Wednesday, October 23, 2013

NY Sheep and Wool Festival: Report from Rhinebeck

Amber and I just returned from a long weekend in upstate New York where we went to the New York Sheep and Wool Festival which is commonly referred to in knitting circles as Rhinebeck. It was our first time attending and it was amazing. Rhinebeck is a wool festival similar to our Estes Park Wool Market--only times 1,000. There were so many people and so many booths of amazing things to buy! We were a little overwhelmed at first, but we got the hang of it after a bit and managed to find some things that we couldn't leave without.

HOLY SMOKES!
Nice work, nature.
We stayed with the lovely ladies of Kelbourne Woolens in a house in the Hudson Valley. What a beautiful fall setting for a wool festival! We spent a lot of time knitting at the house when we weren't buying fiber and yarn at Rhinebeck.


There were so many vendors selling local yarns, rovings and fibers. Amber and I had recently spun through our stash of roving so it was a free-for-all for us to buy more! We both picked up a sweater's quantity of longwool roving to spin-up during next year's Spinzilla.

Amber's roving purchase matches her Apple Cider doughnut perfectly

Longwool roving was seen and purchased

Loop had beautiful batts and art yarn

Outlander Adventures' Icelandic yarn Poetry mittens

There were plenty of sheep, alpacas, goats and llamas as well! We love seeing all the different breeds of sheep. Icelandic, Shetlands, Border Leicesters, Cotswold - all the sheep were in attendance!

Merlin the Leicester Longwool
Sheep Parade!

Icelandic Sheep Baby


An adorable Teeswater

Llama parade!
Ysolda Teague had some exciting news at Rhinebeck - the release of a new book "The Rhinebeck Sweater"! She was doing book signings for pre-sales of the book which will officially be released on November 6th. We have it on order and can tell you already that it is an amazing book, everything you'd expect from Ysolda with 12 gorgeous sweater patterns by amazing designers.


The best part about Rhinebeck was seeing and hanging out with so many awesome people! Ysolda, Cal Patch, Jill Draper, Maryjane Mucklestone, Ravelry, Sonya Phillip and more were in attendance and we loved meeting up with peeps for hot cocoa and doughnut breaks.

Sonya Phillip and Allison Page show off their Empire yarn from Jill Draper

Cal Patch and Jill Draper help us display all of our purchases!

Til next year, Rhinebeck - it was awesome!

2 comments:

Fibreperson said...

Great report and great pictures! It was so nice meeting you all!

Anonymous said...

OMG, so jealous! The whole experience looks like so much fun, and so steeped in nature. What a great time to be in upstate NY! Also can't wait to see those lovely rovings to be spun up into yarn next year!