Jocelyn Songco has worked, lived and traveled around the world — first with the Peace Corps, then backpacking around Africa, then working with the International Rescue Committee in Guinea to help refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia. After earning double Master’s degrees at Columbia University, in International Affairs and an MBA, she learned the ropes of global investment at DeLoitte before finally devoting 14 years at the Open Society Foundations to financing programs to help small farms and job-creation programs internationally. Along the way she picked up a taste for good regional wines and a passion for fiber arts. The last two have come together in her latest project: opening a combination yarn shop and wine bar on the Rondout waterfront.
“I learned how to knit at about age 27,” says Songco, relating how a former Peace Corps buddy visiting from San Francisco had handed her some wool and a pair of needles and given her a lesson to while away the time on a train ride. “I went to my first Sheep and Wool Festival the next year, and then I started spinning.” Soon she found herself carrying a project bag wherever she went, knitting on long airplane or “bush taxi” rides or while waiting to meet with Third World heads of state.
When her work became mostly remote during the COVID pandemic, she knitted her way through many a Zoom meeting. “In 2020 it seemed like all I did was sew. I made masks all the time. I literally felt like I was saving people’s lives,” she recalls.
But it was the annual lure of the Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck — the nexus of a regional creative community of fiber artists — that made her fall in love with the mid-Hudson. “I was coming up for every Sheep and Wool. I loved the leaves changing. It was the happiest time of year for me,” she says. “Then, in 2019, I visited a girlfriend in Bloomington and had an epiphany: I decided, ‘I want this life.’ So, I put my apartment in New York up for sale and started looking for a house.”
Hanging onto a smaller pied à terre in the City so she could split her time between there and upstate, she bought a house in the Connelly waterfront neighborhood of Port Ewen and began renovating it. A few months later, COVID struck, and telecommuting became her new normal. By early 2022, her employer had decided to do some restructuring and offered a golden parachute to staff who wanted to leave voluntarily. Songco, who had fantasized about opening a yarn shop and wine bar for years, on the model of one that used to exist in her Brooklyn neighborhood, was ready for a change. “I really didn’t want to stay,” she says. “It was a blessing.”
She wrapped up her City job in May and immediately started looking for a storefront in Kingston. The space she found — a little over 700 square feet on West Strand, just a few doors down from the popular Ship to Shore restaurant — was situated in a neighborhood with plenty of foot traffic during the summer months, and perfect for her needs once some renovations were completed. “I got the lease in July, and the contractor started work after Labor Day. On November 2, we opened.”
A soft opening the weekend of the 2022 Sheep and Wool Festival, in mid-October, confirmed Songco’s hunch that a Kingston shop would be a magnet for the fiber arts subculture. But her business plan doesn’t rest on wool sales alone; yarn shops, in her experience, don’t generally do more than break even. It’s the wine bar component that she envisions as becoming a hub for “an intentional effort to build a community,” in her words. “Especially after COVID, people long for that human interaction.”
A handsome L-shaped bar has been built, but while she waits for her application for a wine and beer license to wend its way through the state bureaucracy, Songco is already using the space to host gatherings. Beginners’ classes in knitting are offered twice each Saturday, and intermediate classes once each Sunday. Spinning classes will get underway on December 4 and crocheting classes on the 11th, with weaving, hand-sewing and perhaps even quilting workshops planned for the New Year.
Already proving popular are Knit Nights, offered every Wednesday from 5 to 7 p.m., when knitters are encouraged to bring their current project from home and socialize. “You can just sit here; you don’t have to buy anything,” Songco explains. “I might also add Sunday nights.” Another idea she wants to pursue is putting together kits making it easy for fiber hobbyists to schedule “creative dates” at the shop, on the model encouraged by Julia Cameron in the book The Artist’s Way: “Make time to take yourself out on a date. Do something for yourself with an intentional creative element.”
Project kits are among the items for sale at Yarn Farm Kingston, but the main enticement is the gorgeous selection of yarns, and the “tactile experience” that they offer. It’s a challenge to walk around the shop and not pet everything you see. “They’re not yarns that you’re going to buy at Michael’s or on Amazon,” she points out. Many are hard-to-find, small-batch, all-natural and hand-dyed.
Songco wants to patronize New York State-based wool suppliers as much as possible, such as Battenkill Fibers in Greenwich (the “house yarn”), Buckwheat Bridge Angora in Elizaville and “Poughkeepsie-based, internationally known” Merino supplier Loopy Mango. Dyer David Freer of Highland, who does business under the name of Crafter Gamer Geek, may come into the store in the future to host gaming nights. Another local dyer, Jill Draper Makes Stuff, is based in Midtown Kingston and has yarn lines named Kingston, Mohonk, Rifton, Valkill and Windham.
There are also fibers from suppliers around the world discovered by Songco through her work financing small businesses in economically stressed countries. One of her favorites is Cowgirlblues, which produces merino and mohair yarns in Cape Town, South Africa, as well as kits. Another is Bobbiny, a small company in Poland that sells coarser fibers ideal for macramé and basketry.
Fiber-crafting tools of all sorts are also available: needles and hooks, spindles, lap looms and so on. Particularly beautiful are the yarn-dispensing bowls made by Hudson Valley Wooden Bowls. You can buy leather handles for making purses and French project bags of varied sizes that are pretty enough to use as shoulder bags or even weekender luggage.
The quality on display is evident. “Everything that I have, I just believe in it. It should inspire people,” says Songco. “The customers are amazing. My favorite thing is the families or pairs who come in and have a shared interest in the yarn… It’s its own subculture, like comic books. They come in; their eyes are shining.”
For those who aren’t already caught up in a fiber hobby, of course, there will soon be a lovely wine bar to sit at, presided over by Songco’s boyfriend Todd Rowe, a chef with plenty of experience working at wine bars. It will be his job not only to keep the international wine selection fresh and interesting, but also to ensure that non-knitters feel at home at Yarn Farm as well. Beer-drinkers will have many choices of local microbrews; there will also be a selection of fancy loose teas from Tay Tea and coffee from the Knit. Coffee Company in Gardiner, which is owned by a fellow fiber artist (https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2021/04/23/gardinerite-finds-market-community-with-new-coffee-company). Food offerings will include charcuterie boards, cheeses, empanadas, soups, Lagusta’s Luscious chocolates and other sweets.
For updates on when the wine bar will be ready to open, as well as lots more information about Yarn Farm Kingston, including class schedules, visit www.yarnfarmkingston.com or @yarnfarmkingston on Instagram, or call (845) 514-2693. The shop is located at 21 West Strand Street in Kingston’s Rondout Historic District. Current hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 3 to 7 p.m.
Join the family! 
