KnitBits: Stitches West, a Podcast Patreon and Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

As I mentioned yesterday in my review of Knitlandia, we knitters like to get together at a lot of events through the year. I’ve never been to the Stitches shows, but the blogger behind It Takes Balls to Knit says Stitches West is his favorite. He’s got the beginnings of a report on what went down at the most recent one, but there will be more posts in the future to give you a great look at this show in case you ever want to go (or just like seeing what happens at events like this you can’t travel to).

If you want to knit a pattern and you’re not getting gauge, you may feel like you need to keep trying until you get exactly the gauge of the pattern or your garment won’t turn out right. While it is true that your sweater won’t come out the same if you have the wrong gauge but follow the pattern as if you have the right one, it’s often not too difficult to account for differences in gauge in your project, as this article from Fringe Association explains.

Have you heard of the Power Purls podcast? It’s done by Kara Gott Warner, editor of Creative Knitting magazine, and it’s all about making a living in the knitwear industry and, more generally living a creative life (you can find my episode here). Kara has launched a Patreon drive to help support the podcast, which, if enough people sign up, will allow her to outsource production of the podcast so she can spend more time doing interviews and have new episodes more often.

The latest episode of Power Purls happens to talk about the movie Eddie the Eagle, which comes out today. The movie tells the story of a British ski jumper who won the hearts of the world with his appearance in the 1988 Winter Olympics. In the movie, Eddie’s mom wears a sweater that says “I’m Eddie’s Mum,” which was designed by British yarn shop Yarn Stories and based on a jumper Eddie’s mom really wore. “Eddie the Eagle’s grandma was famous for the jumper she knitted for Eddie’s mother with the slogan ‘I’m Eddie’s Mum’ on it so it was only natural to get one of these iconic garments into the movie,” Yarn Stories said in a news release. “But we only had a partial photo of Eddie’s sister’s jumper to go on,” explains designer Charlotte Johnson. The company is producing a kit so people can knit their own jumpers; check their Facebook page for updates.

Stateside, the #IKnitforEddie campaign is also going on, in which designers can submit their own Eddie-inspired hat projects emblazoned with a giant E. Photos can be uploaded to the site, with voting beginning April 2. The project with the most likes and shares will receive an Eddie-related prize and the project will be featured in promotion for the film. To promote the project, 20th Century Fox made a video that almost gets Hugh Jackman knitting:

Finally, we all know knitting is a great life skill, but did you know it will probably also help us in the case of zombie apocalypse? Let’s Knit has a great list of reasons why knitters will be able to survive should the zombies come, ranging from being able to knit everyone clothes to the convenience of having pointy weapons with us at all times. Just make sure you keep a spare pair for zombie hunting.