Who we are

Wool Gatherings was started by Carole Greaves, who has been involved in the knitting and crochet community for most of her life. She started by getting told off for knitting during lessons at school, and moved onto testing out patterns for the likes of Sirdar.

Carole moved into hand dyeing her own yarn around twenty years ago. She worked in various industrial units around her hometown of Glossop in Derbyshire. Eventually she started hosting weekly knit and natters for other knitting enthusiasts, and running workshops to teach people knitting, crochet and felting techniques. She also started creating her own patterns.

While she was dyeing her own yarns she attended craft fairs and yarn shows around the country to sell them. This inspired her to run her first event - which was Bakewell Wool Gathering, back in October 2013.

Meanwhile, Carole didn't have much time for hand dyeing anymore, but she did outgrow the studio she was using. She moved for the first time into her own local yarn shop, which was called Skeins. Skeins was open for five years but at the end of this period Carole decided she preferred to focus her time on running events. She'd already added Buxton Wool Gathering to the line up by this point.

Global events put a pause on live shows for a couple of years, but in that time the landscape of yarn festivals in the UK had changed again. That meant Carole decided the time was right to add a third show - which brings us up to the present!