A couple of weeks ago I thought it would be a good idea to try and organise a week of blogging for knitters and crocheters, where individual bloggers could all simultaneously post about the same topics over the course of seven days, so that for one week readers might be able to read from blog to blog and enjoy a community of bloggers all talking about elements of their craft in their own unique way.

So, after a conversation with some of the members of Ravelry’s Blog Hub group I have been working away on how the week will run. So, hoping that you might be interested, here are a few details:

The Knitting and Crochet Blog Week will run from Monday 26th April – 2nd May 2010.

OK, that’s the date out of the way. I thought that was probably important.

How do you take part? It’s quite simple. Every day between 26th April – 2nd May 2010 there will be a blogging topic (relating to knitting and crochet) asking for your experiences, opinions and hopes on various aspects of your hobby, one topic and a short explanation is provided for each day, plus a ‘wildcard’ topic in case you just don’t fancy one of the blogging topics for any particular day. The entire list of 8 topics (seven daily topics +1 wildcard) are listed below. They are hidden in case any blogger happens to want the topics as a surprise, day by day, but I have published them early as I know that knitters and crocheters are often an organised lot, and might want to get photographs, etc, taken in advance. For explanations of tagging codes, please see the bottom of this post. OK, here are the topics (click any topic to expand):

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Use these topics and brief descriptions as a springboard for your posts and take them in whatever direction you fancy. If you are a Ravelry member and fancy chatting about what others are going to do to take part, then feel free to pop along and find out what other folks are up to, or if you have any comments or questions please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below and I will be sure to get back to you ASAP.

If you’d like to spread the word, please do feel free to blog about Knitting and Crochet Blog Week on your own blog, and feel free to use the banner at the top of the post if you’d like to.

Frequently Asked Questions

An FAQ can be found here. (Disclaimer – some questions are not that frequently asked. Maybe it is more of an OAQ – Occasionally Asked Questions).

Suggested tagging System

People have been asking if it would be possible to compile a list of every person taking part. Whilst I will do my best to find as many as possible, it is quite difficult for reasons explained in the FAQ, therefore I have had an idea for a tagging system to use in posts. Most blogs allow you to add ‘tags’ to posts. If we use these to insert a google-able tag in, then once all of the entries have been crawled by the search engines it should allow people to type that unique code into google and find the entries posted for that topic. If a blogger doesn’t wish to use the ‘tags’ feature of their blog they could alternatively add the code to the end of their post – it will still be found by Google.
For the tagging system to work the code has to be something not already in google (ie, not a recognisable ‘word’, therefore I suggest we use the following format:
Day One: knitcroblo1
Day Two: knitcroblo2
Day Three knitcroblo3 etc
Wildcard: knitcroblowc

knitted woolly mammoth t-shirt from www.mrcloud.com

With knitting needles for tusks and a warm and cuddly knitted body, this mammoth really is woolly.  In this t shirt the mammoth is caught at the moment of casting on a new project  perhaps another mammoth in a previously unknown form of reproduction.  Could this have been why these wonderful animals eventually died out – because they couldn’t knit new mammoths fast enough?  Help to make sure that knitting never dies out again by making sure that we never forgot the fate of the woolly mammoths, and give fellow knitters and science nerds alike a smile for only £12.99, and available to ship worldwide from www.mrcloud.com

He's not just woolly, he's knitted. Oh, and he has buttons for eyes!

Have you ever considered what it is that you enjoy about knitting?

Knitting has recently been given a bit of publicity in the British press.  The Guardian tells us that activities such as knitting can make us both greener and happier, whilst The Times calls it ‘the trend that won’t die’, but one story that keeps on being re-hashed is that more and more of us are learning to knit to stave off the effects of the economic crisis.  In an article called ‘The wonder of wool… or how knitting is once again helping us through the hard times’ Daily Mail hack Andrew Levy tells is that the knitting revival has ‘clicked into top gear’ thanks to… the credit crunch.

Andrew Levy is not the first journalist to attribute the popularity of knitting to the misguided notion that making your own clothes is cheaper than buying them, and he will not be the last, but if you don’t knit to save money on clothing… why do you do it?

I remember having a conversation with another knitter when I was fresh to knitting, and my knitting friend telling me that she was a ‘process’ knitter.  I asked what she meant by this, and she said that some people knitted for the enjoyment of the physical movement of knitting – the relaxing, quiet, meditative action of needles and yarn, whereas other people were what she termed ‘product’ knitters – those that knitted because they wanted to have a hat that was turquoise with a lurex kitten motif intarsia knitted into the earflaps, and to be able to tell all subsequent admirers ‘Oh, this old thing?  I knitted it myself!’.

I hadn’t been knitting long enough to question why I enjoyed my new-found hobby, so didn’t quite understand the distinction.  I suspect that most of us will fall somewhere between the two states.  I enjoy both the relaxing process of knitting and the wonderful items that are borne of it, which I enjoy more than mass-produced and generic designs, but I certainly don’t knit because I find it to be cheaper than purchasing items in the shops.

So… Why do you knit?

Designed to help friends and family take care of your hand knits

Here are some handy gift tags to help ensure that your hand-knits have a happy future when you give them as gifts. These small gift tags can be printed onto normal A4 white card and folded down the centre line. The front features a short message and a bright ball of yarn and knitting needles (each sheet has four different colours, so there’s on to suit any recipient) and the reverse has a number of fields for you to fill in that will help the recipient of your gift to care for it for years to come. The inside can be left blank for your own message or additional information, and there’s room for you to stitch a spare button to the inside of the card if you have used any on your knitted item, so that spare button and care instructions can always be found together.

You can view and download the file here to save to your desktop and print any time you want to give the gift of a hand-knit. I plan to make a set for crocheted items and also some more Christmassy-themed ones, soon.

The brevity of this post is due to me having caught the ‘flu.  Please send virtual Lemsips.

^{PS: my apologies to anyone who has had trouble getting the download to work in past months – the download location seemed to be temperamental and intermittent, but it should be working fine, now. If ever anyone does find it to not be working and would like the file, drop me a line in the comments and I will email you the PDF as soon as I get the message.}

5.9g precisely, madam.

Digital scales are inexpensive, and (if you have a set that you can also use in the kitchen) great for making cakes.  A digital weighing scale is indispensable when making a pair of socks or mittens from a single skein of yarn.  The popular Baktus scarf (which I am currently in the process of blocking) requires you to cast on only a few stitches, slowly increase along one edge until you have knit exactly half of your yarn, and then decrease along the same edge until you are back to your original cast on number of stitches and out of yarn.  It’s a fantastic pattern for getting the most out of a single ball of yarn with no waste at the end, but guesswork as to when you have reached the halfway point of your ball of yarn could lead to tears and naughty words.

You can pick up a pair of digital jewellery scales for about £7-8 on eBay, and you can find digital kitchen scales in any shop that sells kitchen equipment. If you want to test the kitchen scales out by making a cake, please feel free to send any baked goods to me and my cake-trained palette will be happy to tell you if your scales have resulted in baking success.