I’m sorry to announce that we are once again postponing Houston Fiber Fest.
I know many of you are curious what’s going on behind the scenes and I want to be transparent and answer some of your questions. HFF has not disbanded. The organization still exists. We still plan to have in-person festivals in the future.
Over the years, Houston Fiber Fest has had many wonderful volunteers and board members. Most of them gave us a few years of their time and hard work but then eventually had to move on to other things. (Including me – This is being written by Natasha Sills. Some of you may know me from the Knit At Night Guild, from previous festivals, or from Gritty Knits. I had resigned my position on the HFF board a few years ago to concentrate on my yarn business.)
After the 2020 festival was cancelled, several volunteers were unable to stay on. The planning committee dwindled to a single person – then that person had to take time off to deal with personal matters. I agreed to step in and keep things going until she could return. The plan is for us to step back into our previous roles when she gets back and I have a couple of other great people who have agreed to help out when HFF gets going again in the future. We may recruit more help when the time comes, we’ll see.
Regarding 2022 specifically:
On a personal note, I have autoimmune health issues. I’ve had to be much more careful than most people during these last 2 years. There was a considerable amount of risk to planning an event in these conditions. It costs more to rent extra class space to allow for social distancing; we’d need a ton of extra volunteers and maybe even security in order to check vaccine status or enforce a mask policy; there is financial risk in selling class tickets when there is a possibility that a teacher may be too sick to come or unable to get here if flights keep getting cancelled.
Because of all those reasons above, I was waiting for the omicron wave to pass and for the covid numbers in Harris County to drop before I decided whether there would be a festival this year. Now that it’s finally looking like we may have a relatively safe summer ahead of us, I’ve had some things come up in my personal life. Some good and some not so good, but they are both extremely time consuming. I don’t have enough hours in the day to deal with those things, run my business, and also plan a festival by myself in 3 months when it normally takes a team of people a whole year.
Trust me when I say that I am as disappointed as y’all are. I’ve got my fingers crossed that everything will work out for 2023.
If you have any questions, you can email info@houstonfiberfest.com.
p.s. If you are looking for camaraderie within the fiber community in the meantime, please check out the Knit At Night Guild. They have several chapters that meet throughout Houston. https://knitatnight.org/