Knitting and Stitching Show

Another year, another Rhinebeck missed.  

While it is fun to have an extravagant shopping weekend at the fairgrounds, I miss the experience most of all.  Gathering with friends, seeing all the fantastic knitwear, being inspired by the colors of upstate New York autumn, the fantastic food, getting to pet lanolin-rich sheep and chatting with the farmers.  It's the ritual that I miss...summer is really over, now have some apples and lamb chili and cover yourself with wool.  

I slyly made my way up to Alexander Palace for the London Knitting and Stitching show last week.  Rhinebeck it was not, but I was hoping to recapture some of that spiritual feeling of autumn being here.  

Well, the weather screamed fall- lately, if it hasn't been a steady pour, it's been a wild windy ride of sun and rain, and lots of rainbows.   

Plus, I had wanted to get up to North London and check out the hilltop Ally Pally- a beautiful old convention center, crystal-palace style.  This hill is where the first TV broadcast signal in the world originated from!  

 Ah, and a touch of fall color.  There's very little of this here- leaves just turn brown unceremoniously and fall dead to the ground.

 And the city from afar:

 Inside, knits!

I don't know if I'd ever thought of knitting suet before, but someone surely has.

The show had all sorts of fibre artist- a lot of them had their booths set up as galleries and they had really amazing stuff.  Sculpture, multimedia, fashion...

The only thing I was really interested in was buying British wool.  It ended up being a tall order- there were many vendors there, and very few had nothing but commercially available yarn.

There were tons of fabric vendors.  I set out to buy fat quarters and some plain-ish jersey knit and ended up being overwhelmed by choice.  Any game plan in my head was quickly forgotten, and I walked away empty-handed.  

 Although some of the vendors need a bit help in the organizational department.

It seemed that the less organized a vendor was, the cheaper the prices were.  I watched in amusement as one discount yarn vendor had piled bags and bags of yarn into their booth....

In this hip-deep pile of yarn, people were scrambling for the centre, as if some magical yarn lived there.  As the pile spread further and further onto the floor, some worker would come by and shovel the yarn back into a stack.  Some people were literally swimming in the plasticky shifting pile, creating hazardous landslide conditions while searching for that elusive bargain.

Alas, Jameson's Shetland was there and the only cash I parted with that day was for a small kit of color-coordinated yarn for a fair isle hat.  They were just so nice!  Plus, Scotland.

So, aside from lacking the rustic aspect of being outdoors in the barns and pawing fleeces both on and off the sheep...

It was a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Oh, and the food vending situation was awful.  Microwave pizza and pre-made sandwiches and rubbery pastries kind of awful that I stayed away from.  A quick check on my phone revealed that the neighborhood around Finsbury Park tube station had plenty of good Turkish restaurants, and I became the hero of the day for bring a bag of meze and kebaps in take-away bags back to South London.  It wasn't apple cidre donuts and lamb chili from the 4-h stand, but it was decidedly delicious.

MORE Sheep and Wool...and Frisbee Dogs, too

My favorite part about Rhinebeck is wandering around and checking out the sheep and goats and then eating said sheep and goats. Kidding! They do serve plenty of good lamb dishes though. They put some distance between the sheep being petted and the sheep being eaten...the places serving lamb are far away from the sheep barns. It does seem kind of cannibalistic. Apple cider donuts and kettle corn for me then.

This Cheviot was a bit too pretty to eat anyway.













One of the highlights of the day for many are the frisbee catching canines. They used to have sheep dog trials, but I'm not sure what happened...now they just have sheep dog frisbee. They are fascinating to watch.



The dogs are just filled with vibrant energy and concentration.



















So about the shopping...people spend oodles of money here every year. I've spent a kagillion bucks here in previous years. It's great to support the industry and small farmers and indie businesses. However, I was just uninspired to shop and found myself in much more of a contemplative mood. I think I've been doing this festival for so long now that I've already bought everything that I feel the need to buy. Weird, right? Also, it's been much more of a social event for me...getting out of the city and hanging out with good people I don't see often enough becomes a priority. Plus, I have a few big trips coming up and that money that wasn't spent on fiber will soon used to buy the perfect croissant.

As I was walking to the car park at the end of the day, I swung by the Foxhill Farm booth and bought a bag of Cormo roving. I couldn't buy absolutely nothing. It just felt all sorts of wrong. Alice Field breeds and raises the loveliest sheep- she keeps them blanketed, so they are nice and clean. You can just tell when you are spinning it that the sheep it came from was loved and well cared for. The roving isn't over-proceeded at all and I had so much fun spinning what I bought from her last year.



Totally worthwhile purchase. It will keep me busy for countless hours, along with the rather huge stash of fleece from previous Rhinebecks that are still patiently stored in bags under my bed.

More Rhinebeck, Including a Highly Coveted Spinning Session

This man is a rock star.



Well, in the spinning world anyway. It's Norm Hall, and he makes the most amazingly gorgeous spinning wheels by hand. They aren't cheap.

He doesn't have a website. He stopped taking orders in 2005. You can get on a wait list, but it's not unheard of to wait many many years before you get a glimmer of hope that your dream wheel will get made. There is an active market in selling your spot on the wait list.

I only ever see him at Rhinebeck. He sits around his booth, chats with his fan club and occasionally, a lucky wait-lister will show up to pick up their wheel.



It was love at first spin for Mknits.



He also has a nice banjo player in his booth plucking away and making the corner a small sanctuary in all the grabby shoving of the festival.

Happily, his booth is very close to where lamb chili could be had, and I spied the most amazing sweater:



Handspun, handdyed, handknit. This woman was so proud of it, and as you can see from the stranger's hand reaching out to touch it, everyone was in awe of it.



She was super-proud of it. The fleece even came from a previous Rhinebeck.



I was having a lot of fun walking around with my camera and trying to capture the essence of the moment.











I have even more sheepy pictures tomorrow...and some gorgeous sheep dogs as well.