Knit 15

Take a dive into colour pooling and the journey that your multicoloured hand-dyed skein of yarn takes when you begin knitting it into fabric. Helen Reed, AKA The Wool Kitchen, and Wendy Peterson of Yarnsub.com explore the maths and magic that can make the difference between colours emerging as star dust or a smear across your sweater. Images and links to the yarns shawl and app mentioned in this episode are all available on the Knit15 Episode 4 web page.

Celebrating the extraordinary and hidden lives of unsung heroines in knitted squares, the Balance for Better Blanket was created to mark the 2019 International Women’s Day. In Episode 3 of Knit 15, Felicity Ford tells the story of a knitted blanket, of a friendship and of the 30 women who inspired it. Presented by Anna FeldmanProduced by Damian Zane

Undaunted by the initial disdain she received from local mill bosses, Rosa Pomar’s single-minded determination to source and manufacture wool from local flocks of sheep, is now not only respected by Portuguese wool industry chiefs, but also celebrated by knitters and knitwear designers around the world. In Episode 2 we hear from Rosa on how her fascination with Portugal’s rich history of woollen textiles and knitting traditions, turned into a mission to put sustainability and integrity back into wool-making for hand knitters. Later, during questions from the audience, we’ll hear more from Rosa on how she responds to the modern knitterly appetite for super-soft baby wool, why in spite of being a shopkeeper, she urges knitters to buy less and knit more, and of course the story of those beautiful ball bands.

Fit your sweater perfectly around your shoulders and the rest will follow. In Part 1 of this episode, Renee Callahan AKA East London Knit, makes the case for abandoning our preoccupation with bust measurements as the starting point for measuring up for the perfect fit.Beyond shoulders or any other part of our bodies for that matter, lies the engineering of the stitches of our knitted fabric. In part 2, you'll hear yarnsub.com's Wendy Peterson asking us to follow the yarn on its journey to that exasperatingly loose stitch at the end of the row to solve a 30 year puzzle on why it’s not just leaning, that decreases do differently. In the talk Wendy refers to a number of pictures which you can see on the Knit 15 page of the Wild and Woolly website.Presented by Anna FeldmanProduced by Damian Zane