Help Fund Local Yarn on Indiegogo

I’m kind of obsessed with crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It’s so fun to see what people are creating and to be able to support projects that sound interesting. It’s great for creators, too, because they can get funding for projects that might not otherwise be able to happen if they had to find the money themselves.

Speaking of which, I just found a knitting book project on Kickstarter I hadn’t seen before. Shoshona Silberstein is trying to fund publication of her book, Knitting the Indie Dyers, and has 50 days to go on her goal. Pledgers can get a digital or printed copy of the book, and if you donate enough you can get free knitting, too.

As you might have guessed from the title of this post, though, that wasn’t actually what I wanted to talk to you about today. I have an online buddy, Riin Gill, who dyes and spins beautiful yarns in Michigan and sells them under the name Happy Fuzzy Yarn. She lives in the county in Michigan that is home to the most sheep, but she can’t afford local wool to spin. She would like to produce a local wool and alpaca blend (she tells me the alpaca are also in Michigan, but not from the same county) and she’s asking for help with the overhead.

Anyone who pledges more than $20 is basically buying a share of the fiber, either as combed top, hand-dyed or hand-dyed and handspun yarn. I can’t speak to this particular yarn, of course, because it doesn’t exist yet, but I did get the chance to play with some of Riin’s handspun recently (I made a scarf and can’t wait for it to be cool enough to wear it!) and really enjoyed working with it. The texture is nice, the colors are beautiful and it was just really good all around.

It’s so cool to me that we can learn about these amazing projects and support artists who want to bring more good stuff into the world. I hope you think so, too!

Lots of craft designers are understandably frustrated about the proliferation of AI “designed” patterns and photos of projects that have no basis in reality. People who don’t know how to tell if a project is AI are often also frustrated when they see a picture for something but there’s no pattern because it’s not real, or they buy a pattern that doesn’t actually explain how to make the thing or ends up looking totally different from the picture.

Some designers have taken it upon themselves to try to make some of those AI patterns that we see online, often with hilarious results.

Katherine Foster was inspired by a famous AI elephant to make what she calls “AIlephant,” which is now a free knitting pattern on Ravelry.

Her prototype uses worsted weight yarn, but you can use whatever yarn you like to make different sizes of elephants.

The elephant features a cable running down the trunk and a different cable pattern on the back. It’s worked in pieces that are joined and stuffed as you go. It uses German short row shaping on the body and includes written instructions as well as a chart for the cable patterns.

Reading through the pattern, it sounds a little fiddly, which makes sense because it was designed to look like a pattern that isn’t real. But it’s doable, as evidenced by the handful of projects you can find on Ravelry. The ears on her version aren’t quite as big and round or maybe don’t sit in quite the same place as the AI version (which if you haven’t seen it there’s a photo of that on the projects page, too). But it’s a pretty honest replica of a dishonest photo, and a really cute elephant in its own right.

If you make this one I would love to hear about it!

You can grab the free pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Katherine Foster]

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