Welcome to the 1st ever Virtual Homespun Yarn Party!

If this is your first Homespun Yarn Party experience, welcome!  We are a juried show of vendors local to the DC/Baltimore metro area and surrounding states.  All of our vendors make their own products in some way, whether that means raising the animals, dyeing the fiber, spinning the yarn, or crafting goods by hand in small batches. We have several new vendors this year and are glad to welcome them into the HYP family.  We want to help all of these talented independent artists thrive, especially in these trying times.

If you're a Homespun Yarn Party veteran, welcome back!  This isn’t how any of us expected to spend today, and we’re sad we’re not getting to meet you all in person. But safety first, so here we are. This season is hitting the fiber small business community hard and we so appreciate everyone showing up to show some love and spend some money with the Homespun Yarn Party vendors (and sponsors too). We put this virtual event together in one week, so please be patient with us as we try this new experiment!

The Homespun Yarn Party Facebook group is our home base for the next five hours and nearly all of our vendors are participating in the group today. We will be sharing their “virtual booths” with you throughout the day (in HYP table location order), but that will take some time so please consult the Preview 2020 Virtual Homespun Yarn Party post we put up this morning – that has the master list of all our vendors:

• websites
• online shopping options
• in-depth profiles
• virtual booths (intro videos, photo albums, etc. - be sure to watch for cute baby animals!)
• where they’re hanging out today in addition to Facebook
• most importantly, the sweet discounts and special offers they have to entice you to do some stash augmentation today 

All of the discount codes are posted and are good until 5:00 today (some vendors have extended their codes – check their sites for details).

We know not everyone is on Facebook, so we’ll be sharing posts on Instagram, Twitter, and Ravelry, and vendors will be active there as well. Our vendors have exciting things planned for today – some have exclusive sets available just for today or are doing made-to-order dyeing, some are livestreaming from their Facebook or YouTube channels, some even set their booths up in their own studios to really capture the mood! Explore and ask questions – everyone is ready to help you make the best selections.

Claire and Melissa are helping host our 500 Hat Project Knit and Crochet-Along.  You’ll have to wait for the next in-person event for our great classes, but  Kira has put together a short demonstration and handout on Mosaic Knitting. If you’re disappointed to miss the Longest Thread Contest, we recommend you join Lauren’s virtual spin-in right after the yarn party ends (5 – 8 pm, via zoom). 

We posted the door prize gallery yesterday, but as a reminder of how that will work: you get one entry into the prize drawing for each purchase you make from a vendor during the HYP hours of noon - 5:00. You get one entry per person for sharing your progress photos on the 500 Hat Project Knit and Crochet-Along post. Those prizes will be drawn at end of the day and we’ll reach out to winners later this week for shipping info. We’ll also be awarding prizes at 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, and 4:00 based on interactions with our HYP social media posts. These are at the discretion of the committee so be awesome to each other and make us smile or laugh!

Thank yous…

• You! Everyone who is here to shop and hang out; everyone who shared or retweeted or regrammed our announcements or posted on their blogs or in their Ravelry groups; everyone who told a friend; everyone who is working on a hat for the 500 Hats Project
• Our organizing committee (Jess, Lindsay, Corrine, Paula)
• Volunteers (Kira, Claire, Melissa, and everyone who was ready to help out when we thought we could still be physically together)
• Vendor Jury (who will remain anonymous)
• Our vendors who offered up beautiful door prizes and great discounts

Our sponsors:

• Cloverhill Yarn Shop (Catonsville, MD)
• Looped Yarn Works (Washington, DC)
• Lovelyarns (Hampden/Baltimore, MD)
• Red Fox Yarns (Fairfax, VA)
• Charm City Yarn Crawl (postponed for now)
• Fibre Space (Alexandria, VA)
• Leona’s Gallery (Savage, MD)
• Corrine Walcher Designs (Towson, MD)
• Unicorn Clean (Unicorn Fibre Wash, Rinse, Power Scour)

If your LYS is on our sponsor list, please pass on our thanks. If they’re not, please encourage them to consider sponsorship next year (or when we reschedule later this year). 

Again, thank you all for coming, and we hope you have a great time enhancing your stashes!