mud and yarn – aka The Great British Summer (Pt. 1)

While there may not have been much travel knitting going on, there has been quite a bit of knitting travel.  Yes, there’s a significant difference!

A couple of weekends ago saw the return of Fibre East, an annual knitting event held on a farm in Bedfordshire.  For some reason this year was the first time that I’ve been, and I definitely picked a doozy of a year to go.

For those of you who are not local, the current UK “summer” has been something of a washout.  While other big events have been canceled, we knitters are far too hardy for that, so Fibre East went ahead in the rain.

And yes, there was rain!  Being held on a farm, the stalls are all held in various marquees dotted about a field.  I was expecting mud, and there really was quite a lot of it.

We knew it would be muddy when we arrived:

The marquees were apparently on dry ground when they were set up, but a night of rain (after previous weeks of  rain) saw the water table rise, with indoor mud puddles as the result.

I don’t actually own any wellies, but I really wish I did.  I wore my regular boots, which will never fully recover from the ordeal:

and this was inside the tent!

I had an enjoyable afternoon, but the weather precluded the usual ambling about.  I only bought one skein of yarn, undyed Wensleydale from Nude Ewe.  There were two reasons for this: firstly, Wensleydale are very cool sheep, and I love the ethos of Nude Ewe, which sells only yarn from local conservation flocks.  I love knowing that my skein of Wes yarn comes from sheep in a damson orchard about 30 miles from my flat.  Very cool.

During the afternoon we were all extra-careful trying not to slip in the mud.  While we were OK, the car was another matter, and getting stuck in the mud was an unexpected highlight of the day!  Thankfully there were a group of very lovely Police Cadets who were more than willing to help push.  They seemed to be having fun, and I rather enjoyed careering around in a mud slide trying to drive out of the paddock.

I returned home, muddy and happy, as I had plans to go out to a BBQ that evening.

Of course it was raining again, and I slipped and fell.  And broke my right hand.

Does that count as an excuse for not blogging?  Or knitting?