The latest in a long line of festivals to nix its plans in a wild 2020, the 15th-annual North Olympic Fiber Arts Festival has been cancelled.

Organizers of the event made the announcement last week, citing health safety concerns for the festival, which was scheduled for Oct. 2-4.

“We are all disappointed by how COVID-19 has suppressed our creative opportunities, yet we are looking forward to artistic and economic pursuits in the future,” Renne Emiko Brock, North Olympic Fiber Arts festival director, said in a press release last week.

Ironically, Emiko Brock pointed out, the 2020 fiber art exhibition theme was “Clarity of Vision” and was developed five years ago.

Like several other festivals and museum exhibitions, the North Olympic Fiber Arts Festival will instead have a virtual element. The festival website (FiberArtsFestival.org) and Facebook page (Facebook.com/northolympicfiberartsfestival) will showcase several local fiber artists from Oct. 2 through through Thanksgiving, Nov. 26.

“Quarantine” by Gloria B Skovronsky, a Port Angeles fiber artist. Submitted photo

The North Olympic Fiber Arts Festival is an interactive fiber arts event connecting to the community with activities at various unique locations and features exhibitions, workshops, educational demonstrations of fiber processes, hands-on projects with children and adults, a fiber arts market of local artists’ work and fiber supplies, lectures and information about local fiber activities, groups, businesses and instructional resources.

Organizers are also looking ahead to the 2021 festival, Emiko Brock said, with the theme “Bumblebunching – Warped, Twisted, & Imperfect” — referring to the tangled loops of stitching on the bobbin side of fabric that result from improper tension when machine sewing.