WEST LEBANON — It turns out fiber arts such as knitting and crocheting weren’t just a hobby fad that helped people get through the lengthy — and often isolating — COVID-19 pandemic.

“It seems like interest in fiber arts keeps growing,” said Terry Miller, who runs promotions for the Vermont Sheep & Wool Festival, which is held annually on the fairgrounds in Tunbridge. “In New England, especially, there are people who spin and knit all over the place.”

Attendance at the festival, which is scheduled for Oct. 5-6 this year, has been trending upward, along with an increase in new vendor applications, Miller said.

This summer, two new yarn stores have opened in the Upper Valley, catering to fiber artists who are looking for an in-person shopping experience.

“I hate buying yarn online because I really want to touch it and see the colors,” said Katie Johnson, of Lebanon, after visiting the Woolly Thistle, which opened in West Lebanon last month.

Being largely a rural area, the Upper Valley offers knitters opportunities to do more than just see and touch the skeins — loosely coiled lengths of yarn wound on a reel — found in stores.

If they’re so inclined, knitters can visit farms to meet the sheep that provide their raw materials.

Meg Falcone, of Plainfield, is a sheep farmer who became a fiber artist herself. Last month, she opened a storefront at her Five Sisters Farm on Route 12, selling yarns of varied natural hues made from her Shetland sheep.

Falcone began raising sheep when her oldest daughter, 7 or 8 years old at the time, wanted to show the animals at local fairs.

“I thought it would be fun to have sheep because we could do projects with the wool,” Falcone said.

They choose Shetland sheep because they need to have purebred sheep for 4-H and they found someone selling a Shetland lamb.

“They’re small, easy for handling, friendly, they have individual personalities,” Falcone said. “They’re kind of like dogs. They’re really social.”

To help herself make the connection between sheep and wool, Falcone took up knitting a couple of years ago. “I’m coming at it in the opposite direction,” she said. “Some people start as a knitter and we meet in the middle somewhere.”

In fiber arts, the middle can be a yarn mill.

“I think when people learn about how yarn is made, all the way from sheep to skein, it enriches the experience at the end with that garment in a way, and that’s really cool,” said Amanda Kievet, co-owner of Junction Fiber Mill, a small-batch yarn mill in White River Junction, which opened in 2021.

“Not only did you pick out the yarn and knit with it, but you know the whole backstory: what the breed was; what the farm was. You’ve seen the equipment it was made on, and you’ve met the people who made it,” Kievet added.

Local yarn shops and her mill have a strong relationship with their wools, and the sheep that produce them, Kievet said.

Younger people make up the majority of farmers who bring custom jobs to Junction Fiber Mill, co-owner Peggy Allen said.

A new generation of farmers have “started raising sheep and they find us,” Allen said. “It’s a really vibrant growing community of people who are deciding ‘Yeah, I want to have some sheep.’ ”

“They’ve either relocated deliberately to get that sort of farming experience or they’re locals. They mostly have day jobs, but sheep aren’t terribly difficult.”

It’s not just the farmers who seem younger.

Cara Liu, owner of Norwich Knits, has noticed more and more of her customers represent a wide range of ages.

“What I have seen come through the doors is a lot of young energy for both knitting and crocheting,” Liu said. “It feels like crocheting is having its moment right now, at least in the younger generation, which is new.”

In the fashion world, crocheted garments have becoming popular, “so I think that has been inspiring to younger crocheters,” Liu added.

Early on in the pandemic, “knitting became cool,” worldwide, the BBC wrote in June 2020.

So cool, in fact, that the trendy New York Times Style Magazine featured the “works of thread and fabric” in its September 2023 issue:

“To take fiber art seriously is to understand how fabric is inextricably linked to the body and is in many ways an extension of it: We wear it, we sleep under it, we are wrapped up in it when we are born and we are buried in it when we die.”

Yarn shop owners, such as Liu at Norwich Knits, encourage fiber artists to stop by with their finished works. “It’s a great experience to be able to be sitting in the shop and having people come through and help them be inspired,” she said.

At the outset of the pandemic, some people were calling knitting the “21st century yoga,” Forbes.com wrote in 2020. “Experts agree that knitting is a great stress reducer, focusing your attention on the task at hand and resulting in something tangible that you can be proud of.”

After the coronavirus lockdown first went into effect, global sales at We Are Knitters, a go-to website for people just starting out in fiber arts, increased more than 75% a week, Forbes reported.

A few years later, yarn has become part of the “buy local” market. More fiber artists are willing to pay $20-$30 a skein that comes from the wool of sheep raised on small, local farms, said Falcone, owner of Five Sisters Farm in Plainfield. Many inexpensive, mass-produced superwash wools, which cost $7-$15 a skein, are treated with chemicals, either in a chlorinated acid bath or coated with a polyamide or nylon that, unlike natural wool, can be toxic, she said.

“People are like, ‘Oh I could just go to Walmart to get yarn.’ But you’re not getting natural wool yarn, where the sheep are cared for,” Falcone said. “People are starting to realize it matters.”

For Marga Rahmann, of Norwich, the quality of yarn matters for her fiber arts projects and influences her shopping.

“The kind of knitting that I do, for me, I don’t enjoy using blended yarns,” Rahmann said.

Big stores “mostly have blended yarns, meaning wool with acrylics,” she said. “I’m more of a purist.”

As such, she likes the variety of the yarns available at small yarn shops.

In addition to the material of the yarn, Rahmann said she gets added depth from higher quality hand dyed yarns.

“More expensive yarn will often have hand dying as opposed to machine dying,” she said. “Hand dying has an inconsistency in the depth and it comes out looking more interesting.

“It’s kind of like looking at a watercolor instead of a big splotch of oil paint. That’s what hand dyed yarn looks like, it’s more modeled and more texturized.”

Having lived in the Upper Valley for 50 years, Rahmann noted a significant change in yarn stores in the last decade.

“There were many more (local yarn stores) at the start of the decade and I think that is in part because of the ease that big online stores have. The pandemic deepened that habit of ordering online,” Rahmann said.

“But what the local stores have is that ability to see it. I see it with my eyes and I touch it and I listen to the store staff with the experience and expertise on the yarns. That kind of experience of purchasing yarn can’t be duplicated online. The local stores have been pushing the human connection, which I appreciate.”

Corrine Tomlinson, who recently opened her Woolly Thistle shop in West Lebanon in July, tells her customers that knitting doesn’t have to always be an indoor activity. Sitting in a living room rocking chair next to a fireplace with knitting needles in hand is fine, but not required.

“We always say when you go (outdoors), take your knitting,” Tomlinson said. It’s a great way to experience life.”

Tomlinson started out selling yarn online seven years ago, after returning from a visit to Scotland, where she grew up.

“When I got home I reached out to some vendors and I sold (yarn) to my friends,” she said. “I had access and ability to order product from Scotland and England and bring them over here and there was a real appetite.”

An appetite that post-pandemic continues to grow.

Elle Muller can be reached at daniellewingmuller@gmail.com.