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Join me for a quick catch up over coffee this week as I talk about what’s going on in the world of Curious Handmade. We have a big BOGO sale this weekend to kick off the start of the Knitvent 2021 launch, I’ve just come back from a big photo shoot, and I’m trying to end the year strong with some habits that I know make life better. So fill your mug and knit a few rows along with me!
Show Sponsors
Meadow Yarn; Anj is the heart, mind, and hand behind Meadow Yarn. She spends her days dying yarn and telling stories in the Suffolk countryside. The regular hand dyed shades you’ll find in their online shop are influenced by the surrounding landscape, the north sea coast, and the big skies overhead. For an extra dose of imagination with your knitting, Anj also releases her limited edition yarn fictions from time to time. These capsule yarn collections are inspired by her original short stories. You can download them and read along as you knit. As well as their own label, Hand Dyed Yarn, Meadow Yarn also stocks some of Anj’s personal favorite wools and supplies, Icelandic Lopi, Hazel Knits, KnitPro needles and notions, Eucalan wool wash, and arrange of inspirational journals and magazines. You can find them at meadowyarn.co.uk.
Find all your favourite luxury yarns and discover plenty more at A Yarn Story, Bath’s premier yarn store based in Walcot Street, Bath, UK. From gorgeous skeins by The Fibre Co and Walcot Yarns to a fine selection from Shibui Knits, La Bien Aimée, House of a la Mode, and Julie Asselin, there is plenty for the discerning knitter to enjoy. With friendly and knowledgeable staff to help you browse, there is plenty for the discerning knitter to enjoy. Visit the store at Walcot Street, Bath or shop online at www.ayarnstory.co.uk.
Show Links:
Shop the Curious Handmade Buy One Get One Free Sale ( Available from the 1st of October 2021 to the 4th of October 2021 – no discount code needed just add two patterns or two collections to your Ravelry shopping basket and the discount will be applied at checkout)
The Shawl Society 5
5 of the 6 shawls in The Shawl Society 5 are out now; The Curling Mist Shawl , The Silver River Shawl, The Wild Bees Wrap , The Lavender Fields Shawl and now The Veranda Shade Shawl. Just one more mystery shawl patterns to follow next week!
The Shawl Society 5 on Gumroad
The Shawl Society 5 on Ravelry
#tss5 and theshawlsociety5 on Instagram
The Lavender Fields Shawl FO Thread on Ravelry will run until October 7th, 2021
The Veranda Shade Shawl FO Thread on Ravelry will run until November 1st, 2021
The Knit 20 for 2021 KAL
Join in with the Knit 20 for 2021 KAL by sharing your finished object photos here in the October FO Thread on Ravelry
You can also enter on Instagram with the hashtag #knit20for2021 on Instagram and don’t forget to nominate a local yarn shop or indie dyer in case you win!
For more information on how the monthly knitalong works and how to enter, visit this page on the Curious Handmade website for all the details.
Free Curious Handmade Workshops
Simply Curious Socks: Free Beginner Sock Knitting Pattern & Workshop
The Spindrift Shawl: Free Beginner Shawl Knitting Pattern & Workshop
Join the Curious Handmade Group on Ravelry for new pattern announcements, KALs, support and questions for patterns and any other fun things that come up, and join our Curious Crew Newsletter at the link below
Show transcript:
Welcome to the Curious Handmade podcast. You’re listening to episode 349. This podcast is all about crafting a life of happiness and creativity. I’m your host, Helen, and you can find me on Ravelry as HellsBells and on social media as Curious Handmade. You can also find full show notes and transcript on my website at curioushandmade.com.
I’d like to say a big thank you to my sponsor Meadow Yarn.
Hello, knitters, welcome to the show. I will just have a fairly short episode for you this week. I just wanted to pop in and share a couple of announcements and things that are happening. But we’re still on school holidays, and I’m just squeezing in a very quick recording session while I seem to have a moment of peace and quiet. I’m not sure how long that’s going to last though, so I’m just going to crack on with it.
The main announcement I wanted to just pop on and share with you today is that for this weekend only from today, Friday, 1st of October, through till Monday, 4th of October, we are having a buy one, get one free sale on all my patterns and collections. That is available on Ravelry. I’m afraid that I had a look on Gumroad and it doesn’t have the facility to do a buy one, get one free sale. So this one’s just on Ravelry and you can find my whole collection of patterns over there.
And I just thought while we’re talking about holiday knitting, perhaps doing some gift knitting or getting into fall in the Northern Hemisphere and just doing some, looking for some personal projects to knit at the moment, I thought it might be nice to offer a free pattern with a pattern new purchase. There is no code needed, but if you pop two patterns into your cart on Ravelry then the second one will be free. But you need to put them both in the cart at the same time, then check out, not just check out and not have them both in the cart, if that makes sense. I think it makes sense.
So you might’ve noticed that a couple of weeks ago I have all the single sock patterns from the Handmade Sock Society Season Four, which recently finished this year. They are now all available as individual patterns. And this year’s Shawl Society is not yet available as individual patterns because that is still being released. And the next and final pattern for the Shawl Society Season Five is coming out next Thursday. And yeah, so that will be the Shawl Society wrapped up for this year as well. So lots going on. And yeah, just really feels like we’re getting into autumn and the end-of-year season energy coming up very quickly.
Some other knitting-type news I wanted to share with you. I was contacted by my lovely friends at Blacker Yarns who are beautiful wool yarn company based in the UK. They’re based in Cornwall. And I’ve been enjoying using their yarn for designs and knitting projects for many years now. And they contacted me to say that they have their birthday yarn special-edition colorways and blend available now for a short time. So I just wanted to jump on and share this with you because they sent me a shade card and some little mini skeins of this beautiful yarn. It’s called Woodland, is the blend. And I’ll just read you out the little lovely description.
The time has come when we celebrate our birthday again, therefore we wanted to present you our new limited- edition Woodland collection. For this birthday blend, we have created a strong yet soft, squishy woollen spun yarn using Blue-faced Leicester, white Shetland with a drop of Black Welsh Mountain to add a little texture. This year, we have been able to make both a 4-ply and DK. Our inspiration for this collection formed from long and wonderful woodland walks here in Cornwall. We love seeing the leaves sprouting and blossom buds blooming in spring, along with watching the leaves changing in autumn. We have chosen an earthy colour palette with a variety of tonal greens. We imagine autumnal walks in cosy shawls, knitted or crocheted in our striking rustic Woodland collection.
There are eight colorways. There’s one natural, which is Silver Falls, very beautiful light grey, and then there’s Rose Wood and Forest Berry, which are pinky, pinky colorways, reddy, pinky, berry-type colorways, Frost, which is a beautiful mid-blue, and then the greens are Lichen, Clover, and Holly Bush. Lichen is a lovely sage colour, clover is mid-green, and Holly Bush is a beautiful, deep, rich green. Beautiful greens. I’m not usually a huge green fan, but I am very attracted to these greens. They’re just lovely, lovely and soft and natural. And then finally, Copper Wood, beautiful copper colour, brownie coppery. And they just look so beautiful together. This would definitely be a wonderful yarn to do colour work. And yeah, I think because it’s woollen spun, it would just be really nice for colour work. And the colours just look so beautiful together on the shade card, you kind of want to knit with all of them. So I think colour work would be a lovely option.
I think this would be a lovely weight of yarn for my upcoming Rewilding Pullover. I have finished two samples, and I was able to photograph it this week. So that will be coming up not till next year though because I still have to go through the grading and testing process. But I’m thinking ahead and thinking that this yarn would be beautiful for it. And when the description mentioned autumnal walks in cosy shawls, it really made me think about my Whispering Island shawl design, which I published back in 2015 and actually have recommended using the Blacker Shetland DK wool for this one.
But I think, again, Woodland would be really beautiful for this shawl. Just has a textured, really cosy feel about the design, and I think it would be a lovely match with this yarn. And I was imagining exactly that situation of someone with a big, cosy shawl wrapped around them having a woodland walk in Cornwall. So this really made me put those two together. So that yarn is available on the Blacker Yarns website right now. And it’s limited edition, so if you think you would like some don’t wait too long to snap some of that up.
Last week on the show, I was talking about planning and organising for the last quarter of the year. And I’ve still been thinking about that theme this week as well. I was very happy to deal with a few stones-in-my-shoe- type projects this week. They were mostly cleaning and tidying stuff around the house. So not super exciting, not really podcast-worthy to talk about, but I have to say it was extremely satisfying to clean out the fridge and freezer and deal with a few piles of stuff that I had that needed to be taken to charity shops or given to the people that own them, things like that. So managed to do a little bit of clearing and cleaning, which was good.
Most of the week ended up being taken up with my photo shoot. So I was preparing, packing everything, and then spending the day on the shoot. And the day after, unpacking and recovering. It was very tiring because it was a full day. And Sophie came along and modelled for me again, so that was really great. It just helps so much to have that other person to do some of that work. I find it really quite hard work to model my samples. I’m definitely not, I don’t know, not a natural at it. I can do it because I feel like I need to. But I am very appreciative of Sophie now doing that for me as well. And it’s really fun to do that with her. It’s a nice day.
So we did that and now I’m really just looking forward to spending these last few days of the holidays doing more preparation, preparing for this last term of the school year, and thinking about what is going to make me feel calm and energised and a bit inspired. I feel like those are the sort of main ingredients I need to lead a rich, creative life. And one of the things I’ve been pondering about recently is, well, two things. One, why is it so difficult to keep up good habits once you’ve gone to the trouble of forming them? For example, going to bed at a decent hour, doing my exercise, and, I don’t know, all those things that you’re supposed to do, eat vegetables. I can make myself do them for a period, and then if something happens I tend to fall off the wagon very quickly and find it very difficult to get back on.
And then I saw a post on Instagram that made me rethink this whole issue a little bit. It was by a fitness person. I can’t remember the name of the account to be honest, but she was basically saying that to try and shift your mental state into thinking these things are fun and enjoyable rather than chores or obligations. And so I was like, oh, that was a really good just thought to shift my mindset a little bit because I do really enjoy walking and I do really enjoy having early nights and waking up feeling rested and I do enjoy eating lovely, healthy food. So I’ve been sort of just thinking about that.
And the other thought I had, the second thought I had, which is related, is that these things that are so good for us, that are recommended over and over again by health experts are free. They’re not always free, but going to bed early is, walking is free, doing some stretches and a bit of yoga at home in my living room is free, and eating healthy food is not really more expensive than eating sugary, processed junk food, especially if you’re just eating basic vegetables, which is all you really need to do. You don’t need fancy, expensive superfoods really. It would be a vast improvement on my diet if I could just eat a bit of broccoli and carrots on a daily basis I think.
Yeah. So I’ve been thinking about that aspect of habits. And yeah, I’m going to, I don’t know if I’ll develop some more thoughts on that, but I just thought I’d share my initial thoughts seeing as I’ve been talking about planning and I guess it’s all in the productivity, getting organised realm of topics. And I’m constantly thinking about those kinds of things and wondering how I can get more done and actually have more fun doing the things that I need to get done.
So on that note, I will say goodbye. Just before I sign off, I’d like to thank my sponsor A Yarn Story.
And don’t forget the BOGO buy one, get one free sale that’s happening this weekend only and grab a pattern or two. If you’ve been eyeing anything off, now’s a great time. Happy knitting. Have a wonderful week. I’ll talk to you again soon.
