Check out the Power Purls Podcast to Learn about the Business of Knitting

I have to admit I’m not much of a podcast listener. I want to do better because I know there’s a lot of great content out there, but it’s hard for me to listen to words while I’m writing words, and I just haven’t made myself sit and knit while listening, which would probably work better.

But I want to try. I’d love to hear about podcasts that you love, but right now I want to share a new podcast with you that I really want to listen to regularly.

It’s called Power Purls, and its produced by Kara Gott Warner, who is the executive editor of Creative Knitting magazine, previously a freelance designer, editor and technical illustrator who has a great depth of knowledge about knitting and the business of knitting.

The podcast launched today, will include a new interview each day for the first week, and will then become a biweekly podcast focusing on stories from the business, including chats with designers, yarn company people and knitters of all stripes.

She says in the welcome message for the podcast that she wants to provide empowering and encouraging stories from the business and help listeners to “be a scrappy designer so you can stay in business doing what you love.”

This is such a great idea for a podcast because we knitters are spread out all over and trying to make a living in a lot of different ways. It isn’t always easy to connect with other knitters and talk about the business and learn best practices, so I think this will be super useful for knitters who are looking to become designers and designers who want to have better, more sustainable businesses. And just for knitters who are interested in knowing what goes into knitting magazines and other publications and who want to be more mindful knitters.

I mention all this because I’m going to be on the podcast, probably in December, but I don’t want you to wait until then to check it out.

If you do go give it a listen (as I write there is an interview with Tricia Malcom of Vogue Knitting and an “Ask Kara and Tabitha Anything” with Tabitha Hedrick of Sweet Georgia Yarns, talking about design proposals) I’d love to know what you think!

For the past few years I’ve taken part in a Christmas in July blog hop that encourages people to get a jump on their making for holiday gifts.

I love to use yarn I already have for these projects in the hope that people will consider what they already have that they can use to make projects for themselves or to give as gifts.

This year it was a couple of knit baskets made using partial balls of yarn left in my stash from other projects.

They use the same basic pattern but the first one is made with two colors of bulky yarn, and the second used two strands of worsted weight yarn held together, which made the gauge about the same, but I cast on fewer stitches to make a smaller version.

The bottom of the basket is square, though you can make them rectangular if you’d rather. Then I just knit up the sides in rounds until I was about to run out of yarn. This gave both baskets rather short sides — maybe more like a tray than a basket — but you can keep knitting as long as you like to make the sides of your basket as tall as you want.

They’re worked in seed stitch, which keeps the edges from curling and adds a nice texture to the baskets.

Of course this also allows you to use even more odd balls from your stash. I’d love to make a big one someday combining lots of different yarn. I mean, I’d probably use it to store more yarn, but that’s a fine thing to do.

As it is, these little trays are great for sitting on your desk or bedside table to hold little things that always seem to appear there. I like to use one to hold the supplies for whatever project I’m working on, things like little scissors, my tape measure, a crochet hook, etc.

And they would make good gifts on their own or as a container to hold some other goodies if you like.

You can find the free pattern for these stash busting baskets over at Our Daily Craft.

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