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I’m so thrilled to be chatting with you again after such a long break. Thank you for bearing with me while I found my bearings in my new home. I have a bit of a life update for you. Knitvent 2019 just started yesterday with the reveal of the Bide Shawl, our first pattern. Welcome home!
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The Knitvent 2019 collection was inspired by the theme of “Home for the Holidays”.
As the year draws to its end, we’ll celebrate all the quiet joys of hibernation and gather close in gratitude for our own cosy nests.
The word “home” can have a hundred different meanings. It might be where you grew up: a place rich with treasured memories, priceless heirlooms, and familiar customs handed down through generations. It can be somewhere brand new, a space you carve out for yourself and fill with chosen family and your own fresh traditions. It may simply be a feeling of safety, hard-won and precious, which you carry with you wherever you go. Whatever home means to you, and wherever your home might be, the six mystery patterns we’ll share this season will spark your love for the life of a homebody. Let the outside world bustle and rush. We’ll be right here in our favourite corner, peacefully knitting to our hearts’ content.
For the past six years, Knitvent has held a special place in the Curious Handmade community. It’s now a favourite holiday that brings us all together by mixing the old-fashioned anticipation of an Advent calendar with all the excitement and fun of a mystery knit along. Over a span of four festive weeks, six secret knitting patterns will make their way to your Ravelry library. It’s an irresistible mix of presents for the most knitworthy people you know, special touches for your home, and treats for yourself to help make this holiday season warm and wonderful.
The Curious Handmade Ravelry group is a welcoming home for like-minded knitters at this time of year, glowing with Knitvent spirit. The friendship, support, encouragement and enthusiasm you’ll find there are truly heartwarming. Over on Instagram, you’ll also find so many inspiring images and posts from the talented members of the Curious Crew: just use #Knitvent2019 to join in! Throughout the Knitvent season there will be contests, KALs and prizes, holiday stories and surprises, and a delicious sense of togetherness. Every year seems more magical than the last, and I hope you’ll come be a part of it all.
Become a part of the Knitvent family and treat yourself to a season of joyful holiday surprises!
Purchase the the Knitvent ebook on Ravelry!
Our first pattern, the Bide Shawl, was revealed yesterday!
Bide is such a quiet word. It speaks of stillness, steadiness, and learning to stay. Sometimes it means being able to endure: to bide a winter storm is to withstand its mighty winds. Sometimes it’s just a gentle visit: bide awhile, put your feet up, get comfortable, catch up on all the chat. One definition for bide is “to wait calmly for a good opportunity to do something” which is delightfully specific. There’s so much in that one line. Patience, wisdom and also a kind of peaceful optimism. If you know how to bide your time, you must trust that something wonderful is on the way.
The pressure to rush around in an exciting holiday whirl seems to come just at the time when the urge to remain close to home and loved ones and quiet pursuits is strongest. It requires a calm and steady intention to stay put instead of saying yes to every invitation and opportunity that comes along. It takes a willingness to bide.
The Bide Shawl is our first surprise pattern of Knitvent 2019. Knit from bulky yarn with simple texture and eyelet rows, a smart garter border and playful tassels, this triangular shawl is a deeply satisfying, quick knit. It makes an exceptional present as it’s achievable even at the last minute but is substantial enough to make quite the impression. It would also be a lovely thing to knit for yourself, for those cosy moments biding by the fire.
The Bide samples were knit using my favourite cuddly, squishy bulky weight yarn, Tundra, from The Fibre Company. The red shawl (medium sample) used the Red Arctic colourway, and the cream/grey shawl (large sample used the Baby Beluga colourway.
Knitvent 2019 Giveaway winners
The Knitvent 2019 Giveaway has closed, but I’ve left the beautiful Giveaway thread open for anyone else who would like to share their memories and thoughts about their beloved homes. It’s such an uplifting and emotional read: thank you all so much for sharing. Here are our giveaway winners:
Grand Prize
Post 68 by aliad555
“Home is spending time with my husband and dogs, the feeling of safety, warmth and comfort and being very grateful for all that we have.”
Congratulations! Please message HellsBells on Ravelry with your address and we’ll get your prize into the post for you!
Ten Winners of Mount Juliet Shawl Pattern:
Post 82: kristinknitting
Post 134: 2mayboys
Post 73: thierria
Post 109: CarolIsASong
Post 11; sabinaknits
Post 75: craftyMil
Post 146: catvet
Post 149: AlohaGirlBC
Post 108: porthia
Post 30: Bgeldmaker
If you’re one of our lucky winners, please get in touch if you already own the Mount Juliet Shawl pattern and let me know which pattern you’d like instead.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the Curious Handmade Podcast. You’re listening to episode 274. 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.
Hello knitters. I’m back and I’m so happy to be chatting to you today. I wasn’t sure when I would be able to podcast again and I was chatting to a friend who listens to the show, and it just made me realize how much I miss you all. So I decided that I would make a special effort today and get over that slight fear of recording again after a long break.
So as you probably know, if you’ve been listening for a while, the long break was due to moving to the other side of the world, from London in the UK to the Sunshine Coast in Australia. We are living in a town called Buderim, which is right in the middle of the beach area north of Brisbane. So we are, I don’t know what that’s really, it feels tropical, I think it’s called the subtropics and so it’s pretty, pretty warm. We’re heading into summer. See, I can’t even stop giving you a weather report even though I’m on the other side of the world.
But yeah, just to give you a bit of an orientation and a flavour of where I am now. Yeah, it’s a beach community and it’s pretty amazing. We’ve swapped sirens, ambulance and police sirens for bird song. It’s very spacious. I think we’re almost over our slight feeling of agoraphobia. But yeah, wide roads, wide car parks, lots of space in the garden and much bigger houses. Yeah, it’s all quite different, but in quite a nice way, I have to say. People are very friendly. Because we’re not living in a city, it’s just so much more relaxed than city life. I don’t know how you’d describe it. The Sunshine Coast is a very sprawling, sprawling area and it’s made up of lots of little beach towns spread along the coast. And they’ve kind of over the years all joined up to make one sprawling big kind of city, really. But yeah, it’s all very spread out compared to London.
And so, there’s everything we need, like all the shops and grocery stores and everything we need, but just enough, not too much of anything. And yeah, the pace of life is a lot slower. It’s wonderful. So, so far we’re really enjoying it. I don’t think we’ll get bored. We could always entertain ourselves with going to the beach and doing lots of crafts and we always have iPads and TVs for when it gets too boring. It’s been a really interesting time and the kids have started their new school and well, the kids have been so welcoming and friendly and the teachers that they have are wonderful. They have just joined in for the last term of this year and then they’ll start their new school year in January over here. So it’s a bit of a different rhythm to the year.
But yeah, it’s one that’s kind of familiar to me from my school days. So it’s kind of nice to be going back to what I grew up with, in a funny kind of way. So I don’t know if you all notice my accent change. I’m not sure if it has already or not. You probably will notice a bit of a change and I might slow down a bit. We’ll see. I don’t know. I’m a bit embarrassed about that or a bit conscious of it, let’s say. But anyway, I’m just going to not worry about it too much and hope that you can still understand me if I start talking in a broad Australian accent.
So we have moved into our house here and all our boxes arrived from the UK. Lots and lots and lots of boxes, which we’ve almost unpacked. So reunited with the stash, which was nice, and I ended up having lots and lots of boxes of yarn and lots of boxes of books and not a lot else, in terms of personal stuff. There was quite a bit for the kitchen. But yeah, it was quite funny how it ended up being mostly crafting stuff and books. And most of the books are either craft or cooking books. So it’s been funny unpacking everything and seeing it in a new environment. It’s making me look at things with slightly fresh eyes. I’m not sure if it’s going to help me destash or declutter things a bit more, having it in a different environment, but most of it I feel like, oh, I still love it and I’m glad I brought it all this way. So, that’s been really nice.
Yeah. So we’re just gradually settling in. It’s taking a bit longer than I kind of anticipated. I mean, I’m very impatient and also overambitious, so I kind of just always anticipate that I’ll do things quicker than I actually can in real life, but we’re getting that and feeling really quite settled for considering we’ve only been back a month or two.
So mostly what I’ve been doing on the work side of things is working on Knitvent. And while I have had the theme for this year’s Knitvent in mind since the very beginning of the year, back maybe even since the end of last year actually, it just seems so appropriate to me, personally at the moment, because we are settling in and nesting into a new home. And so the theme, come home for the holidays with Knitvent, just seems really even more right.
So as the year draws to its end, we’re celebrating all the quiet joys, hibernation, and gathering close in gratitude for our own coziness. The word home can have a hundred different meanings. It might be where you grew up, a place rich with treasured memories, priceless heirlooms and familiar customs handed down through generations. It can be somewhere brand, a new space you carve out for yourself and fill with chosen family and your own fresh traditions.
It may simply be a feeling of safety, hard won and precious, which you carry with you wherever you go. Whatever home means to you and wherever your home might be, the six mystery patterns we share this season will spark your love for the life of a home body. Let the outside world bustle and rush. We’ll be right here in our favorite corner, peacefully knitting to our heart’s content.
So I hope you enjoy the theme of this year as Knitvent. Knitvent is following its usual format. It’s a little bit more sort of squashed together time wise this year, over four weeks. So we have six patterns and they’re coming out basically as a subscription, a mystery package, over four weeks. So the first week, which just came out yesterday, is the first pattern. And then next week there’ll be two patterns in the one week. The week after one, and the last week, there’ll be two patterns again.
So yes, so very excited about this season. I hope you like the pattern that came out yesterday, the bide shawl and it is knit in one of my very favorite snuggly yarns, which is Tundra by the Fibre Co. They brought out I think six new colors of Tundra this year and so I’ve chosen two of the new colors for two different sizes of the shawl. It’s a really, really snugly quick knit and if you don’t have bulky yarn in your stash, you’re wanting to knit from stash and you don’t have the bulky yarn, I think it might even be super bulky, you can easily substitute another yarn weight with this shawl.
Just use an appropriate size needle. I like to use 4 mm for fingering weight, about four and a half to five for DK, and then maybe about 6 mm for a worsted weight. It’s just whatever fabric you like. With a shawl, it’s not too critical with gauge and this shawl, you can just knit more or less repeats of the very simple pattern or you can add a big garter border if you wanted to, make it a bit bigger or you know, it’s really, really flexible, this one. I deliberately designed it to be flexible as to [mom 00:11:31] size, knowing that people often like to knit their Knitvent patterns from stash.
So even if you are not a bulky wool fan for whatever reason or you know, sometimes the bigger needles can hurt your hands. I can relate to that. Just use something that’s in your stash. My test knitter, Tracy, who’s TracyRR on Ravelry, used a wonderful set of worsted weight yarn. She had enough stash in, I think three or four different colors, so she used some lovely stash in that way and it just looks stunning. A sort of a gradient effect. So thank you so much Tracy for testing for me. As always, thank you to Deb for knitting one of the samples for me. I knit one and Deb knit one this time. And yes, Tracy did a wonderful job test knitting for me, so I just really hope you enjoy this one.
We also had a giveaway for their launch of Knitvent and the prompt in the thread was to talk about the meaning of home for you. And it was super beautiful and moving. I always have so much joy reading these giveaway threads and people were talking about what makes home for them and people mentioned their family, friends, pets, beautiful places, treasured belongings, traditions, some recipes that make people think of home, especially around the holidays, and very much the feeling of being secure and loved and grounded. And just reading through the posts made me so emotional. I was already feeling a bit emotional today and then I started reading these posts and feeling even more emotional, but just so much love and gratitude just beaming out from these pages. So you are all so gorgeous and warm and generous to share your stories and lots of beautiful photos. Such an uplifting thread in Ravelry, if you have a moment to have a look. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, to everybody who joined in.
So I’ll just announce the winners of the giveaway and the grand prize winner, which is a skein of yarn, a project bag and a Laine knit journal. The winner is post number 68, who is aliad555 , Alison, and she said, “Home is spending time with my husband and dogs, the feeling of safety, warmth and comfort, and being very grateful for all that we have.” So, thanks very much and congratulations Alison.
And I’m also giving away 10 copies of the Mount Juliet Shawl pattern, which is my latest single shawl pattern. So the winners of that are;
Post 82: kristinknitting
Post 134: 2mayboys
Post 73: thierria
Post 109: CarolIsASong
Post 11; sabinaknits
Post 75: craftyMil
Post 146: catvet
Post 149: AlohaGirlBC
Post 108: porthia
Post 30: Bgeldmaker
So thank you so much for entering and congratulations. If you would like to message me on Ravelry at HellsBells. For Alison, who won the grand prize, please message your postal address and we’ll get that in the mail to you. And for everybody who won the Mount Juliet Shawl pattern, we’ll pop that over to you in Ravelry. If you already have that one in your library already, you can just message and let me know an alternative that you would like and we can also send you that one.
So I’m just going to keep it pretty short and sweet for this return podcast episode. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t had time to do any personal knitting, so I can’t really talk about that. I have done a few rows here and there on things, but mostly been working on designs and just making sure that Knitvent’s all or ready to go. So, I think I’ll just leave it there today. I just wanted to pop in and say a big hello to you all, get back into the groove of things, and I hope you are all well and enjoying your knitting and I’m just really happy to be back. Happy knitting, and I’ll talk to you soon.
