I recently went on vacation and part of that vacation was going to a yarn festival. And I’m a big knitter. And I was really excited. I hadn’t been to something quite like that before. It was in a different country.
So I was just — I mean, I was excited to visit the country. I was excited to see what this type of thing would be like. So when we got there, some things that I didn’t expect were, um — there’s a website called Ravelry, but it’s where a lot of people who knit and crochet, they can look for patterns and they can save things they’d like to do in the future.
And so I have all of these patterns saved that at one point I would like to make, and it was really cool to see people walking by me in person wearing those patterns, and just see the creativity and the ways that different people combined different yarns together, different colors. And, really everyone that walked by, even if they weren’t wearing something that I myself wanted to make, they were wearing something handmade. Like, 90% of the people.
And that was really cool, to just be seeing hand-knits in the wild, I guess. You know, some — I might see that every now and then around here, but it’s harder to know, like, if something is handmade, um, if it’s not very obviously handmade. And, um, it was just cool to, like, know because they were all there and because I’ve seen the patterns that they’ve made those. And then, there was quite a few vendors selling yarn and knitting and crochet related things.
And, um, one of the things I’ve never really done before is different vendors will have samples, so they’ll have knit up different patterns, using their yarn usually or, you know, a technique or whatever. And, um, there were all of these different samples I could try on.
So that was really exciting to be able to see like, “Oh, does this size fit me? If I made it, would I want to make it bigger or smaller? What yarn did they use?” Um, obviously the vendor’s hoping that you’ll try it on, like the yarn, and then buy the yarn there, which I wanted to do. But because people have traveled from so far, many of them didn’t have all — like, a sweater’s-quantity-worth of yarn that I could buy with those colors. So, I ended up buying something that is gonna be shipped to me.
Um, so yeah, I just had a really good experience. It was cool seeing, everywhere I looked, people were knitting. That’s not something I see really ever, at all. So, it was just a interesting, good experience.