Award-winning Scottish publishing and design
We released another pattern with our friends at Shilasdair today – Ringle Based on the very first, very simple, yoked pullover that I ever designed and knit, Ringle features Shilasdair’s Coara Worsted — a springy blend of Blue Faced Leicester and Shetland fleeces that’s now available in some beautiful naturally-dyed shades. Ringle’s yarn is dyed…
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It’s a very busy week here at KDD! On top of our usual work on a new book and collection, we are launching our seasonal product range before the recommencement of Knitting Season on September 6th. Whew! You may remember that last year we began producing new pullovers using fantastic Shetland yarns spun by Scotland’s…
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As the summer draws to a close, I thought I’d round up some of the many inspiring projects that have been knitted in recent months from KDD patterns, and show you a couple of new designs in our yarns. Last week, Melanie Berg revealed a stunning shawl in Àrd-Thìr, which reminded me of the beautiful…
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On our way to North Uist and Berneray a few months ago, we stopped off in Skye to say hello to Kirsty, who now runs Shilasdair, the Isle of Skye natural dye company. I first visited Shilasdair – when it was run by natural-dyeing legend, Eva Lambert, in its old home on the Waternish peninsula…
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Today, I’m delighted to introduce Melanie Berg as the next participant in our European Yarn Community conversations. Melanie is a German designer whose work will, I’m sure, be already very much admired by many of you. Melanie is best known for her shawls, but she also creates gorgeous modern garments, and everything she makes is…
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Downstream, a simple top-down cardigan with raglan shaping, is a sleek and wearable knit.
Progressing through the Bold Beginner Knits patterns, I find my confidence in my knitting has grown…
Ta Da! Meet Midstream – the fifth pattern release from Bold Beginner Knits Since I created Rowchoish for the West Highland Way collection, I’ve had a bit of a thing for using simple oblongs to create interesting shapes that wrap around the body. I have so many oblong-y ideas, in fact, that they could probably…
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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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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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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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I seem to have had a breakthrough with being able to read my knitting during this project. Maybe down to the chunky yarn, meaning the stitches are easier to see.
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