February News

The weather has been so incredibly dull and dingy here over the last week that I keep finding myself scrolling through the images on my phone in search of something bright and colourful. Thankfully my yarn stash is also a good source of colour therapy and so I have been busy sorting through that too - rummaging around for the really bright, zingy shades that I am pretty sure give me a good hit of serotonin when I crochet with them. If only yarn was a source of vitamin D too, eh!
 
In an effort to cheer myself up, within the midst of what feels like a never ending winter, I have tried to pack a lot of bright, inspiring colours into this email, alongside all my news, and hope that you have a few minutes to spare to catch up with all things Janie Crow!

I was talking to another crochet designer the other day about how the workload of designers has changed so greatly over the last few years. Crochet and handknit designers traditionally worked in-house for yarn companies or were employed as freelancers and thus paid solely for their design work. The advances in technology now means that designers have many more jobs on their to do list, such as maintaining engaging social media channels, creating videos, shooting step-by-step tutorials and dealing with pattern queries, alongside all the usual stuff, such as writing and creating patterns in the first place. 
 
With the rise of forums like Tik Tok and Instagram, we are finding that many new crocheters want to create their projects solely from the use of videos and many of them do not know how to read patterns, so it is interesting to see how the needs of the craft community are constantly changing, putting even more pressure on designers and yarn companies alike to create more and more material for their audience.
 
We have had quite an odd start to the year, with quite a few hurdles along the way, and I feel like I have been chasing my tail work-wise for weeks on end, but hopefully things will be calmer towards the end of the month and I am looking forward to some sustained time with my beloved yarn and hook! It can be so frustrating not to be able to really get stuck into my work, but I feel incredibly fortunate to have a small (but totally fabulous) team who can complete many of the tasks that are now essential for running an online crochet business and who support me so well by picking up the flack when I'm not on top of my game.

The Royal Garden project was first released in 2018 and it was made using yarns from the Rowan range. A few years later I worked alongside Scheepjes to create a kit for the project using yarns from their range. This kit has recently been discontinued, so I decided it was time to create some new versions of the design using yarns from the Stylecraft range.
 
One of the new versions is made using a palette of colours from the Special DK range and the other has been made using Stylecraft's 100% recycled yarn, the lovely ReCreate DK. 
 
We do not currently have kits in stock for the Special DK version as we are waiting for some shades to come back into stock, but we do have the ReCreate kits in stock and you can find them by following this link.
 
The original Scheepjes kit was heavy and weighed in at over two kilos, so we were not able to send it to customers outside of the UK as the postage cost was so high, however, as the new kits are a lighter weight, we have been able to amend the postage options and can send them worldwide. 

The design was inspired by the terracotta floor tiles found in the coffee shop at the Green Hotel in Mysore, India, and the formal quilt-like layout of the former royal palace's gardens at the front of the building.
 
You can choose between two different layouts for the project and we have included colourful diagrams to show both of these in the new pattern (shown below). It also includes written and charted instructions, step-by-step images and links to a couple of free technique videos that Emma has created to guide you along the way.
 
The pattern is available in UK and US terms and we are hoping to have the Dutch language version in stock very soon. You can find more information about the project by following this link. 

I mentioned last month that we have ongoing issues with stock levels for kits. We hope to have this problem resolved by early next month as we have been advised that quite a lot of yarns will be available soon. 
 
We have stock of all the kits shown in the box below - you can click on the images for more information on each of the projects.  

We have just been able to add kits for the Climbing Rose Wrap and the Mexican Diamonds Blanket to the website. You can find them by clicking on the images below. We haven't had either of these kits in for a while, so head over to the website now if you have been patiently waiting!

Despite our relatively poor stock of kits and yarn packs, we do have a healthy stock of paper patterns, which you can find here. 
 
Download copies are always available via our Etsy and Ravelry stores within just a few clicks, so you could always use this opportunity to sort through your stash and see if you have enough yarn to at least get started if you are itching to create a new project. You can link to our Etsy and Ravelry stores by clicking on the images below.

We are in Farnham exhibiting at the Unravel Yarn Festival at the Maltings. The show is on today, tomorrow and Sunday and tickets are still available. You can find more information about this great yarn show here.

​Emma and Gemma came up with the idea of running a team Janie Crow temperature blanket crochet along project over the course of 2025 and they have been very busy creating blog posts and social media content about it since early January.
 
It has been brilliant to see how many of you have taken on the challenge of creating a project using the free motif designs from the Spirit of Flora design, which you can find by following this link. You can click on the image below to see the blog posts about the temperature blanket project.

We won't be exhibiting at The Stitch Festival at the Business Design Centre in London in March as it will collide with our son's 30th Birthday celebrations, however, we are able to offer you a discount code that will give you £2 off the standard adult/concessions ticket price. The code to use at checkout is as follows: 
 
JANIECROW25 
 
The code expires at midnight (or there abouts) on the 6th of March and is not valid on afternoon or Sunday ticket sales.
 
My friend, and fellow designer, Shannon-Jaide of The Wool Flower Co is leading three workshops at the show and there are still have places available on all of them. If you are a beginner then you might want to learn to make a Granny Square with Shannon-Jaide's help, or, if you are more experienced, you could join her to make a crochet bum-bag or some pretty crochet shell earrings. You can find all the information on these workshops by following this link and you can see Shannon-Jaide's work over on her inspirational Instagram feed here.

​My first workshop trip of the year will be the Stitchtopia trip to the Swiss Yarn Festival in early April, which I have realised this week, is not actually all that long away, and so, with just over six weeks left, I have started designing the project that participants will work on while we are away.
 
The concept of the design has been in my mind for ages and I have been looking at traditional Swiss chocolate box designs as the inspiration for the colours and theme of my project. You can find my mood board for the design over on Pinterest if you fancy taking a look!

There are still a few places on the trip to Zurich, where we will visit the yarn show and tour the city. We will also be visiting the Lindt factory, so if you are a chocolate and yarn fan this might sound like a perfect trip!
 
You can find more information about the workshop by following this link.

Andy and I were looking at the origin of our recent punnet of blueberries and wondering when we will start to get fruit and vegetables that have been grown a tad closer to home and have not racked up all those air miles. Living in the UK means that the choice of items grown here is pretty minimal, especially at this time of year, so I was really pleased to see some Yorkshire grown rhubarb for sale at the weekend.
 
Stylecraft have a beautiful shade called Pink Rhubarb in their new Made in Yorkshire range of Special DK. I didn't know until the yarn launch recently that Yorkshire is famous for rhubarb farming. If you are interested in the history of growing the crop in the 'Rhubarb Triangle', you can find out more about it via this article on Wikipedia. You can find my blog post about Stylecraft's homemade yarn here.
 
A few years ago we introduced a rhubarb plant to our garden. It has taken a while to settle, but I am hoping that this year we will start to be able to eat some of it. I certainly won't be paying the eye watering cost that the rhubarb I saw at the weekend was priced at, and will be waiting for the cost to come down (more than) a little before making a scrummy rhubarb crumble, such as the one I have featured as this month's recipe.
 
My mum is a big rhubarb fan too and has always stewed it with a wedge of ginger or slice of orange peel, so the idea of a rhubarb and ginger crumble really appeals to me, especially with a good glug of creamy yellow custard. You can find the recipe here. 

Whether you celebrate it or not, there is no getting away from the fact that today is Valentine's Day. Here at Janie Crow we tend not to focus  on 'special' days as we know they are not relevant to everyone and can cause unnecessary upset, but the reason I am mentioning it today is that I want to focus on the symbol of the day and quite literally get to the heart of the matter! (see what I did there?)
 
I am sure there must have been a time when, like me, you have sat or laid down in quiet surroundings and really focused on the rhythm of your own heart, beating away in your chest, and thought about how amazing it is. An incredible muscle that rhythmically thumps away, keeping your whole body, quite literally, ticking along day and night.
 
But here is the thing - when did you last think about your heart health? Do you imagine how your heart might look inside your chest and whether or not it is in good shape? I was thinking about how much we focus on all the things that happen on the surface of our bodies, like making sure our faces are moisturised and that our skin is smooth and wrinkle free. We all feel the pressure to create muscles and tone in place of excess fat and many of us are prepared to spend huge amounts of money looking after the parts of our body that we can see in the mirror. But what about the vital organs that sit hidden away inside our bodies? If we had transparent skin and could see what was going on inside of us, would we be more mindful of what our vital organs look like? If we had to wear our hearts on our sleeves, would we be more careful about our heart health?
 
The statistics for heart disease are shocking - one in five deaths in the US is attributed to it and there are more than 800,000 women living with the effect of coronary heart disease in the UK, which also kills more than twice as many women as breast cancer here.

I was recently sent a link to this video about heart health on the Zoe Youtube channel. It is an interesting film, where the discussion focuses on what you can do to improve your heart health. If you have an hour to spare then you may want to watch (or listen to) the whole conversation in one go, or like me, you can chunk it down into bitesize pieces and listen to bits of it at a time.
 
Whether you celebrate Valentine's Day or not, I hope that I have inspired you to give some thought to the health of your heart on this special day. If you are pretty confident that your heart is already healthy then you could always celebrate by creating a little crochet version! There are loads of patterns to choose from online but I particularly like this one by The Crochet Leaf! If you fancy making a project that includes heart shapes, check out my Indigo Dreams pattern, which you can find here.

I had a fabulous few days away with some of my yarny friends last weekend and I am still feeling buoyed up by spending time with some amazing women! This weekend we are at Unravel in Farnham and I am so enjoying spending time around yarny folk again. It is always such a joy to be in a room full of yarn and excited knitters and crocheters!
 
I keep misjudging the weather and find I am not wearing quite the right amount of clothes, so this weekend I have packed lots of warm layers in the anticipation of more chilly weather. I have finished knitting a lovely garter stitch waistcoat called Pelica and it is keeping me beautifully toasty over my cardigan! The pattern is by Rosa Pomar and you can find it here. Image below by © Agata Xavier shows the waistcoat beautifully. I didn't include buttons and followed the advice of Linda at Kettle Yarn Co and slightly felted mine to give it a slightly thicker feel. I love it!

After a few teething problems (that you may or may not have noticed) we are hopefully now up to speed with using our new email host. Making the decision to change was not taken lightly and I was worried about the technical glitches we experienced early on, but now I am really enjoying working with the new look email and hope that you like it too! If you are finding anything amiss with this new style of email, like odd text or broken links, please let us know so that we can iron out any issues.
 
We are looking forward to a quieter time next week and I am really hoping, in true British style, that the weather will afford us some brighter days. I hope that wherever you are, that you are healthy, happy and warm.
 
Until next time!