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Are you a beginner knitter who is wary of lace shawls? Does the very idea of putting holes in your knitting scare you? Or does a lace shawl just appear too complicated a thing for you to consider attempting? Well, Footfall – the latest pattern release from Bold Beginner Knits – offers you a deceptively…
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Hello! Tom here. Kate and I spent all of last week away in Berneray and North Uist, where I’ve been working on a new photographic project (more of which later). Late spring and early summer is a truly beautiful time of year in the Outer Hebrides, and we feel very lucky to be able to…
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Do you have any knitting needles to spare? KDD is currently supporting some local community groups who use craft as a tool to tackle social isolation and mental health and we need needles! We are able to provide yarn support, to share our skills, our patterns and ideas, but new knitters also need things to…
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A Bold Beginner Knits tutorial for the Upstream pullover When you are knitting your first sweater an instruction to “join body and sleeves into yoke” might appear especially bamboozling. You have, on your needles, one body and two sleeves. How on earth do you combine these three separate tubes so that they magically become one…
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Hello! Kate here. It’s time for another release from the Bold Beginner Knits collection – the Upstream pullover. Seamless yoked pullovers are a great first sweater project for a beginner knitter to tackle, and I knew I wanted to include one in this collection. And loving the muted marl-y palette of Àrd-Thìr, I was keen…
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Hello everyone, it’s Tom here popping in to tell you about my latest photographic assignment – the 2019 Drymen Show. In 2017, as part of a project for my darkroom and film photography course at City of Glasgow College I set about documenting – and celebrating – the people, the animals and the work involved…
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A few months ago, when Jane decided to learn to knit, I thought it might be nice to design a few things just for her. Simple patterns aimed at beginner knitters are sometimes not terribly exciting, either in the making or the wearing, so I set myself the challenge of designing some simple patterns that…
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I have been thinking a lot over the past week about the difficulties of talking about the mental health “benefits” of a craft like knitting. There’s a lot of really interesting research about crafts and mental health about right now, but I often have problems with the way such research is publicly communicated or presented.…
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Have you heard about the Shetland MRI scanner appeal? I know from personal experience just how important MRI scans are, since it was inside one of these machines that my stroke was diagnosed nine years ago. Magnetic resonance imaging is an incredibly important diagnostic tool not just for brain injuries, like my stroke, but for…
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If there’s one thing I’ve had time for over the past few months, it is my knitting. I think one has to be very, very careful when talking about knitting and mental health, or discussing craft activities in association with terms like “mindfulness”: mental illnesses are varied and complex, and craft is not, in any…
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A few days ago, all of us at KDD were very excited to hear that Jennifer Moats (WonderfullyWovn on Ravelry and Instagram) had won Best in Show at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival skein and garment competition for her beautifully-knitted version of Kate’s Shieling blanket from the West Highland Way collection. We caught up…
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Hello everyone, it’s Tom here. I thought I’d pop in to share some of my photos from our recent Hebridean trip to the isle of Berneray (Eilean Bhearnaraigh). As a photographer, I find the ever-changing weather and shifting quality of light in Scotland’s Western Isles really stimulating in my work. On this trip we were…
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