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

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power purls podcastI 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!

Comments

  1. I have to admit – I was a podcast junkie! Now, with starting homeschooling my kiddo, I really don’t have time for much. Will listen to this one! Thank you

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]