In March we were on an adventure - we visited the Cologne h+h Fair over the weekend, which is a huge textile fair with focus on yarns.

We arrived on Thursday evening to Düsseldorf and stayed at the Sheraton Airport hotel which was very convenient. On Friday morning we took the train to Köln and stayed at a nice hotel close to the train station. I was double booked from my normal work and had an take-home exam in Machine learning on friday, so unfortunately I couldn't visit the fair that day. Eva went and came back to the hotel in the evening with a lot of insights and had already made contact with some interesting suppliers. Our goal with the trip was to find suppliers who made the perfect embroidery yarn, find suppliers for knitting yarn, to learn a lot and to have fun. Our needs for the embroidery yarn is for it to be the perfect thickness, durable, great shine and saturated colors, and most importantly - ethics - we want a good yarn production in terms of workers health, environment and the animals. There is a big gap in the embroidery yarn market in these aspects. On saturday, we went together to the fair. The fair was very nice, with plenty of different suppliers. The supply of embroidery yarns was not huge, at least not for wool. It was definitely an improvement from all textile fairs I have been to before. However, the ones I have visited before I was a consumer and not a business. We were a little unused to taking contact with the suppliers in the beginning, but after a while we were more confident and had several very interesting discussions with different people. Everyone was very nice and excited to talk about yarn. We got a lot of different test yarns and went home to test it on our canvas. On sunday we went back to the fair before our journey home for a continued discussion with our favourite suppliers.

So, did we find what we looked for? Well, YES we did! Or at least we hope so, we found a supplier with a lot of different types of undyed yarn that seems very promising for our embroidery-needs. Their booth was beautiful, since they had coloured all their different qualities with the same color so we could see how the different qualities catched the color. Their yarn is currently being test-dyed by our favourite dyer Honse Design to see how it behaves when dyed. We also found a fantastic supplier for knitting yarn and got plenty of test samples to test the quality. In Köln, the Covid-restrictions still made us wear face masks and show our vaccin-passes everywhere, the restrictions where removed the week after. Next to the fair, we ate the best octopus ever at a resturant called the ASH.

So we left Köln with plenty of yarn, inspiration and knowledge. We know better what our requirements is called in technical terms. Except from the huge pile of knitting skeins in the photo above, we also got plenty of tests for our embroidery yarns. And - a little bit of magic when we were at the restaurant, eating our octopus and cheering in champagne to celebrate a successful trip, a man saw our skeins and asked if he could tell us about his yarn farm. He was one of the suppliers from the fair. Well, yes we said and he pitched his yarn production and gave us another test sample. Felt like a dream to be sitting in a nice restaurant and another yarn lover walking by to discuss business.

All in all, a very intensive weekend with a lot of insights, good discussions, learnings, ideas and yarn!