Adventures at the Ren Fest 2019: First Weekend

The time has come for the return of Adventures at the Ren Fest! By now, surely you know I work out at Th’red Head Design‘s booth, Wolf ‘n’ Sheeps’ Clothing, at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival. My duties mostly involve selling fibery goodness and performing spinning demos for the masses. I do get to meet a lot of interesting people, but usually it’s the same kind of interesting: people telling me about my “sewing machine,” parents who need to repeat what I say to their children in a sing-song voice so I can be understood, and jokes about Rumpelstiltskin or Sleeping Beauty.

But every weekend, without fail, I find characters worth telling you about. Last weekend I saw:

• A woman grab our demo spindle. She tried to spin it, without holding the yarn out of her way, on a cloth covered table, so naturally it didn’t spin. She commented on the poor quality when she saw me eyeing her.
• Another woman wandered into the booth, explaining to us that she was a “floating ember of beauty meandering around the festival.” She stayed a while.
• During my first demo, a woman in full garb smoking a vape walked right in front of me, and without stopping told me I “wasn’t hard enough for this faire.”
• A family of four were walking in front of me, the children were a baby and a toddler. The toddler ran to his mom and punched her in the abdomen, to which she responded “Ow, my pussy.”
• A man and a woman, who I presume were romantically involved, came in to look at yarns. It obviously wasn’t his thing, but he told her she needed more “hand-dyed yarns.” Seems like a keeper to me.
• During my second demo, a man asked me how long I have been spinning. I told him almost a decade, and he walked away cackling.
• Another patron came in to look at yarn, seemingly frustrated. She wanted to know all of the yarn yardages in feet.

These by themselves would’ve been plenty for one weekend, but something else odd happened. It’s a hilarious mystery. That’s right, Watson, the game is afoot.

One of my other duties every season is to replace or add signs around the festival park, ’cause we can be tricky to find. In the past, Marci made little felt signs that did the trick. This year, she laser-cut sturdier wooden signs that more easily catch the eye. So not only was I putting up signs this year, but I was taking down the felt ones too. This is the sign closest to our booth, and I discovered this felt sign stapled over it Sunday morning.

This means someone found a felt sign I had missed somewhere in the park, somehow got it down in one piece (the ones I took down tore where they were stapled), and risked poison ivy to staple it over our wooden sign. Why? and Who? I mean to find out. Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks!