Nope – we are not trying to fill the enormous shoes of Edinburgh Yarn Festival as an international event with a huge reputation. The Woolly Good Gathering is a small event focusing on collaboration, friendship and community-building for yarn and fibre enthusiasts around Edinburgh and beyond.

We are an experienced group of project management, accountancy and research professionals sharing the workload in a legal partnership registered at Companies House (Woolly Good LLP). Between us, we organise large events, work to tight deadlines, manage large datasets and budgets, and run our own yarn, publishing and design businesses. We have also received mentoring and excellent advice from people, who have run very large yarn festivals in the past.

We also benefit from Edinburgh Academys rigorous experience in hosting large scale events.

TicketTailor is operating our ticket sales - they are an established and reputable company with good ethics.

This is always a challenging one, naturally… we receive far more applications than we have places for vendors.

We make choices based on keeping a balanced and interesting festival for ticket holders, with opportunities for vendors too. We keep a ration of stands from Scotland and are mindful of ‘yarn miles’, so we only have a few vendors who come from much further away - whether is southern England or in the EU.

To keep things fresh for ticket holders and ensure people don’t see exactly the same yarn at every show they go to, we generally have a rule that vendors don’t attend more than 2 years on the trot (but may well come back after a years break!). The exception to that may be in our support for vendors from minority ethnic groups.

Choices are never made lightly, take long and challenging discussions, and are communicated with care back to vendors.

In the past, we have returned tickets up to the last days before the festival, and even at shorter notice in exceptional circumstances. Sometimes this has meant we are out of pocket in paying workshop tutors their proper fees.

From 2026, we will honour returned tickets

• for workshops and talks up to April 3rd 2026

• for marketplace tickets up to April 10th 2026

• any requests outwith these dates will be at our discretion only and for significantly extenuating circumstances.

Of course! Our core values and Code of Conduct has its own tab on the website here and we’d encourage you to look at it in full, but here is the introduction:

“The entire reason for building the Woolly Good partnership was to come together to celebrate community and belonging, but we acknowledge that festival spaces can feel challenging for many reasons. We are committed to making The Woolly Good Gathering a welcoming and safe space for everyone by being transparent about how we view the importance of diversity and equality and what we are doing to build inclusivity and equity.

In any engagement with Woolly Good and at The Woolly Good Gathering, we want everyone to feel safe and respected. We have a zero-tolerance approach to any kind of discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity – including but not limited to skin colour, country of origin, refugee status or religion; discrimination on the basis of sexuality or gender identity; discrimination on the basis of disability; discrimination on the basis of neurodiversity.

We happen to be a group consisting of Scots by choice, proud rainbow allies, people of colour and neurodiverse parents but these experiences are not important: what matters most is that we care for everyone in our community.“

(Please see also the FAQ about financial grants to BIPOC vendors and speakers below.)

It is unfair to ask anyone to work for free. We are following best practice guidelines by paying all speaker and workshop providers the fees accorded to the most experienced artists as recommended by The Scottish Artists Union.

Musicians performing for our relaxing community craft night and over our chilled jazzy afternoons will be paid according to the Musicians Union recommended rates of pay.

As we identify in our values statement, prejudice and discrimination exist everywhere – including in the yarn community. We know, through the work of BIPOC in Fiber (where Alyson Chu is a team member), that work needs to continue in amplifying the work of BIPOC makers and improving representation of BIPOC vendors, speakers and workshop providers at yarn events through intentional representation. This is particularly challenging in Scotland, which is less ethnically diverse than other areas of the UK, so it is right that we work harder to create equity and inclusivity.

We are implementing some of the recommendations of the Making Changes in Craft report from the Craft Expertise Project by Dr Karen Patel by eliminating financial barriers in inviting vendors to our event as part of redressing the balance of historic exclusion and inequalities. This includes vendor stall grants.

The report and its wider project is worth reading more fully, as it provides an insight into how we can all take steps to address racism and inequalities in the craft sector in the UK.

Vendor wellbeing is really important to us – we know being at a yarn festival is very demanding and vendors are humans with access and care needs too. We already have volunteers ready to help vendors with unloading and setting up, breaks, coffee, food and water delivery etc.! Every vendor team will have plenty of free water, hot drinks, biscuits, cakes and lunches provided. There is also a quiet wellbeing and recharge room set aside for vendors.

Please see our dedicated Venue page on the top menu – we know this is about way more than ‘wheels’. If you still have questions after looking at this, please do message us using the contact form or get in touch with Edinburgh Academy Events directly if that is more appropriate.