We are Jennie Powell and Zoe Carter, and we are the pair of best friends behind the Knit-Tea Retreat. You might have seen us online as Owl About Yarn and Pins and Needles UK. We’ve been good friends for several years now and love doing anything yarny together. We’ve had a lot of fun and met so many lovely people whilst travelling around the country to various wool festivals.
A couple of years ago we started bandying about the idea of organising a knitting event. I was lucky enough to go to a couple of knitting retreats but Zoe hadn’t managed to and so we decided that the best thing to do was to arrange our own! We spent a long time talking about the sort of thing we’d like to arrange, and then even more time trying to find our venue. We hit gold though when we found Insole Court. It has everything we would need to hold a workshop based retreat, and all in a peaceful location but still conveniently close to Cardiff City Centre.
Planning went well for our inaugural retreat; we got our first choice of tutors for our workshops, the venue was excited to host us and the knitting public seemed interested. And they were! We sold out our first retreat within 21 hours, and moved onto creating a waiting list!
Shortly after that, Zoe expressed an interest in a second venue for a knit and natter style retreat, and thus our Stratford-Upon-Avon retreat was born. We had a very fun day looking at all of the beautiful locations we might consider in the town and then once again were lucky enough to secure our first choice! The beautiful Alveston Manor Hotel is perfect; with the original Tudor heart of the building and then the sympathetic add-ons it reflects the history of Stratford whilst lending us that touch of elegance and luxury we were hoping for!
There was a second Cardiff retreat in Autumn 2019, and we are currently planning the events in 2020, but who knows where we will go after that! Perhaps we will travel further afield, perhaps one day even abroad! Maybe hosting our own yarn festival is in our future, or maybe other yarny adventures we haven’t even imagined yet.
The Knit-Tea Retreat 