Smitty is Knitting

Category: yarn festivals and events

  • Comedia dell’arte. Comedia dell’yarn-te?

    Comedia dell’arte. Comedia dell’yarn-te?

    Down to clown in Venice

    I began indulging my love for harlequin motifs with my Junco Sweater, but at the end of last month, I got to visit the harlequin homeland: Italy!

    My partner, who is a freelance assistant camera operator, worked on Cover-Up, a documentary about journalist Seymour Hersh and directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. He was invited to attend its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and I got to go with!

    This event was wild. Most of the time, I felt like I had snuck into the back door of a party I hadn’t been invited to. My partner noticed Mads Mikkelsen and was tempted to tell him how much he enjoyed his work in Death Stranding. I accidentally caught Tilda Swinton on camera trying to film an art installation. Willem Dafoe was hanging out in the hotel bar. I drank Negronis while watching people I can only assume were European royalty pass by in evening gowns. Guards walked around wearing military berets and machine guns. I was nervous to make sudden moves.

    The level of wealth was strange to me. It was strange to witness in person. It was especially strange considering that Cover-Up is about a guy who blew the top off multiple war crimes committed by American’s military, namely, the My Lai massacre during the US invasion of Vietnam, and the torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the invasion of Iraq. Hersh is a truly remarkable person who pursues the truth regardless of what people think, and what enemies he makes. He’s been accused of spreading conspiracy theories. He was the subject of angry, worried phone calls between Nixon and Kissinger. He’s on the left in this photo from Reuters.

    Director Laura Poitras, director Mark Obenhaus and journalist and political writer Seymour Hersh pose during a photocall for the movie “Cover Up” out of competition, at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, Venice, Italy, August 29, 2025. REUTERS/Yara Nardi

    The same day Cover-Up premiered, so did After the Hunt, a new Luca Guadagnino movie starring Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri. We passed the red carpet during their entrance but couldn’t see over the wall of photographers. But I do wish I had seen Roberts’s dress with my own eyes:

    Julia Roberts stands amiling on a red carpet. She is wearing a black gown with a low-contrast pattern of diamonds.

    Roberts wore Atelier Versace, a long blue-black gown with a low-contrast pattern of diamonds cascading down the skirt and rising up the shoulders. I thought this was a fashionable nod to the history of comedia dell’arte and Harlequin in its country of origin.

    In commedia dell’arte theater, Harlequin is a stock character, a servant and a trickster with two masters, undermining the authority of both. Which is also why Harley Quinn of DC comics makes such a good anti-hero: sometimes allied with the abusive Joker and sometimes Batman, she flips between her penchant for chaos and her moral agency.

    An illustration of a historical Harlequin actor. He is wearing a unitard of blue and red diamonds on a yellow backdrop, holding a sap, and wearing a black mask over his eyes. He is also wearing a cap that comes to a point in the back.
    Harlequin
    Harley Quinn in Batman: the Animated Series, where she appears in her original character design: she wears a two-pronged jester hat, with one red side and one black side. She is wearing a black mask over her eyes and white face paint. She is wearing a checker-patterned red and black unitard, with black diamonds on her leg, and red and black gloves.
    Harley Quinn

    Harlequin’s costume patterns range from diamonds to patchwork triangles, often colorful and bright, but sometimes black and red. And in Venice, those motifs manifest in Carnevale masks. As a former Catholic, I still feel drawn to the gilded imagery of Catholic religious ritual, and the way it has adapted (or appropriated, in many cases) pagan traditions. It’s catnip to a heathen like me.

    A trio of Carnevale masks. On the left is a white mask with red lips and wavy lines crossing vertically over the eyes, and a black cap shape over the forehead. In the middle, a mask with red lips and a gold mask over the eyes - this figure wears a crescent-shaped headpiece with gold, black, and red diamonds. On the left, a mask that is completely white except for a large golden filigree covering the foreheard, eyes, nose bridge, and cheeks.

    I also got to visit the Peggy Guggenheim collection, where they happened to have a temporary exhibit featuring the work of Helena Maria Vieira da Silva, a Portuguese abstract painter who mapped space using grids of colorful squares. I was really taken by this exhibit and Vieira da Silva’s style, and I think it’s no coincidence that she also worked in tapestry and stained glass – the way those forms naturally lead toward geometry, pixelation, and abstraction probably had an influence on her painting style, the signature use of a grid to create depth and find form in her depictions of movement, cityscapes, and interiors.

    “Ballet, or The Harlequins”
    “Maria Helena II”, a portrait of Vieira da Silva by her husband, painter Árpád Szenes

    Now that I’m back from Venice, I’ve been looking for ways to translate that interest in diamond motifs into knitwear. Through my searches on Ravelry, I came across this project by user SilasM.

    That was it, that was exactly what I wanted to make. The pattern is Harlequin Pullover by Anne Mieke Louwerens, an artist who has worked in textiles and knitwear design, painting, graphic design, and ceramics.

    But I had a small roadblock. I couldn’t find this pattern online anywhere, because it was originally published in the fall/winter 1988 issue of Vogue Knitting.

    A page from the issue of Vogue Knitting where the Harlequin sweater is modeled. Int he main photo, the model is acing away from the camera and a single line of orange diamonds on a black background is shown on the back. There are duplicate stitch bows adorning the tops of the diamonds. In the inset image on the bottom left, the models faces the front, showing the grid of orange and black diamonds and a coral cowl neck. In both photos, the model is standing next to a man in a suit, holding an umbrella. The model is a white woman with brown hair, wearing gold hoop earrings.
    The Harlequin sweater modeled in the Vogue Issue.

    But that’s why God made eBay, right? Luckily I found a hard copy of the issue from a seller on the site, who kept this magazine miraculously preserved for the last 36 years.

    After looking at the pattern directions, I’m already planning a couple mods. To feel truly in the piebald spirit of Harlequin, I want to make all the contrast color diamonds different colors. I’m also planning to add some shoulder shaping, and sleeve decreases to preserve some yardage. I’m split on the cowl neck. I love how it looks, but I’m partial to lower necklines. It’s added by picking up the stitches around the neck after the rest of the sweater pieces are grafted together, so I won’t have to make a decision until much, much later.

    The diamond motif wasn’t the only thing that caught my eye in Venice. Right now I’m also enamored with celestial imagery, which is all over the city (and other parts of Italy, according to my friend who has traveled more extensively there). So I was completely transfixed by the Torre dell’Orologio in San Marco Square, an astronomical clock tower depicting the 12 zodiac signs. It tells the time, and the positions of the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the astrological position of the sun.

    I also found plenty of inspiration in the tile floors at San Giorgio, a church and monastery. The island, San Giorgio Maggiore, is also home to a photography gallery, which had an exhibit on Robert Mapplethorpe while we visited.

    A tiled floor of white, red, and black stone
    A tiled floor of white, red, and black stone
    The facade of San Giorgio Basilica, a white marble building with a stone plaza, tiled in a geometric pattern.
    Fellow weebs will recognize San Giorgio as the location where King Crimson is revealed in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5

    In addition to Venice’s classic sights, we were invited by the Cover-Up production team to the Biennale Architetturra to see the installation “Calculating Empires” by Kate Crawford, a researcher who has been studying AI for the past decade, and artist Vladen Joler. I got to speak a little with Dr. Crawford, who was so extremely cool. The project is available to view online here.

    Also at the Biennale Architetturra was Necto, an installation made from knit fiber and LED lights. Read the full details here.

    A large knitted art piece is suspended on multiple brick columns in a large room, kind of like a giant spiderweb. Multiple lines of LED lights run through it, and dots of light can be seen throughout.
    This is what I was filming when Tilda Swinton’s tour group came through.

    And besides the “official” art, there were tons of murals and graffiti all around Venice. Much of it was anti-Amazon and anti-Bezos, since he had just completely shut down the city for his own wedding just a few months prior. Most of it was in support of a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.

    A mural depicting Black immigrants with the words "No one is illegal"
    A building whose first floor is painted orangey-red and whose top floor has an intricate, diamond brick design. In the lower left corner the words "Dyles hate cops" and "Palestina libera" have been spray-painted in pink.

    And last, the two funniest images I took. On the left, a young man whose whole job is to carry a falcon around to scare pigeons away from this rooftop bar. On the right, a trio of suited, ear wire-wearing tough guy security guards at the Film Festival take a much-needed gelato break.

    A man wearing a white shirt and black waistcoat faces away from the camera with his hands resting on a guard rail. On his left arm is a falcon. We were at a rooftop bar, so some other rooftops are visible in the background. In the left foreground, there are a few people sitting at tables
    Three men in black suits and wearing wires in their ears stand in the street with cups of gelato. The man on the left is taking a bite. The man on the right is facing away from the camera. A third man is hidden behind the man on the right.

    There are worse gigs, probably.

  • Maryland Sheep & Wool: On the other side of the booth

    Going to a big fiber fest as a shopper and as a worker

    This weekend was the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival (MDSW), which is certainly the largest in my particular geographic region. It’s one I’ve been to many years in a row, but as an employee, while I working at the yarn company.

    Here’s how we’d prepare for such a big event: About 2-3 months prior I would take an inventory of all on-hand skeins and earmark a certain amount to pack and take to the booth. Whatever we needed more of, I’d add to the dye queue. The amounts would be decided on the popularity of the colorway or the base, what colors and bases we had of the most eye-catching samples we had, and what the hot designs were. As the date drew closer we’d go into super-production mode, a flurry of winding, dyeing, twisting skeins. About a week out, we’d start gathering display fixtures, register parts, equipment, and fiddly little needs like pens, tape, clothespins, hooks. During this time I’d reconfigure the point-of-sale UI for max checkout efficiency and to add any new merch. Then it was time to load the truck.

    Load-up and load-in days are always the hottest day of the month. At least, they always feel that way. After getting everything in and out of the truck I would be drenched in sweat and my heart rate would be through the roof. I would be cursing myself for not preparing with more cardio. And I always forgot something. I developed a superstition that if I was always going to leave something behind, I should add an extra innocuous, unimportant thing to the packing list cursed to be the Forgotten Item, like a scapegoat carrying my absent-mindedness into the desert.

    I found many parts of this preparation grueling and mentally challenging. A lot of the responsibility came down to me, and not necessarily because I was capable. Years ago I got hired, and I learned the ropes, then other people left the business over the years, and suddenly I was the senior employee and default manager. I thought, and I told the owner, that managing was something I could do – I was wrong. I thought “if not me, who?” which is not a good mindset to predicate your professional decisions on.

    Despite the mistakes and self-doubt I felt before these big yarn events, I was always excited for them. I was really good at talking to customers, getting them what they needed, and being interested in their projects. I love talking about yarn, which made this more bearable than my other retail jobs. Once the show started I was in my element – helpful without slimily upselling, available without being annoyingly clingy.

    And the weekend would end, and we’d do everything in reverse. I’d take stock of everything while unpacking, compare it to our original inventory, produce sales data, and reorganize the workspace for a week or two until our workspace no longer looked like an earthquake had hit. And then it would be time to prepare for the next show.

    This weekend, I attended MSW as a plain ol’ attendee for the first time in nearly decade. I made sure to mosey as much as possible. I wove in and out of the barns to see the sheep and goats, especially the Valais Blacknoses, this year’s featured breed. I blurbed random facts and insider knowledge to my partner, who is not a fiber crafter but is usually up for a chill day trip (and as a coffee aficionado, appreciates a well-turned ceramic mug, and MSW has plenty of talented ceramicist vendors). I stood in line for $10 lemonade because there’s nothing like fresh-squeezed fairground lemonade, and didn’t have to worry about getting back before my lunch break ended.

    MDSW-goers know that weekend is either pouring down rain or hot as hell; this year was the latter. I thought we would be spared with some cloud cover, but by the time we were looking for lunch in the shadeless asphalt strip where the food vendors (and their seething grills) are located, the sun was out in full force. I was only able to keep on my Mizzoni top for about 45 minutes before I had to cry uncle and go down to just a t-shirt.

    A mirror selfie from my waist up to my shoulders. I'm wearing a white t-shirt under a colorful knit vest. The vest has chevron stripes in varying widths in shades of green, gold, purple, and orange. My hand is in the foreground holding my phone.
    My Mizzoni, which was an excellent stashbuster and my gateway design into vests. Sleeves? Who needs ’em!

    Heat aside, it was tremendous to simply wander the grounds with no agenda, other than the list I had made with the few vendors I wanted to make a point to visit.

    Notable stops include Plied Yarns, who always has a stellar booth with fabulous samples. Like Yarn Hero, who I mentioned in my Frederick Fiber Fest post, Plied is a great place to find test colors, discounted mill ends, and tiny amounts of yarn. They even offer bundles of bobbins in little packs like watercolor palettes, a great option for fans of Fair Isle and other precision colorwork styles. I also got buttons for my Bookkeeper Cardigan from Haulin’ Hoof Farm Store and a shawl pin from Tinkers Hollow, whose geometric take on the classic pennanular brooch design is a very cool modernization. I’ve been wanting one of these for a while because as much as I like wearing my shawls, I hate when they slip off my neck.

    Last, I always like to visit new vendors at shows to support the investment they’ve made and hopefully prove to festival organizers that they should return. Among these was Heron’s Llŷn Farm, who offers naturally dyed, handspun yarn. The skeins are labeled both with the natural dyed used for the color and the names of the sheep whose wool was used. The owner was in the booth with a livestream of her barn to make sure none of her flock were lambing without her. I joked it was to make sure they weren’t throwing wild parties while she was out of town. I picked up two squishy skeins of handspun worsted, dyed deep purple with madder root and iron.

    Top of the photo shows two white post cards with circular buttons fastened to them - one set is turquoise with a light brown floral design, and the other set is light brown wood. In the bottom left corner is a hank of dark purple yarn with a brown paper label; on the right is a piece of brown cardstock with a dark brown wooden hexagon fixed to it, with a matching pin.
    The spoils. I got a lot of yarn last weekend at Frederick Fiber Fest so this was not a yarn-heavy shopping day. Extra shout out to the folks at Tinkers Hollow – as I was checking out, the pin of my brooch slipped out of the packaging and the sharp-eyed owner alerted me before I walked off with half the accessory missing!

    Never been to a fiber festival and thinking of going? I highly encourage it! Maryland Sheep & Wool is one of the largest in the US, but there are dozens of similar events happening around the country for most of the year, typically in the summer and early autumn. This blog post lists many in the US and this page lists global and virtual events (shout out to this reddit thread for the links). My tips: Go early to beat traffic, stay hydrated, check food vendors to make sure there are options for your diet, and don’t be a Karen*. Everyone is working too hard for that.

    Text reads “People who work in customer service should be allowed to fight one customer per day” on a pink and orange background

    *in this house Karen is a gender-neutral term and also applies to the non-knitters, mostly men, who mope around and make jabs about how much money their spouses, typically their wives, are spending on yarn. No one thinks this is funny, the sales associate is not laughing with you, what goddamn century is it.

  • Frederick Fiber Festival: A day of sidequests

    New-to-me dyers, a hyper-specific color mission, and the importance of showing up in the rain

    I had been wanting to go to the Frederick Fiber Festival for years and never had a chance because until recently, I had always been working on Saturdays. Tough, especially because FFF happens twice a year – twice as many chances for me to get my ass there!

    During my tenure at the yarn company, we typically went to the big events, like Rhinebeck, Stitches (before it imploded), and VKL (before the thought of unloading a truck in the middle of Times Square became enough to give one hives). I developed a preference for the farm-ier, more outdoorsy events, where in addition to indie dyers and designer appearances, there were also farmers auctioning sheep and herding dog demonstrations. FFF isn’t quite large enough for the complete county fair vibe (I’ll get my fill of that when I make another small roadtrip to Maryland Sheep & Wool next weekend), but it introduced me to a number of vendors I hadn’t had the pleasure of shopping with before.

    Before I went absolutely apeshit at every shiny new booth, I had to remind myself that I had a mission. I’ve been wanting to make an Artus Shawl ever since it came out, and I have a very specific color scheme in mind that revolves around luna moth green. My partner, who loves solving problems, was with me, so I asked him to keep an eye out for a similar shade. I was fully expecting not to find it that day, but I happened to find it at Cape May Fibers. I held up a skein of mohair and said “Look for this, but not fuzzy”; I put the skein back down but my partner had the good sense to take a picture of the label to get the colorway, and wouldn’t you know it, the color was called “Luna Moth”. So while I couldn’t get the weight I needed at the festival, I placed an order in sport weight that night.

    I also made a stop at Yarn Hero’s booth, another source for color-shifting fractal-spun yarn. What I really appreciated here was that in addition to their beautiful standard skeins, Yarn Hero had flawed skeins, mill ends, and test runs for sale, sold by the gram. Not only is it a more affordable option for festival-goers, but I find this also speaks to the sustainability of the company. It’s good to see businesses not hiding away skeins that are short or have slubs just because they can’t sell them full-price. And it’s a rare opportunity for people like me who aren’t picky about a little mill knot here and there, or for folks who don’t want to buy more yarn than they actually need for a project.

    This is another perk of going to festivals like these: you get to see products that often don’t make it to the business’ websites. Plus you get to actually meet the people who run the companies, see the colorways in person, and feel the yarns. This is especially important for companies that don’t have a retail space, and rely on trade shows and trunk shows to directly sell. These events are usually the biggest money-makers, and will often keep an indie dyer in business for months.

    Which is why it’s so crucial, if you’re able, to brave the rain if the forecast calls for it. It never quite stormed on Saturday, but we had a clap of thunder and the rain was off and on, like someone was turned on the spigot every ten minutes or so while the clouds blew through. Almost all of FFF’s booths, minus a few trucks and food vendors, were indoors and sheltered, but there was still a strong gust that blew through one of the buildings and threatened some stands. In those moments, everyone comes together to brace against the poles and pick up flying shawl samples.

    At many festivals, however, booth spaces are in outdoor tents more exposed to the elements and mud, and some unluckily-placed vendor gets the short end of the stick when the weather turns sour. Rain or shine, these events are planned well in advance and can’t be canceled.

    Eventually the sun came out, and we called it a day at the Frederick Fairgrounds with my new skeins. The yarn I got from Polymorph Dye Works is especially fun, black with neon neps – it reminds me (in the best way) of 90s arcade carpet.

    My little hoard from FFF, from (left to right) Robin’s Promise Yarn Co., Polymorph Dye Works, 29 Bridges Studio, and Yarn Hero
    The same image just styled like a Dark Souls
    achievement

    But Frederick is a beautiful little city, so our day didn’t end just yet. My partner is a massive coffee-lover, and we made a stop at Gravel & Grind, a cafe and bike repair shop that sells great drinks and independently roasted beans. It was also Indie Bookstore Day, so while we drank our coffees we looked up the nearest bookshop to support. That turned out to be Curious Iguana on Market Street, downtown Frederick’s main drag of boutique storefronts and restaurants. I picked up volumes 23 and 25 of Jujutsu Kaisen, which were missing from my collection, as well as Sisters of the Lost Nation by Nick Medina; I had read Indian Burial Ground and I’m looking forward to reading his first novel.

    My haul of books from Curious Iguana
    The same image but styled like an Elden Ring achievement

    Our last stop of the day was Gwenie’s, a Filipino bakery with a couple locations in the MD/DC metro area. We were introduced to Gwenie’s by a friend of ours, and they requested a slice of ube cheesecake if we were going to be in the area. We got there within an hour of their closing time, when everything is 30% off, so we left with an armful of of mamons and sylvanas.

    An ube mamon and ube custard cake, you guessed it, styled like a Dark Souls achievement.

    Driving home from a lovely day out, I think the highlight of my Frederick visit was running into a regular customer from my former job and exchanging excited greetings. At least now they know I didn’t just fall off the face of the planet when I quit. Closure!

    *I’ve never played a Souls game, Sekiro, Bloodbourne, Elden Ring, or even a Souls-like. I just think the title cards are funny.