November newsletter

20/11/2020

November Newsletter

It seems to have been one of the speediest months ever here at Janie Crow and I honestly cannot believe that I am here with another of my bumper monthly newsletters! To be honest, it is getting a bit scary to realise that Christmas really is on the horizon and that another year is almost over. I keep thinking how strange it is going to be to look back on 2020 and have very few punctuation points to remember, like big family birthdays or holidays, so I have downloaded a year planner for 2021 and stuck it up on the wall in the studio this week in the hope that I can start filling it up with exciting projects for next year....my fingers are very tightly crossed!

So this newsletter is pretty much all about the Festive Season and we have some lovely things to show to you including some new designs I have contributed to Inside Crochet magazine and some images of hanging decorations that Sarah has made from my recent pattern using some lovely alternative colour palettes. We also have an interesting piece that Sarah has written to showcase the designer maker Melanie Keevil and we have also focused on our new Lifestyle brand, with a piece I have written all about plastic!

You can find a video introduction for this newsletter by following this link or by clicking on the image below.

We have some new products on the Janie Crow web site this week including the brilliant knit and crochet stitch inspired tea towels from Tilly Flop (shown above) and an updated stock holding of loads of my crochet project kits.

If you have been patiently waiting for any of these kits we now have yarn packs for the Love Is Enough version of the Fruit Garden CAL, Mystical Lanterns Blanket and Lily Pond Blanket to name but a few. All in all we have updated stock levels of 9 designs and have added more than 100 kits to both Janie Crow and Just Knots, so we are sure you will find something to keep you busy over the next few months as the weather turns more chilly!

You can check out my back history of designs by flicking through the downloadable catalogue here.

This month we are focussing on the technique of adding beads to your crochet and you can find a technique video by following a link that is featured lower down this newsletter. Don't forget you can send in your questions for our monthly Q&A simply by replying to this email.

I hope that you can spare a few moments to settle down with this week's newsletter and catch up with all things Janie Crow.

Inside Crochet Magazine - Festive Edition

I am a big fan of Inside Crochet Magazine and I have a lovely relationship with the team there - they are incredibly supportive and helpful and I am so thankful for their friendship. I think Inside Crochet Magazine is one of the best crochet mags out there and I love that they push the boundaries of the craft and have such a beautiful style with the quality of the images and styling, the stunning locations and the projects they choose to feature.

The new Festive Edition of the magazine is out now and boy is it a (Christmas) cracker! There are so many fabulous projects in there including designs by some of the UK's leading designers and I am honoured to have been asked to contribute the patterns for some more festive decorations that feature in an exclusive 'beaded crochet' cover book.

The cover book contains the patterns for 4 decorations (made in 2 alternative colour ways) and step-by-step instructions and images for adding beads to your crochet. The magazine even has a tube of gold beads included to help you get started on your beaded crochet journey.

If you like the idea of beading but feel you need a bit of extra help you can find a video tutorial that Sarah and I filmed a few years ago on the Janie Crow YouTube channel here and a free to download technique document here.

You can find more bead shades over on Andy's Just Knots site by following this link but unfortunately we have now sold out of the magazine, however you can find it for sale on the Inside Crochet web site here.

De-stash Decorations
Sarah Hazell

I have been really inspired this year by Jane’s Festive Crochet Decorations pattern to dip into my stash and make some decorations to hang in our home and also to give as gifts. By coincidence our sitting room is decorated in grey and white, but the rest of our abode is much more colourful and this got me thinking about using Jane’s designs in different colours. In fact one of the great things about this pattern is that it provides you with a framework to create your own unique colourways.

I am not going to bang on about colour theory because the chances are that you may not have the ‘right’ colours in your stash. Instead I am going to show you some examples of how I have used my stash this week by taking inspiration from what I already have!

This year we have been encouraged to get outside and take the time to absorb what nature has to offer us. The colours used for this first decoration were inspired by the idea of walks in the forest and the colours of leaves, tress and pathways.

I have used various different DK weight yarns to echo this idea and tried to link them to some of the things from our Christmas drawer of treasure!

My second source of inspiration came from a little collection of hand-painted wooden houses that I bought last Christmas but in fact display all year round because I love the mid-century palette that it conjures. Anybody who knows me will recognise how much I love coral and this one really helps to balance the more muted tones in this scheme.

I particularly enjoyed making this motif as it contains some oddments of beautiful hand dyed cashmere that I was fortunate enough to find a few years ago. It is so soft and precious and reminds of the day I visited the dyer at her studio with friends.

Blue has been the Pantone colour of the year for 2020 and so this decoration was inspired Pantone’s Christmas colours. Again you will see that I have sneaked in some of my favourite orange but this time it is much deeper and helps to draw in some of the reds that are so prevalent at Christmas.

These colours also make me think of Scandinavian countries and that lovely contrast of red and terracotta tiled roofs against blue-grey buildings and waterlines. I bring the painted stones out every Christmas and they are amongst my absolute favourite decorations.

Finally it wouldn’t be Christmas without a bit of Winter Wonderland. This choice was inspired by my daughter, Phoebe who loves the sparkle of Christmas. It may be difficult to see in the photograph but the darkest yarn is a sparkly sock yarn. (I used this double to get a similar weight to the other yarns).

The other colours are intended to suggest a winter sky with that soft pink that we sometimes see at this time of year.

I hope that my words and images have inspired you to look at ways of making your decorations extra personal this year to reflect our love of home and also using the resources we have to give as gifts or keepsakes.

You can find the patterns for Jane's hanging decorations and her mini stockings by following this link or by clicking on the images below.

Homemade Advent
Gemma Biggs

As seems to be usual for me these days I decided fairly last minute, towards the end of November last year, to make advent calendars for my daughters. I liked the idea of making something that could be used from year to year and that I could fill with little treasures that suited their interests.

I had purchased some fat quarter bundles of Christmas themed fabrics to do the job I then set about cutting all my pieces out. The tiny little pockets took quite some time to cut out and sew and then these were sewn onto the background fabric before assembling the calendar. I sandwiched wadding in between the front and back pieces of fabric and then used bias binding around the edge to hold all the pieces together before adding two loops to the top edge through which I could feed a dowel and ribbon for hanging. I had also sewn two channels on to the back fabric to slide two dowels into to give the calendar some weight and stability, but a piece of sturdy cardboard sandwiched inside would have worked well too. The stick-on numbers for the pockets finished the calendars off.

By the time I had the calendars finished I had left myself about 48 hours to get things to fill the pockets with! So, the idea of little treasures flitted quietly out of the window and I set about trying to use my imagination to come up with ideas. My eldest daughter Olivia was (and still is) totally obsessed with cats so I set about crocheting her a cat family. They were very simple 2D cat shapes, but she loved them. That accounted for about seven of the pockets and the others were filled with a variety of small foil wrapped Christmas chocolates such as santas and snowmen along with some ‘vouchers’ to be exchanged for little treats such as a manicure or facial, or choice of DVD to watch or book to read together. Instead of the cats for my youngest daughter Emily, I had hidden away some of her favourite toys, Disney Tsum Tsums. These are tiny rubber collectible figures of Disney characters and she was delighted to find one of these in her calendar every few days. The remainder of her pockets were again filled with small chocolate treats and treat ‘vouchers’.

The calendars are still up in the loft with all the other Christmas paraphernalia at the moment, but Olivia is reminding me on a daily basis that they need to be got down and filled. She talks about using them for years and years and even when she is grown up. The fact that the calendars have already become a ‘family tradition’ puts a huge smile on my face and makes the time spent making them feel like time well spent.

Janie Crow Lifestyle

Thank you for the amazing response to the new Janie Crow baby! We are so pleased to have received so much positivity about it and we are really grateful for all your follows on the Instagram page.

Did you catch the link to Summer's yummy double chocolate cookie recipe? If not you can find it by following this link and clicking on 'Vegan Recipes' at the top or by clicking on the image below.

Since posting the cookie recipe Summer has made some more cookies and added recipes for carrot and coriander soup and vegan Yorkshire puddings to her site - don't worry if you are not vegan, many of the recipes can be converted to use butter and eggs and Sum gives advice on how to do that.

Andy made a batch of the double chocolate chip cookies at the weekend using butter and non vegan chocolate and although his cookies looked a little less professional than Summer's they were really tasty! The brilliant thing about these cookies is that you can make the dough in advance and pop them in the freezer so that you can bake them when you want. They are gorgeous when fresh and gooey out of the oven!

If you didn't see last week's newsletter where we launched the Lifestyle brand you can find more information by following this link. The aim of the brand is to give you a more personal insight into our lives and loves here at Janie Crow but also to showcase what we think are some great lifestyle and beauty products, all of which have an ethical, zero waste attribute. If haven't checked out the lifestyle store yet then take a look here. The hand and lip balms have been flying out over the last week along with the gorgeous 'Friendly Soaps'. If you click through to the accessories section you will find some more fab things too!

This week we have continued to look at our packaging options at Janie Crow and Just Knots. All Lifestyle products will be sent using biodegradable and ethically sourced packaging with no plastic options and we are swapping our grip seal plastic bags to boxes for as many kits as we can. We also reuse packaging that comes into us - for example we put the Janie Crow Tea Towels into the left over resealable bags that are used to send sets of crochet hooks by one of our distributors and we use waste bubble wrap to pad out any orders that may need it rather than throw it away. We also reuse any boxes that arrive in good shape!

Over the last year we have been using mailing bags made from sugar cane and we have had a few emails from followers wondering why we are not going to continue using these for all your mail so I thought I would use this weeks email to talk to you about the 'big plastic spin'!

Plastic - not so fantastic - whatever the spin!

I remember first becoming aware of the word 'spin' in regards to politicians making sure that however dodgy or dishonest their proposals or legislation might be - if the way it was fed to the public in terms of how it was written or presented had a positive spin then the masses would be more likely to fall for what they were saying.

In a world of social media where we are fed needs and musts all the time it is easy to believe the 'spin' surrounding plastic with words like 'sustainable', 'renewable sources' and 'recyclable' being banded around left right and centre. The mailing bags that we have been using at Janie Crow also say 'Carbon Neutral' and show a symbol that shows they are made from sugar cane, BUT (and of course there is a BUT!) this does not mean that they are biodegradable or that they can be recycled. And it is that factor that is the big problem!

And when I say big problem I mean BIG PROBLEM!

Many mailing bags focus on the process by which they are made rather than the fact that few are biodegradable or recyclable in your home recycling bin, but rely on you taking them to larger commercial recycling bins such as those found at the big supermarkets - I have checked out all of our local supermarkets this week and none of them recycle plastic bags, so it would be interesting to hear if any of you have found a similar problem.

If you have read my Lifestyle value document you will have seen that the decisions we make in regards to yarn use here at Janie Crow present me with lots of dilemmas. ALL the yarn we purchase at trade arrives here in plastic bags and that is regardless of how high end the yarn inside might be. If you add to this the fact that many yarns use processes that use plastic (such as Superwash Wool being sprayed with a type of plastic to make it less likely to shrink when washed) and the fact that more bags are used to pack kits and then to be put in the post you will see that this is a big plastic problem.

If you take a moment to think about this, try and envisage the number of plastic bags being sent out with yarn orders across the globe and then think about the impact that this could be having on the world. Did you know, for example, that only 5% of the world's plastic is in-fact recycled? Did you also know that there is a plastic 'garbage patch' in the Pacific Ocean and that it is estimated that 1.15 to 2.41 million tonnes of plastic are entering the ocean each year from rivers. More than half of this plastic is less dense than the water, meaning that it will not sink once it encounters the sea.

Watch the video here from The Swim.

Over the last few years the yarn industry has focussed on micro fibres and the impact that this could be having on our oceans. Many people therefore see man made fibres as the big enemy, but I would urge you to look at the much bigger picture - the one that shows the billions of wasted plastic bags floating in our oceans along with the plastic drinks and shampoo bottles - the things we use and replace day in and day out.

Over the next few years I will be consciously looking at the yarns I use for new projects and I am so pleased that so many yarn brands are also beginning to look properly at what they produce. I do think though that yarn use is a very personal thing though, and that you are all grown up enough to make the decisions of what yarn to use for your project by yourself! If I have written a pattern for a man made fibre and you want to use wool or cotton then go ahead! Simply check the tension and meterage to ensure you have enough and off you go!

Natural fibres are definitely the way forward, but they are not always within easy reach financially so before we all become big yarn snobs we need to look more closely at making bigger and more necessary changes, which for us here at Janie Crow and Just Knots currently means changing to cardboard boxes and paper packaging for as many items as we can.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this - simply hit reply and let me know what you think!

Maker Spotlight - Melanie Keevil
Sarah Hazell

As you know, here at Janie Crow we are always keen to find out about and support the work of fellow artists and crafters and this week, I want to tell you all about my friend, Mel.

I first met Mel through a mutual friend at one of her solo exhibitions and was immediately struck by the intricacy and integrity of her work. I have been lucky enough to visit her studio, built by her husband and been fascinated at the sheer industry that goes into creating such evocative pieces. The following words are from Melanie and describe her inspiration and process – enjoy!

'For the last ten years I have worked from my garden studio in Kings Heath, Birmingham.
I create abstract ceramic wall panels that are a personal response to landscape, coastline and rock formations. Recently I have also started making ceramic vessels.

My ceramic pieces begin life as a sketch or idea in my notebook. Wherever I travel my sketchbook is with me and I use it to record a detail that catches my attention. Whilst wandering around the sun drenched streets of Spain or France I might sketch part of a building, eroded stonework, a beautifully shaped window or the peeling paint on a door.

The starting point could be the landscape and rock formations of Cornwall and the colours and patterns of a pebble on the beach. I make notes about the colour and light to help choose the right glaze that will best capture the effect that I want to create. I also use the camera to reference colours and composition.

Back in my studio I begin by rolling a slab of white stoneware clay to work on. With my sketchbooks as a reference I draw and press into the clay to make lines, patterns and shapes. I then have to wait for the clay to slowly dry to a firmer texture. The clay panel is sandwiched between newspaper and boards. It has to be done like this to prevent the clay from cracking or warping as it shrinks whilst drying out. Once the clay is leather hard I can begin carving. This creates a three dimensional surface. I select areas to carve that will later be filled with glaze. Some areas will be much deeper than other sections depending on the type of glaze I plan to use, for example some glazes are quite runny and need to be contained.

The next stage is probably my favourite part of the process. This is where I use coloured slips (liquid clay) and coloured stains to paint onto the clay surface. I enjoy the freedom of using the slips like paint, creating expressive marks and texture and building layers. The work is then left to dry out completely this time, slowly between boards. This can take another couple of weeks. It is then biscuit fired to 1000 degrees in my electric kiln.

Glazing is a time consuming process. I mix and create all my own glazes. Over the years I have tested hundreds of recipes. I now have a large range of favourite glazes that I will use on my work. Even so in each firing I will always squeeze in a few more tests. I never stop experimenting with different variations to find a perfect matte turquoise or a pale green crackle to add to my collection. So with my pallet of glazes arranged on my workbench, I set about glazing the bisque fired ware. I find the clay surface uninspiring at this point as it seems a little lifeless somehow. The prepared glazes are in jam jars and look very similar to each other in this raw state. There is no hint of the colours they will become just varying hues of grey, white and rust.
I apply each glaze with a brush. Each glaze will need two or three coats and has to dry between applications. The glaze has to be applied carefully to avoid touching the boundary of the glaze next to it. It is a complicated process and hard to keep track of how many layers l have applied. It is difficult to identify which glaze has been put where as they all look so similar at this stage. There can be as many as thirty different glazes to apply in one of my larger panels.

I fire my work to 1260 degrees. It takes about 13 hours to reach temperature. After two days the kiln will have cooled sufficiently to open. Evert time I open the door of the kiln I am filled with anticipation and apprehension in equal measures. There is always the risk of the work being ruined as well as the exciting possibilities of a glaze that works marvellously to make the finished piece a success.

This year on my Instagram account I am taking part in #artistsupportpledge a wonderful initiative set in motion by Matthew Burrow s MBE. Artists sell their work for under £200 and when they reach £1000 in sales, pledge to buy another artists work to the value of £200. This creates much needed support system for the creative community.
I currently have work in two exhibitions,‘Architectural Echoes’ at Studio Vault in Yorkshire and ‘Crux’ at L ittle Buckland Art Gallery in The Cotswolds. Both galleries are selling work online because of the current lockdown situation.'

If you would like to see more of Mel’s work and support her by purchasing one of her beautiful items, then you may like to look at her Instagram page @melaniekeevil or visit her website

It's Nearly the Weekend!

So, as often happens on a Friday afternoon I am a little late with this email - it is already getting dark outside and the weekend is beckoning. I hope that wherever you are and whatever you have planned you will stay safe and well.

I am planning to sit with my new book in a comfy spot and hope to get out for a long walk in preparation for our big walk in aid of Shelter in a few weeks time. I am also hoping to crack on with my version of the Stephen West MKAL project which I only have 8 rows and the cast off left to complete!
Sending big virtual yarny hugs to you all.

I have been nominated within the Craft Influencer of the Year category of the Craft Business Awards once again. I was fortunate enough to win this award for 2020 and would love to do so again. If you would like to vote for me then click on this link or on the image below to be taken to the online voting forms.

---Support Me---