Spinning Yarns – A Festival of Colour, Creativity & Craft

After reading about Spinning Yarns – A Festival of Colour, Creativity & Craft being held in early September, I decided to buy tickets for Neil, Tara and myself. On Sunday, 5th September, we attended our first yarn festival since the lockdowns began. It was exciting and slightly scary all at the same time. We haven’t been to social gatherings in a very long time.

The Spinning Yarns Festival was held at the Theatre at the Mill and the Mossley Mill Complex in Newtownabbey. It was the first time this yarn festival had been held since 2018, and we enjoyed ourselves.

We arrived at 11 am to walk around the marketplace place, which was outside Civic Square. There was an exciting range of traders and craft and gift stalls. The Spinning, Weaving and Dyers Guild were demonstrating spinning and weaving. Some of the local yarn shops were represented as well.

The Northern Ireland Alpaca Group had a stall alongside a small enclosure with two alpacas. Dandy, the cream-coloured alpaca, was three years old, and Mondas, the black alpaca, was ten. Let’s be honest. There aren’t many animals as cute as alpacas…

I didn’t buy much at the Festival this time; I’d decided to purchase tickets for the two talks in the afternoon instead. We don’t usually attend talks or workshops at the festivals we’ve heard in the past, so we were looking forward to these.

This Festival was, I thought, aimed more at crocheters than knitters. There were beautiful displays of crocheted blankets and crocheted mandalas, as well as outstanding displays of yarnbombing with crocheted and knitted bunting and small animals.

We ate a snack for lunch purchased at the small food stand and enjoyed listening to the various musical acts, a pipe band, a singer, and a brass band later in the afternoon when we came out from the second talk.

I treated myself to a few handmade faux fur pompoms, a few large glazed coconut shell buttons, an alpaca pin and a beautiful Zebra Sock Skein of wool hand-dyed by Woolly Adventures.

The first speakers of the afternoon were James McIntosh and Dr Thomas Ernst. Their talk was “How to Deal with Almost Anything”. This was a very personal talk by James McIntosh about the difficulty of growing up in rural Northern Ireland as a gay man and the lack of civil and individual rights he had. His parents sounded like wonderful people, and he had been brought up to be church-going. He was less than welcomed into his church after he came out to his parents and minister. Sadly, his life only improved after he moved to England and farther afield to work as a chef. He was invited back in 2016 for a Food Festival, but his treatment at that led to a debilitating about of depression.

He slowly recovered from the depression with the help of his partner Thomas and by learning to knit. He found that knitting helped him to slowly recover from the depression and start to live his life again. He began writing his patterns when he saw a severe shortage of patterns designed with men in mind. His book is called “Knit & Nibble: Life’s patterns, recipes and games” written by James McIntosh. This led to a hand-dyed range of yarn that he had swatches of. They were beautiful colours and felt sublime. Their talk finished with a Mindfulness Meditation led by Dr Thomas Ernst.

James McIntosh is a natural speaker, and although some of the subject matter was difficult to hear, it was interspersed by some laugh-out-loud anecdotes. This was my niece Tara’s favourite of the two talks.

The second talk of the afternoon was by Eleonora Tully: Coastal Crochet. Her talk was very inspirational about how she perfected her craft of crochet while working as a nurse. Eleonora had completed a correspondence course where she created samples and swatches and learned how to design and write patterns.

Eleonora discussed where she finds the ideas, how she explores the themes for her crochet blankets, and which were her favourite projects to work on. Eleonora is adventurous with texture as well as colour in her crochet blankets. She chooses the yarn colours by winding a length of each colour of yarn onto a wooden peg, then moves the pegs around until she chooses a cohesive colour scheme that works.

She was over in Northern Ireland with her husband and daughter, and they had enjoyed a trip up the North Coast to the Giants Causeway the day before.

It was one of my first outings wearing my recently completed Memories Sweater designed by Sally Melville, and I received a few compliments about how lovely it was.