one week to go!

Well, there’s just one week to go until the start of our 10 Years in the Making Club, and we are all geared up and ready for three months of knitting fun!

This is the fifth club we’ve run at KDD, and each one has been a little different.

Our first – the Seven Skeins club – was focused around knitting small cold-weather accessories, like the Kokkeluri mittens . . .

. . . we also developed a group of tasty recipes

. . together with a guided walk around the mountain that had inspired the whole collection (with our friend, Gordon Anderson)

and gathered all these things together in a lovely book.

The following year we returned to the island where Tom and I got married . . .

. . . and brought you there too, for Inspired by Islay

This club explored our favourite island in twelve designs inspired by Islay’s varied landscapes and rich history . . .

. . . such as the Oa hoody, which celebrates the island’s mingling of Norse and Gaelic cultural influences

(Tom in Dunyvaig by Dunyvaig)

Tom’s weekly Islay whisky tasting notes proved to be a particularly popular feature of that club!

(Stronachlachar, from West Highland Way)

I don’t mind saying that the West Highland Way club was one of the most ambitious projects we’ve ever completed.

Through twelve patterns, twelve essays, and a series of short films, we celebrated the place in which we live

I particularly enjoyed researching and writing the West Highland Way essays – which explored different aspects of our landscape as an always-peopled-place, from the Ben Nevis observatory, to crofting practices of seasonal transhumance (commemorated in the Shieling blanket)

The patterns I designed for this collection remain some of my most-worn favourites

(Strathendrick)

Last year’s club – Knitting Season – was similarly broad in scope – with a focus on creativity in a broad sense.

The designs I developed for Knitting Season were all about testing different approaches, or trying out new things in one’s knitting – such as the Dathan pullover, which encouraged colour play.

For this club, I also researched and wrote twelve essays, exploring different approaches to creative practice, from Hokusai’s repetitive (but always different) images of Mount Fuji . . .

. . . to the searching, reaching sounds of musician and composer, Alice Coltrane.

Those essays were gathered together for club members in Wheesht, a book which has gone on to be our surprise best-selling title of 2020.

Wheesht was published and sent out to Knitting Season club members in 2019: I didn’t know what was coming when I was researching and producing this book, and certainly one lesson of writing Wheesht (for me) is that the times are always in their own way, uncertain. But 2020 has undoubtedly been year in which many of us have felt in much need of creative encouragement.

The 10 Years in the Making club takes up the creative theme, and Wheesht‘s positive, inclusive and enabling approach – but this year for me it is all about the knitting.

I have hugely enjoyed developing a group of brand new designs in our new yarn, Schiehallion, and really love working with this colour palette, as well as with this soft and springy woolly wool.

There’s a range of relaxing and challenging knits, new takes and classic styles, and each week I’ll share “My Favourite Tinks” in a series of fun reads that explore the things that I most love in my knitting. Club members receive a 10% shop discount as well as the weekly patterns and essays, and we’ve some wee bonuses and surprises planned too. Our key aim in this club is to bring some knitterly fun and cheer to see out a year that has been, in its own way, difficult for everyone. There are a range of fair and inclusive pricing options (we’re offering a digital-only subscription this year for the first time) and it has made us all very happy to see club members signing up from all over the world. Some of you may be interested to know that we’ve already had more sign-ups to 10 Years in the Making than for any club which we’ve run previously – which, if it says anything, suggests that many of us are looking forward to some fun knitting this autumn and winter! Will you join us?

The first pattern lands next Friday, on the 25th – and you can sign up for the club at any time.

There’s some more information here about the club, and, if there’s anything else that you need to know, please bear in mind that Mel is currently taking a much-needed break after a couple of very busy weeks, so there will be a short delay in email communication until she’s back at her desk next week.