TL:DR Go find a nice Advent Occupation.

I learned to spin originally by watching Youtube videos on how to do it. Knitting the resultant yarn or weaving with it or giving it away for someone else to knit is also a joy. Fundamentally, I like the craft world and have tried a lot of different kinds of handwork over the years. Youtube as others have noted, has opened up opportunities for learning many more crafts; it’s basically apprentice lessons for all sorts of things I never heard of, such as making Dorset buttons or grinding twenty-sided dice. There are lessons on sword forging, tree cutting, torchon lace-making, restoring equipment, running a drill rig. You get the idea. 

So when I saw a post on Youtube about events at a wool festival, I thought it might be entertaining.

There’s a huge festival in New York State on the third week of October called the New York Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, New York. 

Rhinebeck is a town like Peterborough, New Hampshire. It has 2,500 full-time residents. About 30,000 people show up for the Sheep Festival, and have for close to forty years.  There’s a whole Rhinebeck thing where people get together online or in person and make sweaters they will wear to this event. If you went in a store made sweater you would be eyed sideways, at a minimum. You would NOT be in uniform. I’ve seen some of those sweaters online and they are full of color work and not easy knitting. But beautiful…

Three years ago two women took advantage of Rhinebeck to run a side show for people who came early for the weekend, calling it Wool and Folk. They billed it as being more intimate, more inclusive and more accessible, with food and music. And that seems to be what it was the first two years, although people wanted it to be more of all those things. 

This year, the side show turned really sour when one of the women was no longer working on the program, and the other woman ended up totally out of her depth.  

She had to change the venue at the last minute, because permits hadn’t been obtained in time. That’s such a passive way to say something. SHE hadn’t obtained the permits she needed.

Though this event expected about 2,000 people (10% of the actual Rhinebeck), the new venue was only able to hold about 400 people inside, without vendor tables, and rain was forecast. Rain did indeed arrive and, lo and behold, the venue was totally inadequate for 2,000 people, and the vendor spaces. Parking was in short supply, and far away. Food was inadequate. Vendor space was inadequate. Utterly and completely inadequate. Mud is terrible for people who have mobility problems, or use walkers and such, so accessibility was inadequate. If the fire department had been notified, they would have shut the whole operation down, it was so over crowded.

What struck me over and over, as I watched and read about this event, was how incapable people were of getting out when the red flags went up. Vendor booths were incredibly expensive in the first place. The venue was changed at the last minute, but contracts were not rewritten. Communication was incredibly poor all along. One look at the parking arrangements should have sent shivers down vendor backs. (Using the local Walmart parking lot and the church across the street after failing to get permits elsewhere?) Unloading and setting up vendor stands meant standing for three hours in the rain waiting for the one person who was doing the set-up to give direction. Then carrying boxes of stuff from fifteen minutes away. 

All these small businesses went along with this ugly situation and kept trying to make it work, even as their yarn and other products ended up in the literal mud. 

I was going to add a url for a video about the situation, but I could not find one I was willing to link to. Very cringey. 

Crudely speaking, knitting as a craft has very rich entitled people buying skeins of yarn that cost fifty bucks a pop. It also has people who are disabled, and therefore constrained to activities that they can do sitting, like knitting. And it has a lot of tiny businesses run by women who are making money off of the other entitled rich women. All of these people talk incessantly about privilege and taking care of each other and figuring out … stuff … Listening to them discuss this situation was like a sick fascination. Like watching a train-wreck. Like a huge dose of gossip. It might have been quite unhealthy, actually.

I’m not rethinking my own spinning. I am realizing that there’s a lot of drama in the world that I’d just as soon avoid. Knitting drama. Please!