Season 3 Ep. 2: Nightshift Shawl and How To Start Your Own Knit Along (KAL)

Transcript of episode:

Welcome knitter to the Encourage Better podcast. If knitting is your creative refuge, the place you craft your best self, but some days sitting solo on the sofa feels lackluster and leaves you a bit empty: Keep this podcast going! Encourage Better brings you to Kodiak Island, and is the must listen to podcast to kickstart your knitting Mojo and broaden your smile. So welcome! I hope you enjoy our episode. Let's get started.

Aloha friend, and thanks for joining me here on Encourage Better: Knitting Adventures in Alaska. Kodiak has quite a swing of the pendulum from what winter and summer are like. And this isn't in regards to temperature as much, because Kodiak is truly a temperate zone where our temperatures don't swing more than, you know, 30 ish degrees from winter average to the summer. And the part that swings is usually the day light and the nighttime. So we're currently gaining daylight. In early April, the sun is setting after 9pm. Whereas in December, it was dark before 4. And I bring this up simply to share the idea of ebb and flow...

And it's not just in your attention or excitement, dear listener, the very days grow short and long. A project that I began on May 21 2020 of last year and finished on July 24, actually began six months earlier. In December, when I began spinning some yarn. I was spinning without clear purpose, I was just enjoying creating a variety of singles. And they were plied. These particular ones were plied barber pole and had a very fun SpinCycle Yarn-esque look to it. If you know that yarn then that image should pop very quickly into mind, where the colors from one single put together with the other would flow in some areas that were in alignment. And then other areas there would be quite a contrast. So I tucked the skeins away because I wasn't sure of their future use. I was just happy at the time to have created them.

Do you ever work like that dear knitter, maybe it's spinning, maybe it's purchasing a certain yarn. You aren't quite sure what you will use it for. But you know that it's going to be something good. And I'm not asking this rhetorically. I sincerely would love to hear from you about this. You can email me at Melissa at encourage better.com and share a bit about it. Perhaps your idea or story can be shared with other listeners for encouragement.

Okay, fast forward from spinning a variety of skeins in winter to May. I connected with a friend in Scotland who loves shawl knitting, and she and I decided to knit Andrea Mowry's Nightshift shawl, which I'm wearing it right now as I am chatting with you. It's cozy and I love it and I dubbed it The Shifty shawl. Not only did my friend Chloe and I get started with it, but after asking her permission, I invited my friend Barb and she invited her sister Lois into the mix. I created a WhatsApp group where we would share our progress and hold one another accountable and offer any help if we got stuck. These were the "great ideas" that I had.

And right away we all got stuck. Picking out yarn was the first hurdle and it was a high hurdle for each of us to leap over. Though leap we did not do. We each showed pictures of possible candidates. Then we we revamped our selections most of us more than once, and I settled on using two skeins of my aforementioned handspun. And a skein of Hudson and West's weld in a gorgeous Goldenrod color. That colorway is called mustard. And I also had a spincycle yarn that was primarily just yellows and golds, and a touch of green. Anyways, these were to be the primary yarns for my shifty. I liked the drape of using fingering weight yarn, on the 4.5 needle, which I only discovered after playing around with swatches, if you swatch you know. But it took quite a few attempts. The shifty Shah was meditative, which I appreciated as my mind and my spirit. During this time, we're kind of stretched. And the color changes between the yarns made me quite content. I know that as a knitter, when I share these things, it doesn't sound crazy to your knitting ears. Whereas I think if just someone else listened, they might think that was a strange thing to share. About halfway into the knit, I exchanged the mustard for the spincycle yarn that I had. And it gently flowed from a rich, robust yellow to a very deep gold, and a deep brown, and even yellow greens.

So the group back to the group, the group was fun to knit with. And I'm telling you this for a purpose. You can make your own community. I'm gonna say that again, you and I can make our own community. Sometimes there's a, there's a cow, a knit along on social media that every buddy is in. And you may be hesitant as you don't want to get lost in the crowd. Or maybe they started, this happens to me all the time. Maybe they started and you're late to the party. Not that they would mind or anything. But you personally are just wishing that you could have begun at the beginning. You can always knit with a friend or two, you can use a pattern to knit up with a new friend and make more friends. So in our group, my friend Chloe didn't know Barb. And neither of us had spent time talking with Lois until Barb invited her. But at the end of it all, it was a lovely time with friends. Now I like a step by step breakdown of ideas. And in case you do too, here's exactly what I did in that group. I simply went into WhatsApp, any group program that you want to use is fine. I used WhatsApp because that's what I talked to all my friends on anyway. But I went into WhatsApp and created a group chat. I added Chloe and Barb and Lois and I even snagged a screenshot of Andrea Maori holding her night shift shawl, and I added it as our group photo to kind of inspire us. And I started us off with a simple prompt of introduction. And we each chimed in either with a voice message which is so fun to hear your friends voices, or a text message. And then we started adding pictures, mostly of what the yarns we were considering and then the yarns that we were no longer considering then then it morphed into our pets. So what do our pets look like? And then it went from photos to not just photos but little video clips. There were just the four of us in four different time zones. But we had zero overwhelm and a lot of fun.

The small group provided a simple, but effective way to be part of something shared. The message is never felt overwhelming in number four in content. And when a question was asked one of us or all of us might chime in with an answer. The video part was especially helpful when questions arose regarding color choices, as well as showing an answer to a particular place in the pattern instructions. And since we had all purchased the pattern, and this was a private group chat, we felt fine with pointing to portions of the text within the pattern for clarification, because nothing was going to be given away so to speak. Why am I sharing these steps and thoughts? As a simple encouragement for you, a group of two knitting together is equal in value to 400 or 4000. In a social media knit along if you miss the online one, or you're hesitant to get plugged into a huge cow, look to one or two fellow knitters. And empower yourselves to enjoy the experience together. If you found out about the yarn swap two weeks after signups closed, why not reach out to one or two knitters that you know and orchestrate your own?

I find it so important to beat this drum: that small scale doesn't mean small value. Few numbers doesn't mean less worth. An audience of one is an audience. And it's so important to chase the meaning and chase the true experience than it is to chase the numbers. So one further thing that I like to mention is the goal of the knitting group can be community and not actually what you're knitting the project. The project can be a byproduct that's just extra, like the cherry on a Sunday. In our group, one of us finished one to my knowledge is still knitting. One realized her colors were not at all what she envisioned, and one decided it wasn't for her. And all of us are happy with where we are and proud to lend encouragement through the knitting. And the oohs and ahhs that is progresses. And all of us are happy and proud, and celebrating with each other at the spot where they are.

So if there's any chance that you've got a knitting buddy who might thrive knitting alongside of you from afar, get their creative juices flowing. And you can do that by simply sharing this episode with them. It's simple and it takes less than 45 seconds, you can just click the share link and send them this episode, I suggest adding a little note that says you're a knitter that I adore. But to be honest, my family always says my text messages are a bit extra. You can actually share this episode with them and not miss a word I'm saying as the action doesn't close out this episode, you can give it a try and let me know if anything takes off for you.

As I look out my window seeing more springtime snow here on my island. I am thankful that you're here. It warms my heart. I'm thankful for you. And I hope that you enjoyed our time together. If you are curious as to what my shifty Shah looks like, you can check your inbox if you're an email subscriber, because I sent some fun pictures of my progress directly from our WhatsApp group and an email that went out. And there's also a post on the website that shows colors. Some of the ones that made it some of or some of the ones that didn't make it. My final project, which I'm squeezing right now, just the changes that I made, which were slight in the knitting, as I alluded to before, I used here and spun. And just a note to mention, the weight of my yarn was not what was called for and the pattern. So there were some adjustments to be made. And I share all of those with you. If you'd like to sit down and read the blog post. You can find that by heading to www dot encouraged better.com forward slash night shift Shaw and my hope is that you dear knitter, find peace and joy and aloha in your day and your creative process. Aloha for now.