Knitting Festival Expectations: Barcelona 2022

This November I will be attending Barcelona knitting festival. It is a big deal for me, as it is my first time attending a knitting festival. I will finally have the chance to see and talk to many, familiar (online) faces and get a better sense of what the knitting community is like. The festival's lineup this year is especially attractive and I confess I still hold a secret hope of somehow scoring a Tapas and Yarn ticket, an evening event which is currently sold out.

One of the big perks of attending the festival will certainly be the chance to see and feel different types of wool. This is something I am really looking forward to, since I have been doing most of my wool shopping on the web, in part because online shopping seems to be a natural extension of spending time online, but also simply for lack of a better option (see my earlier posts).

Nevertheless when I do so, I still wonder most of the time about the color nuance I will ultimately receive. Even if the possibilities of seeing what you are actually going to get have greatly expanded, as technology advances and color displays become more and more accurate, I am still not 100% confident I know what the actual color will look like when I'll receive the parcel.

I imagine that the more experienced one is knitwise, the less one worries about color issues. I presume that after assembling many knitted garments (several sweaters, many accessories), perhaps it becomes easier to just let a newly-acquired yarn dictate what it wants to be. As appealing as this approach may be, it is one involving a levity of spirit that I don't always possess. Though I am deeply attracted by this knitterly attitude, at this stage, I still mostly operate in a pragmatic manner: first I decide want I want to make, then I usually order the yarn for the project.

Given my current level of expertise, I also still depend on a pattern's instructions and I am extremely cautious about altering it. Truth be told, I am slowly becoming more proficient in understanding the reasons why certain structural elements are included (read: short rows, mirrored increases etc.), but I am still on a learning path. I am fine with that. Nevertheless I usually want to "personalize" the pattern in some way, and that usually means choosing a different yarn or at least a different color palette. (Side note: as I dive deeper into this wool-universe, I become more and more interested in using lesser known yarns for new projects as a way to investigate and get to know them better, but I find it a bit difficult to select proper yarn substitutions online).

In conclusion, when choosing the yarn for a project I am faced with these options: A) buy the yarn from someone who sells a kit for the chosen pattern in a different set of colors, B) exchange a series of emails with said vendor asking for recommendations, or C) peruse other people's projects on Ravelry and try to get a sense of colors and/or types of yarn substitutions and D) I could go out on a limb and try something entirely new, (that is not the originally recommended yarn) but I probably won't. Either way, there is one big caveat: no way of knowing what effect the chosen colors will have against my skin tone (assuming that I am knitting a sweater for myself), let alone having a sense of how the yarn feels (it gets even more complicated if I already have some yarn that I want to use as an accent color, and I am looking for other yarn to combine it with, as this is very difficult to accomplish online in a timely fashion). The more laborious the process, the less enjoyable it becomes.

So.... did I mention I am looking forward to meeting a bounty of new-to-me fibers in Barcelona?

Signing off- until then