Momma Pat and I went to Yarningham! This is a local yarn
festival held in Birmingham. I have wanted to go for a few years but never
managed to get a ticket for it. This year I jumped on the early bird booking
and got our tickets way back in March! It was held at the Uffculme Centre on
the edge of Highbury Park. This was also an opportunity for us to be nosy in another
heritage building of Birmingham.
As I had pre-booked tickets we jumped the (very short!)
queue and went straight in. I decided to actually walk around everything and
have a look before I committed to buying anything. The yarn hanks on every
stall were incredibly beautiful and came in so many colour ways. I’m not a huge
fan of hanks (read: I really don’t like them as they are a faff to ball up
without a winder!) but I do always admire them and wish I was the type of
person to have the patience to use them.
The whole show was a lot smaller than I thought it would be.
I have wanted to go for ages and I know it is a young festival, but there wasn’t
really much to see at all. We’d done the full circuit in maybe 20 minutes, even with
stopping to look and navigating other
people included!
I did buy some things but I was quite restrained. I got a
book on crochet wreaths, as I do like making them. I also treated myself to
some proper KnitPro blocking T pins and some new darning needles. The highlight
of the show was the soft taxidermy – I want it all!! The ladys shop is here on Etsy. We also had our photos
taken in the wooden cutout prop, and had a massive bit of cake (possibly the
best meringue I’ve ever had, but the cake was rather sickly by the time we'd eaten half the slice as it was so big).
I’m glad I have been finally and it was great to see that
there is a demand for yarn based crafts. It was interesting to see two types of
spinning wheel being used by stall holders too. I’m not sure I would go to
Yarningham again though unless I could afford to buy things, and could afford
to do workshops that would actually develop my skills!
