Saturday 25 February 2017

Unravel 2017

Last weekend I was lucky enough to spend a day at Unravel with two yarn-loving friends. If you don't know already, Unravel is a festival of yarn and fibre, curated and presented each year by the team at Farnham Maltings in Surrey. We had a really lovely day, but rather than giving a blow-by-blow account, I thought I would pick my top three Unravel highlights to share with you;


1. Yarn-loving friends - to spend a whole day with two yarn-loving friends was just such a treat. We chatted future projects, exchanged advice, compared notes on knitting needles and 'enabled' each others yarn purchases. There was a really lovely atmosphere at the festival as a whole and we were lucky to be attending on the Sunday - the quieter day of the three - which meant we could enjoy the day and make yarn-purchase deliberations at our own pace.

The three of us went to Yarnporium together in November where I seemed only able to buy yarns with a purple or raspberry tone, at Unravel, I had a distinctly blue-grey colour palette going on...
My yarn purchases, from left to right:
Rugged Aran by Stranded Dyeworks - Islington DK by Kettle Yarn Co - 3 skeins of Socks Yeah! from Coop Knits, Socka by Sparkle Duck - Elen Sock from Treskelion Yarn and Fibre


2. The yarn - I know this sounds slightly obvious given that I was at a yarn festival. I loved the mix of yarns presented, from the brands that I had expected to see and those that I hadn't come across before. I was quite focused, I went with a list of future projects and their yarn requirements and almost (!) stuck to my list, but I also came home with notes and photographs of lots of other yarns I had seen and squished - excited and inspired by future making possibilities...

Selection of hand dyed yarns from Snail Yarns


3. Making inspiration - I was expecting to be delighted by the yarn at Unravel but I hadn't necessarily thought that I would come away with so much inspiration for future projects. The Pompom stand kept drawing me back with their beautiful samples; I am still very taken by this gorgeous cardigan from the latest Interpretations 4, the collaboration between Joji Locatelli and Veera Malimaki.

Two-tone garter stitch cardigan

If you've seen the latest edition (Spring 2017) issue of Pompom you might recognise this crochet cardigan - it is beautiful and having tried on this sample, its fighting quite hard to get into my list of future makes!



Perhaps predictably, given that I appear to be going through a 'grey and blue' phase in terms of colour preferences, I got heaps of inspiration from the Kettle Yarn Co too and their recently published Dawn to Dusk 2 which contains the most beautiful knitwear designs.  

Our little boy made this drawing whilst I was at Unravel -  "Happy Yarn Festival" - I think it sums up our day perfectly. I'm looking forward to next year already!

Happy Yarn Festival drawing

 And just because we love robins in our house - I've got to share this photograph of one of the birds in the yarn aviary that welcomed visitors to the festival...

Photograph of a knitted robin

2 comments:

  1. Lovely review Helen. I'm looking forward to future blog posts. X

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  2. Thank you for the review Helen. What a wonderful day. Great idea to take photos of yarn you liked for future purchases. I love that Pompom cardigan too. I'm going to add it to my Ravelry favorites.

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