Maltingly good!

Last year, when I first came to Unravel, the fabulous knitting festival at Farnham Maltings, I didn't really know what to expect. It had come highly recommended by my knitting friend Mandy, but I hadn't had much experience of knitting festivals other than a slightly underwhelming visit to Olympia. I was also mid my bout of vestibulitis (in fact before I'd really been diagnosed) and not altogether enthusiastic about crowds/standing up. I drove down, feeling I have to say as if I was not  altogether well enough to do so, and managed to get lost, arrived in the Wagon Yard carpark around lunchtime and found myself a space.

Once I entered I found myself in a brave new world of knitting gloriousness. A day and a half later I left laden with yarny loveliness and having even managed to do a workshop on dyeing (therefore also slightly laden with dye). A year and a few hand-dyed skeins later and my anticipation was MUCH greater.

I arrived earlier, partly due to being rather healthier and partly because this year I wanted to try & get it all done in one day - Bradford City having rather unexpectedly made the League Cup final on the Sunday. It had proved utterly impossible to get tickets for the match itself but I still had to be safely home and on the sofa (clad in my Bantams Beanie) by 3.30 and with one thing and another Sunday wasn't looking terribly practical for Unravelling. I wasn't doing a workshop this year either - would have loved to do the needlefelt hare workshop but it was all booked up by the time I looked at it. I arrived in Farnham pretty much exactly as the last space in the Maltings carpark went, so my first 10 minutes were spent finding somewhere else to park. The next 15 mins were spent walking to the Maltings, coming in, buying a coffee, panicking I hadn't locked my car & walking to the car & back to check. (It was locked. I am not as stupid as I think I am.)

The good thing about this is that I did get to say hello to the Well Manor Farm sheep outside the Maltings three times.

The place was PACKED. It felt MUCH busier than last year. I had arranged with myself to do one complete circuit before I bought anything, examining the produce and getting my little notebook and doing various bits of maths as to how much it would cost to make various garments and planned projects. Some rooms were virtually impossible to navigate, and some stalls I couldn't get close to.

However, the Unravel crowds are some of the nicest you could hope to find yourself crushed up against! There was also the chance to see how many people's sweaters I recognised from their project pages on Ravelry (particularly excited to see the person I guess was Rhian Drinkwater in her Dalek Fyberspates Challow). Met up with my friend Mandy at lunchtime - she had been on Alison Ellen's workshop in the morning and had been nearly expiring with excitement about this for some weeks.

My favourite stall, probably, was Well Manor Farm aka the Little Grey Sheep. I had made myself the nicest shawl from their Gotland Aran last year (which I wore throughout Unravel with pride) and was keen to use the same yarn to make Ann Kingstone's Hild. I had checked the yarn weight before the show and it seemed to be fractionally too heavy - but on looking at the stall it seems they've got a new spinner and the yarn should now knit as exactly the right tension. If anything it's also even more lustrous and touchable than it used to be (I know this, as I spend the Bradford City game winding it into balls). It also smells gloriously, unashamedly sheepy - if you spotted someone standing in the foyer inhaling yarn during Unravel, that was me.

Some places, I just couldn't make my mind up. Despite declaring my intention to purchase Fyberspates Vivacious, I found I could no more make my mind up at Unravel than I could in I Knit last week. Nor could I settle on what exactly I wanted or would do with Elisabeth Beverley's gorgeous plant dyed merino and cashmere. Instead I bought some new stuff, or stuff I hadn't seen before - sparkly pink and grey yarn from A Stash Addict, delicate handspun rose-coloured sock yarn from Shearer Girl, and a couple of skeins of the spendidly-named Buffy from Juno Fibre Arts. (Can I design socks with stakes and crosses? Surely someone has done this already.) Plus a bit of UK Alpaca. I was also very impressed by the handsome range of beads at Moon Beads (some of which found their way home with me).

The final stop of the day was at Judy Hardman's stall, where Mandy, who has taken up spinning (hence lucky old me got a hand spun/dyed skein for my birthday) purchased the fleece of a sheep called Bertie, which needed to be transported back to Hanwell while she had me & the car, and therefore no need for Bertie to impart his aroma to others on the train. Although I strongly suspect the trains out of Farnham that day would have had a little scent of sheep...