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 Summerhall’s rigorous experience in hosting large scale events and are delighted that they are managing everything at the venue from front of house to ticketing and security.

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.)

Using a crowdfunding strategy to launch The Woolly Good Gathering enables us to plan an exciting event with all the right attention to detail for venue, accessibility, space, quality of light and generosity we dreamed of in our many chats over tea and cake in the last year; securing something like this takes funding we do not have personally or instantly. In addition, the community-building ethos of what we want to do matches with the idea of a Kickstarter – if the local yarn community wants to invest in it, the festival will happen! As we explain in the Kickstarter, there are always risks, but if the goal is not reached, no backer is charged, and we will rethink a smaller gathering. However, we’ve got faith – especially given the social media buzz already – that we’ll be meeting not only our target but even our stretch goals!

Yes – the Kickstarter ensures the event can go ahead by securing all the funding needed for the venue, paying all speakers and workshop providers and keeps the table-fee for vendors as low as possible. After this, we will open for general ticket sales through Summerhall for Friday 26th April Marketplace, Friday 26th April Community Craft Night and Saturday 27th April Marketplace as well as a weekend bundle.

Of course – all details will be available about this when we launch for general sale through Summerhall after the Kickstarter ends.

The nature of some of the Kickstarter merchandise is its exclusivity and only available through the early investment of the crowdfunding, e.g. the Kickstarter special yarns. Some rewards are available early to Kickstarter backers, e.g. the Iolair and Knitrospective Festival Shawl patterns. Other elements will be available at the festival for everyone as far as stocks last, e.g. tote bags, pins, Jenerates cork tags and the festival exclusive skeins from Iolair Yarn and Zakami Yarns.

All tickets for our workshop and talks programme will be available when we launch for general sale through Summerhall. Some of these will have a fee attached and others will be free but ticketed.

The funds raised by general ticket sales and merchandising after the Kickstarter will be used to pay for venue hire, speaker and workshop provider fees, financial grants, and purchase of new stock for The Woolly Good Gathering 2025 and other TWGG mini events. If there are any funds left in the pot, they will go towards paying the Woolly Good partners back for some of the time they have contributed to making TWGG happen. (Nobody is going to be a millionaire!).

There is no perfect date for the Gathering and we have had to balance several different factors: (a) We needed to find an available Friday and Saturday with our chosen venue, Summerhall; (b) we needed to find a date with enough space between existing Scottish yarn events; (c) hosting an event in the summer is difficult in Edinburgh because of other festivals and the knock-on impacts in terms of availability and expense of venues and accommodation; (d) weather and travel – much earlier in the spring means it can be challenging for people coming from the North.

Unfortunately, this has meant that TWGG is on the same weekend as Wonderwool in Wales. We understand that some might be disappointed about this, but we hope that it at least gives those not going to Wales an alternative opportunity to attend a yarn event.

Our yarn festival neighbours have all been invited to The Gathering and most are coming along to celebrate with us and promote their own events: we are stronger together, supporting one another in collaboration!

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 travel, accommodation and 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.

As this is The Woolly Good Gathering’s very first event, we have simplified the vendor process by inviting a selection of vendors from Edinburgh and beyond the city, who provide a range of indie-dyed yarns, farm-focused yarns, fibre and accessories. We have also been mindful to invite a diverse and inclusive breadth of businesses. All-in-all, we have had to make some difficult decisions to provide a balance in the different types of businesses represented in the marketplace.

If TWGG is successful, in future, we will ask vendors to apply and our selection process will follow a clear set of criteria.

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 Summerhall directly if that is more appropriate.