Unravel 2016

I've just got back from Unravel 2016 in Surrey. It was a three day show and on the last day I also taught a 3 hour workshop on Beaded Lace Knitting, while Simon manned my stall. We had a great time. I met lots of social media friends I've never met before, several people who've been to my workshops and lots of regular customers. It was so great to see so many people and to get so many hugs. 

We arrived home at 9pm last night and today I've been exhausted. I don't feel like I have done any work today but I actually have. I've got an urgent design deadline coming up and I've been knitting frantically on the project today and I've made some real progress. I wanted to share a few things about Unravel with you all but I'm too tired to write much so this will mainly be a picture blog.

It was a challenge setting up our stall as we had a smaller space than I'm used to but I'm happy with the result. We were in a different room from last year but I loved our location. The other stall holders in our room were lovely people too and I enjoyed getting to know some of them better. Meeting other yarny business owners is part of the fun of attending shows.

I displayed as many shawls and patterns as I could fit in and I had a gorgeous selection of pretty yarns, beads and Tattysqauwk shawl pins.

Our stall was a small horse shoe shape with tables on three sides and space for us to get in and out at the back. This is during Thursday evening set up so not all stalls were ready.

One of the new stall holders I enjoyed meeting was Julia from Woollenflower. Julia came to my attention last autumn. She makes gorgeous pouches from recycled tweed materials. I managed to snag a pouch during a recent shop update. As soon as she updates her website, it's all gone. So when I saw she was going to be at the show, I decided I needed to get another pouch. There were two I had my eyes on and I got one (more on that later) but I wish I'd bought the other one too.

Amanda Perkins (formerly of Natural Dye Studio) had an exhibition of her amazing crochet blankets. I managed to have a quick look at her blankets and I managed a quick chat with Amanda too. 

Amanda's crochet blankets are for sale and she had patterns too. Check out her website.

I did have a quick look around the show on Saturday before it opened and I earmarked a couple of stalls to return to later. One of them was a new to me project bag maker, Pink Hazel. The style of her project bags and her fabric choices immediately caught my attention. And yes, I bought a project bag. I was tempted by her smaller notions bags and needle rolls too. 

The show was really busy and here are the queues waiting for Saturday's opening.

There were lots of woolly decorations around the venue. Aren't these little sheep cute?

And the banisters were decorated with cute sheep with a variety of sweaters.

  
In addition to my Woollenflower and Pink Hazel project bags, I also bought a beautiful drop spindle from Spin City, sparkly Opal sock yarn from Interknit Cafe, some buttons from the Textile Garden and the Unravel tote bag. Quite a nice haul.

I've admired the Spin City drop spindles at a few shows now and although I don't like spinning on drop spindles, I wanted one so Simon got me one. In fact, I'm thinking I may start collecting drop spindles as there are so many beautiful ones.

I popped my spindle into the Unravel tote bag with some other stuff and forgot to tell Simon to be careful when he packed the car after the show. I was so upset last night when we got home and I saw that my spindle was broken. I'm hoping I can glue it back together and as I'm not planning to spin on it, it may be okay.

Thank you to all our lovely customers, old and new, who made Unravel a big success. And a huge thank you to Gemma and the Unravel team for organising a fantastic event. I'm already excited about next year.