields in Centre County, will have a booth of yarns and fabrics for sale. All of their sales table items were donated and proceeds will help support their worthwhile program.

In addition to providing clothing to keep ourselves and our families warm, we need to think of our neighbors who may be less fortunate. There will be an area in the ballroom set up for charity knitting. Scarves will already be on the needles so sit and knit a bit. All items will be donated to the Outreach Center in Aaronsburg as part of a project started in 2005 by the Penns Valley Area Knitters.

The Fiber Festival will also have fun and free demonstrations. Joy McCracken of Hughesville will demonstrate spinning beginning at noon at the Green Drake Gallery & Arts Center. Spinning is fun to watch and also is educational – she will show how processed animal fibers are spun into yarn which eventually is used to make clothing.

Accordion Fest—Saturday, August 23!

accordion banner all 4 jpgJoin us for a unique musical experience at the Bremen Town Ballroom. Local accordionists come together to celebrate all things accordion. Different music styles and bands all feature their accordion player on this night.
 

The Line-up
7:00 – 7:30 Bill Ritzman
7: 45- 8:15: The Strayers
8:30- 9:00 Christine Smith
9:15- 10:00 Spider Kelly

The cost is $10. Bring your dancing shoes!

Food will be served as well (optional). Menu tbd.

This Friday! (August 15) Burritos at the Bremen!

This Friday we’ll be serving burritos in front of the Bremen Town Ballroom! Join us for the usual toppings–great veggies, enchilada chicken, and carnitas pork as well as our vegetarian chili and rice.
We have all thMark eating a burritoe sauces too: pineapple-ginger-cilantro, fresh tomato, chimichurri, and lime-cilantro sour cream.

Special this week: Banana “Ice Cream” Come and try it out–it’s vegan!

From 5-8pm at the Bremen Town Ballroom (105 E. Main St, Millheim PA 16854)

 

Nathan Salsburg & Joan Shelley Concert

10515315_10204263296608352_2672469777145751432_oJoin us for a lovely evening of acoustic music with Joan Shelley and Nathan Salsburg from Kentucky. Nathan is a virtuoso guitar player and Joan Shellley is a wonderful singer and player as well.

Dinner will be available before the show (menu tbd). Bring Your own Libation!

More on Joan:
Ginko is Joan Shelley’s much anticipated 2nd album, and her Ol Kentuck debut. The stellar performances delivered by Joan and her backing band (featuring Ben Sollee, Cheyenne Marie Mize, Daniel Joseph Dorff and several other amazing musicians) mark an artistic turning point and are further testament to the great music coming out of Louisville, Kentucky. (Read Archivist Nathan Salsburg‘s take on the project right here.)

The album ranges from gentle moments of quiet beauty (Into the Sea), to crushing drums (Ginko) and swirling strings (Siren). And at the center of it all is Joan’s singular voice and brilliant songwriting. These works move agilely between darkness & light, hovering just long enough to draw us in and keep us rapt and curious to hear what will come next. There are worlds in each of the 11 songs presented here, and we’re able to look more & more deeply into them with each listen.

Captured for recording by Kevin Ratterman at The Funeral Home, Ginko sounds amazing. It manages to shimmer and feel well-worn all at once.

More on Nathan:
I suppose it’s not terribly difficult to play a guitar – to hold the thing in your arms, to move your hands across its body in all the prescribed and proven ways, to coax a little melody into being.

But what Nathan Salsburg – an acoustic guitarist and the curator of the Alan Lomax archive, a Pennsylvania-born Kentuckian who has logged good time in coastal Maine – does with his instrument is singular, nearly mystic: his are agile, engaging compositions, songs that feel desirous and questioning and vital, as if they weren’t just channeled into being, but demanded revelation.

Nathan’s 2011 solo debut, Affirmed, directly addressed a trio of thoroughbreds – Affirmed, Eight Belles, and Bold Ruler – which also made it at least in part about Salsburg’s Kentucky: the land that sustained and nurtured those horses, the ancient traditions that anointed and sometimes undid them. Its follow-up, Hard For To Win and Can’t Be Won, is also a record about place, although its landscapes are less specific. Some of them are memories, even: spaces that were real once, but have to be conjured now, willed to or from mind. Most of the album’s songs are instrumental, save two re-workings of older material: “Coll Mackenzie,” written and first performed by Archie Fisher, and “To Welcome the Travelers Home,” a composite of two traditional nineteenth-century pieces; one sacred, one less so. Both songs concern homecomings, what it feels like to be enveloped by a place that you know will sustain you, will nurture what needs nurturing.

Musically, Nathan has emerged from a venerable tradition that includes Lena Hughes and Frank Hutchison, John Fahey and Ry Cooder. I’m reluctant to make too much of his virtuosity – and he is virtuosic, a staggering craftsman – because he is also in the unique position of having that be the least interesting thing about his playing. There are moments in Nathan’s pieces – these nimble rhythmic shifts, steps from one place to another – that make my knees quiver. Listening to him play, it’s hard not to feel subsumed by gratitude.

I’m just as hesitant to frame his work as subversive, and yet – he is such a remarkably courageous writer and musician, and Hard For To Win and Can’t Be Won is so matchless a document, so inimitable in its moves. This is the sort of record that could change the course of your year. It certainly changed mine.

Bike Fresh Bike Local Centre County

EcoVents is proud to partner with PASA to present “Bike Fresh Bike Local, Centre County” on August 3. 2014

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We are the food partner, and we’ll be making the food for all of the riders! Our menu includes a beef bbq sandwich on a home baked bun and a kale & quinoa salad, shown below:

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Burritos at the Bremen

10460211_10204254483988042_1841227444844868405_nWe’re taking over the sidewalks of Millheim on Friday night to serve our (becoming) famous burritos! We’ll have pork, chicken, and vegetarian burritos as well as some of our awesome salsas. We’re adding a nice Strawberry jalapeno salsa and a spicy chimicurri sauce.

The weather’s looking good, so plan to eat with us! We’ll be setting up our outdoor cafe in front of the ballroom and we’ll spread out as far as we can.

Vegetarian, vegan, and gf options available! Lemonade, Peppermint tea also.