Quick Catch Up with Janie Crow

Greetings from Paris where I am really enjoying a week long workshop trip hosted by Stitchtopia. I have a fabulous group of knitters and crocheters with me and we have had an amazing time so far, so I am not really looking forward to ‘real life’ when I return home next week!
 
Gemma, Emma and Andy have been busy holding the fort while I have been away. To be fair they usually hold the fort anyway, while I faff about with yarn, but it is always good to know that my beloved Janie Crow is in safe hands when I am not there! 
 
Before we get stuck into this Quick Catch Up email, which is mostly the work of Gemma, I want to say a huge thank you for all the amazing happy birthday greetings I received last week via email and our social media channels. Your support really does mean so much and it is extra special when you get in touch!
 
We have a couple of things to tell you about this week, so I hope you can spare a few minutes to catch up with our news…

I left London in the early hours of Monday morning when we hopped on Eurostar from St Pancras and travelled to Lille in France. From there we travelled to Rouen via an amazing museum dedicated to preserving machines and artefacts associated with the area's history of hosiery production. We saw machines dating right back in time, when people made socks and stockings at home, right through to more industrial machines from the 70s and 80s. It was really interesting and the volunteers at the centre were incredibly charming, and excited to have us visit, giving up their precious spare time to show us round.

In Rouen we enjoyed a city tour and a visit to its fabulous art gallery. We also fitted in some workshops, where I my guided my group through the details of the two projects I have designed for the trip. One of the things I love about tutoring on Stitchtopia holidays is having the time to work through projects over a longer period, giving participants the chance to knit and crochet in a more relaxed way than when on shorter workshops. Hopefully they can glean lots of tips and techniques along the way, not just from me, but from their fellow participants too!

Yesterday we visited Monet's famous gardens and house at Giverny. An absolute treat and one that I can now tick off my bucket list! Having missed the wisteria, most of the alliums and the peonies because of the hot weather recently, we were instead treated to a plethora of roses in the formal gardens and the waterlilies in full bloom in the ponds. You can see more pics of our special day over on our Instagram feed here.

We are now in Paris for the next three days, with a full day workshop today, a city tour (to include lots of yarny inspiration) with Julie Dubreux on Saturday and a trip to the palaces of Versailles on Sunday.
 
Of course there have been lots of treats along the way too! There is delicious looking food everywhere you look, so it's been hard to resist. One lunchtime I couldn't walk past this doughnut filled with crème pâtisserie without buying it! Yes, it was almost as big as my head. No, it wasn't eaten daintily and no, I didn't share it!

On both social media platforms we celebrated my birthday last weekend with a 20% discount on all download patterns, an offer which many of you managed to take advantage of. We look forward to seeing some of the results of your pattern purchases filtering through to our social media soon, so remember to keep tagging us when you share your makes. 
 
We love seeing your projects, particularly the beautiful colourways you come up with when you are brave enough to step away from the original colours in the patterns. It always amazes us how different the same design looks when alternative colours are used. 

We still have good stock levels of lots of kits. I know this is the time of year when you probably don't fancy the thought of making a cosy blanket, but just in case you like to get organised well in advance for your late summer and early autumn makes, you might want to take a look!
 
We have particularly good stocks of Sevilla again, Magic Circles, Summer Palace and Mystical Lanterns blankets, the latter being one that we struggle to keep good stocks of during the cooler months due to its popularity. If you like the idea of a lighter yarn for a project, so that you can crochet through the summer, then you might want to consider Crimson Dreams, which is made using quite a few shades of the lovely recycled yarn from Stylecraft called ReCreate.

Gemma's latest review on her book of the month blog looks at ‘150+ Crochet Borders’ by Bernadette Baldelli, published by Quarto in January of this year. ​

The book includes some really unusual border ideas and all the information needed to incorporate them into projects, such as the number of stitches they need to be worked over. 
 
Take a read of Gemma's thoughts on the book over on the blog here and if you fancy grabbing a copy yourself you can get a 20% discount and free delivery with the code DD88 if you order from the Search Press website.

We have featured the most amazing knitting project ‘The Longest Yarn’ here before but wanted to show you something that the project recently brought to the attention of Stylecraft Yarns, a sponser of the project. They got in touch to show off the incredible life-size World War 2 Jeep. Here's what they had to say:
 
"I wanted to share with you one of the most remarkable pieces now standing inside The Longest Yarn here in Normandy — our life-size WWII Jeep. The Jeep carcass itself was built by Ken Lewis, with Mike Forster alongside. Ken is well known for his work and expertise supplying historically accurate uniforms and vehicles for productions including Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, so authenticity was incredibly important from the outset.
 
Once the structure was complete, our volunteer team then began the enormous task of transforming it entirely through knitting and crochet using Stylecraft yarn as the medium. Every panel, wheel, seat and detail has been created stitch by stitch by our ladies using the wool you so generously supplied to us. What began as yarn has become a full-scale wartime vehicle which now stops visitors in their tracks inside our 12th-century Normandy church.
 
It really is a wonderful example of traditional craft being used to preserve and tell history in a completely different way."

What an incredible undertaking and apparently now most of the interior is almost complete with every detail being within a millimetre measurement to a real 1944 Ford GPW Jeep! If you'd like to find out more about 'The Longest Yarn' including it's future destinations click on any of the images above. ​

Here at Janie Crow we often talk about how crochet and knitting has helped us through tricky times and we know that this is also the case for many of our followers who have shared some of their experiences with us through our social media platforms. 
 
As such we were interested to come across this article on BBC Future which discusses how knitting and crochet may be useful tools in the treatment of addictive behaviours and mental health disorders such as OCD and the eating disorders anorexia and bulimia.  
 
It's clear from the article that studies have been quite restricted in their scope and take-up, but the overall sense is that knitting or crochet are far more likely to have some kind of beneficial effect than cause any harm and that surely is good reason for anyone to give it a go! 

We had some extremely hot weather here in the UK last week and I don't know about you, but eating (well certainly cooking) sometimes feels like just too much in the heat, so simple, snacky meals, such as hummus and veggie sticks can feel much more appropriate. If you haven't tried making hummus before, it's really easy and well worth a go. Here's a recipe for a quick, basic one from the BBC Food website.
 
Hummus makes a great base for other things too. We ate the version shown in the pic below on holiday in Spain last year and it was really delicious topped with grilled broccoli, feta cheese, tahini and sesame seeds. Add a few crackers and a salad and that's dinner sorted!

I will be travelling home on Monday after a packed weekend here in France, with next week set to be busy too. I am really looking forward to visiting Emma Ball's new premises on Thursday and catching up with my friend and fellow designer, Debbie Abrahams the same day, as she is also based in Nottingham. Andy and I are heading to a music festival on Friday. I have the written pattern for a workshop project and quite a lot of admin to squeeze in to Tuesday and Wednesday, so I am going to have to hit the ground running when I jump off the train!
 
I want to leave you by saying again how touched I was by the number of you who wished me a happy birthday last week! It was really lovely to get so many messages and I was amazed by the number of you who contacted us to say that you are my birthday twin too! I have tried to get back to all of you, either by ‘hearting’ your message on our social media platforms, or by emailing you, but it's not always easy to respond to everything, so apologies if I have missed any!
 
We will be back in a couple of weeks with the June newsletter. Until then I hope you stay healthy and happy!