UnRavel(ry)ing at Rhinebeck OR The Grand Duchess' Grand Faire

Last week, I promised an update with pictures and witticisms about the Rhinebeck, NY Duchess County Sheep and Wool Festival.

Well, I'm coming through with the goods.

DAY 1:

The Duchess County Sheep and Wool Festival (known by most simply as "Rhinebeck") takes place every fall in the town (sorry, "Village") of Rhinebeck, NY, located in South-eastern New York.

The state, not the city.
There IS a whole state, you know.

We'd had a lovely, but long drive out on Friday to get into New York (again, the state). So we'd stopped, and drove the last couple hours the first morning of the show, arriving a few hours after gates opened.

Which is good because people starting lining up an hour early. Fortunately the lines were gone by the time we got there, but that just shows you how many people were there and how much they really wanted to experience the whole show.

Speaking of which, let me show you what the show consisted of:

Le Map Offiçialle!
(Not even close to actual French.)

"Oh," I hear you softly, disappointedly exclaim, "That doesn't look so big."

And you're right! That map doesn't look so big out of context. But start to consider how many little arrows there are.

Also, see those little A, B, C, D buildings?

Each one of those was one of these:

This is A.
About 200 hundred feet of wooly vendors.

The shear (Hah! Get it?) number of vendors and amount of wool blew my mind. Just walking through one building with 4 rows of about 20 vendors each was more yarn, spinning and wool suppliers than I'd ever seen in my life.

And there were four of these buildings. Do the math, yo. It says there's a whole lotta vendors. Also, it evidently says (A whole lotta) ≈ 320.

Some with much more dramatic ceilings,
but just as many vendors!

And that was just those four buildings. Outside there was a whole bunch of food vendors, including local apple merchants and everything that can possibly be wonderfully autumnal (love that word).

Git yer wooly things and apples here!

And while there were a lot of people there, it wasn't so crowded you couldn't enjoy the space of being in rural New York on a gorgeous fall day.

Picturesque!
Also: More apples for sale.

But aside from the number of yarny, wooly vendors, there was another great reason to go: Yarny, wooly people.

My wife got me knitting recently, and while it's really quite enjoyable, it is not the most popular thing to do. Tell random people you knit, and they often tackily point out that it's, well, strange. (Because you don't need manners for people who knit!)

...Though it is nice when you can immediately point to the hat on your head and go, "Yeah, but I made this."

Anyway, a surprisingly large (surprisingly for non-knitters) online society has sprung up on a site called Ravelry, where over two million (yes, that's 2,000,000) people gather to do all sorts of things knitting, crocheting, and generally wool/yarn related.

Rhinebeck is a wonderful retreat and opportunity for these incredibly wonderful (and yes, slightly strange) people who knit to get together.

The Green before...

A meet up was scheduled at the above green on the first day. I thought there'd be a good amount of people, but was not expecting this:

...And after.
Release the Ravelrers!

There were hundreds of people there, most wearing buttons with their online name on them so you knew who everyone was. (I still have mine!)

It was awesome. And for the rest of the weekend, we would see people wearing buttons, or people would stop to read our buttons to see if they knew us...

...But even those hundreds of people were only 10-25% of the people there.

There were so many people they filled several fields outside.
And these cars are of the visitors still inside AFTER the fair had "closed!"

All right, all right, you probably get it by now: Big wool fest had a lot more people and was a lot bigger  than you thought it was going to be. Which made it awesome.

But to sum up, here was my one of my favorite pictures of the day, that I thought really embodied Rhinebeck:

A fashionable woman, eating a candy apple...
...and carrying a whole sheep fleece. That's right: Whole.

And just because they were there, and really cool...

...Random animals.

"Whhaaaattt....???"

"Oh sooolo miiiooo......."

The tortoise wins again because the hare is sleeping.
...or licking its crotch. Not sure which.

Hope you enjoyed this! I'll be back next week with Part 2: The Sheepening.