Pride!
This year’s Pride celebrations may have been a bit quieter, but no less valuable. Our world may have turned upside down, but people have turned to crafting and creating for solace and strength.
We are proud to support one amazing initiative that has been steadfast giving joy over the past weeks: the #quietqueerscraftalong whose great tag line sums up this year perfectly: Because we’re too tired for regular pride.
The #quietqueerscraftalong is currently running until September 13th and can be found on Instagram. Queer crafters as well as those practicing allyship are welcome to join, with WIPs or new projects, and they have biweekly giveaways to celebrate on this Instagram page. Finished projects tagged with #QQC2020FO are automatically entered for final prize package drawings, which will include yarns, notions, patterns, and more!
We offered our amazingly affordable Estelle DK 3-Skein Kit in a custom non-binary colourway to @quietqueerscraftalong as a giveaway to celebrate the crafting that is so needed in today’s world. We chose this kit because it perfectly combines quality with affordability, from a family owned company that has reliably been supplying Canada with amazing yarns for over 40 years.
This is the same kit we have in the custom Baaad Anna’s colourway of red, black and grey. Read more about our commitment to affordability and accessibility in our blog: A Shawl For All.
If you would like to pick up a pack of the custom colourway shown above, this 3-skein kit is only $26.95 and we are putting a pre-order together for two pride custom colourways: non-binary (as shown here) and Trans (in white, pink and soft sky blue) in our online store today, and will be shipped by the end of the month.
Happy Pride!
The Summer of Fibre Kits
Welcome August!!! This has been the summer of fibre craft kits at Baaad Anna’s. It’s also been the summer of many a started sweater, pairs of socks, and other projects too but we’ve also been having fun making all the fibre kits we are now carrying. From knitted gnomes to macrame plant hangers, we’ve tried them all and are hard pressed to name a favourite (don’t ask us to choose, we can’t!). Any of these kits are the perfect August grab-and-go camping, staycation, vacationing, keeping-kids-engaged activity and we think you’ll love them too! Read on for a summary of the felting, weaving, macrame and knitting kits we have in store.
Macrame plant holder, knit gnomes, felted succulents and animals, and the alpine macraweave kits that are featured in the front of the store.
Felting
Felting is a great introduction to fibre arts and is beginner and kid friendly, requiring no additional tools or materials than what is included in the kits. We have three types of felting kits available:
- The Sarah Elizabeth Fibre Works felted soap kits are fun for ages 5 and up (we successfully made it with a 5 year old, it’s been tested!) and take under an hour to complete. Your felted soap will last much longer than regular soap and once the soap is gone you can use the remaining wool as a natural fibre scrubbie for cleaning. These brightly coloured beauties are functional, delicious smelling, and make a great gift.
- New to the store are the cute-as-a-button succulent needle felting kits from Okanagan Dye Works. Unlike the soap kits, which are done with wet felting, the succulent kits are made using needle felting. The kit includes everything you are going to need to make your tiny felted succulents, including the wool, ceramic pots, felting needles, foam and instructions. These are also beginner friendly and suitable for anyone over the age of 6 (although younger children might need help from an adult). How can you resist making a teeny tiny plant that needs no watering?!
- Last, but not least, we have a full menagerie of felted animal kits from Estelle in both medium and large sizes. Pandas, foxes, birds, sheep, mice and koalas are just some of the wee animals we have in stock. These kits are also beginner friendly and include everything you need to make your chosen animal. We (somewhat predictably) chose to make the sheep!
We also have a wide rande of needle felting supplies sold separately to help round out your summer needs!
Weaving
We recently blogged about the Sarah Elizabeth animal looms and how they are a great summer stashbusting project. The sheep and llama looms and fibre are sold separately to let you choose your own adventure, and they come in both small and medium sizes. Because of their diminutive size, these small weaving projects are also a great adult-child activity since the small loom takes little time to complete using beginner friendly weaving techniques. Let your creativity run free with this project!
BUY YOUR WEAVING SUPPLIES HERE
Macrame
We have two great beginner kits from Sarah Elizabeth Fibre Works (located in Rossland, BC) that will have you learning the basics of macrame in no time! Suited to teens and older, we have both alpine macraweave kits and macrame plant hanger kits in a rainbow of colours. The Alpine Macraweave kit combines macrame and weaving techniques to make a beautiful new wall hanging, and the macrame plant hanger kit includes everything you need to make both a single and double plant hanger. Sarah Elizabeth Fibre Works kits really encourage you to play with your creativity and try new things (which we loved). Read more about our experience making the alpine macraweave here and plant hanger kits here.
Knitting
Last but not least, we have our beloved gnome kits! We’ve been taken with Sarah Schira’s (Imagined Landscapes) gnome patterns for some time now. They are engaging and intricate and a great way to learn how to do cables and other fun stitches that you don’t often come across (the curved Gnome Pun Intended hats are a great example of this!). Each kit includes everything you need to complete your gnome (the pattern, yarn, washed llama hair filling, and glass bead weights) and we bet that once you make one you won’t be able to stop. Experienced beginners will enjoy these as well seasoned knitters. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – waste gnome time before casting one of these on!
Happy kit making everyone!
Sunday Special!
Welcome to August! To start off this hot month, we have a hot hot deal for our weekly Sunday one-day sale… 50% off Cascade Heritage Paints sock yarn!
Today only you can get a lovely 100g skein of handpainted sock yarn for only $9.95!
Enjoy your Sunday!
August Reopening
Have you been missing the squish of the yarn in your hands and the comfort-inducing smell of yarn fumes since the small business closures in mid-March? We are excited to announce that we will be [partly] opening our doors again starting August 1st and can’t wait to have you visit! Our opening hours will be from 11am-2pm EVERY DAY of the week!
We have set up the front area as a boutique-style shopping experience, where you can browse through some of our newest Spring and Summer lines, including Chester Knits, Earl Grey Fiber Co, and the 2020 Backyard Chickens sets from Hue Loco, as well as check out our wall display of fun kits and knit-samples.
In the front area we will have colour samples of our entire line of Corriedale felting fibre, and some examples of our more affordable lines of DK, worsted and bulky yarns that our staff can get for you from the back of the store.
Tip-toeing into our store opening, we are opening only the front boutique to the public for browsing. Although much of the store will remain staff-only, we will be able to bring you yarn and other materials from the rest of the store to the front desk, after which we will quarantine the yarn before re-stocking it so that both our staff and customers can feel confident about shopping in these strange days.
We will be asking for your help and patience as we navigate this new reality; other health protocols we will have in place will include:
- Limit of 2 parties, keeping 2 metre distance in the front boutique area
- Hand sanitizing mandatory before touching any merchandise
- No cash sales
- Staff will be unable to give hands-on help with knit and fibre arts projects or handle customers’ patterns
- Phone-in help and orders may be limited to after-hours staff time
- Winding services may be limited; as well as may require a one-week hold in order to quarantine
We are hoping to open a little more extensively in September but for the sake of our comfort levels, we are approaching this cautiously. We now have almost all of our current stock available in our online store (with inventory numbers) at www.baaadannas.store and the best way to get knit help and recommendations is still to drop us an email at baaadannas@gmail.com as we can give more focused help on this platform. Thank you for your continued support of our family business; we are truly grateful for the community we call home!
Breathe and Hope Revisited
Earlier this Spring we participated in knitwear designer Casapinka’s Local Yarn Store Day shawl launch with kits for her new 2020 design called Breathe and Hope. It’s been a minute, but we have been able to see some of the amazing shawls fully knit up in the kit colourways, which were based off various East Van neighbourhoods. We are thrilled to be able to both show & tell, as well as re-offer the kit colourways thanks to a quick restock from one of our fav BC indie dyers, Chester Knits!
Check these out…four colour combinations for this shawl that best represent the East Van hoods that we call home:
Renfrew:
Photo credit: greysquare photographics
Hastings:
Photo credit: greysquare photographics
Mount Pleasant:
Photo credit: greysquare photographics
Strathcona:
(we haven’t seen this one knit up yet!)
For our kits we have chosen one of our newest lines of yarn for 2020, Chester Knits Soft Sport because as soon as they arrived almost all of our staff ‘sampled’ and fell in love with this base. Using a sport-weight instead of the pattern’s fingering recommendation, the yardage needed is two skeins of each colour and your shawl will end up slightly larger than the pattern’s given dimension. You’ll also want to purchase Casapinka’s Breathe and Hope shawl that’s available here. The colour combos above are:
- Renfrew: Cactus and Pink Pop colourways to echo the avenues of sakura blossoms found in this neighbourhood;
- Hastings: Peacock and Daffodilly reflecting the vibrancy that is found when a florist, record store, LYS, bookstore and olive oil distributor line a city block;
- Mount Pleasant: Tiger’s Eye and Bubble Gum Ice Cream create a damper colour combo of for a more sophisticated audience;
- Strathcona: Flash Mob and Sea Foam to reflect the welcoming streets of this multicultural neighbourhood.
The top two are high contrast colour combinations that will make the colourwork pop, whereas the bottom two are low contrast colour combos where the colours blend together in the eye of the beholder.
And we are also thrilled to have a top-up on Chester Knits yarns not only in the colourways used in this kit, but also on a large selection of both their Soft Sport and Cloud Worsted bases. Check out more here on this amazing new indie dyer from BC’s Interior, Williams Lake.
The yarn community is an amazing place. Fibre artists, crafters, makers, designers, dyers and farmers all come together to create a vibrant and active community that grows cultural, physical and mental well-being. A Local Yarn Store (known affectionately as a LYS by many in the fibre arts community) both serves and celebrates with this community, so to be at the giving-end of this new community-driven day of celebrating LYSs is such an honour! Thank you to everyone who has supported us through the online store over the past few months of this shift in operations, but it is with initiatives such as this that we are able to survive and help our communities keep small family-owned businesses such as ours! Thank you!!
Sunday Special!
For this week’s Sunday Surprise we have another pipsqueak small but mighty fine yarn on sale for all your colourwork needs. Baa Ram Ewe’s Pip Colourwork comes in 25g balls of 100% british wool spun in Yorkshire. At $5.50/25g it is already an affordable option, and today only you can get an additional 30% OFF!
Today only $3.85 each!
Check out how we paired this up with our other affordable 100% wool in store, Briggs & Little Sport to work up this great colourwork hat by local designer Caitlin Shepard of Plucky Pigeon Designs.
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- Chanticleer Hat by Caitlin Shepherd (Plucky Pigeon)
Enjoy your Sunday!
Knitmas in July
Our annual celebration of Knitmas usually lines up with the winter celebration, but as this year has been so upside-down perhaps some of you need a midsummer gift to self?? Here are a few ideas if you need a bit of self-spoiling with some summer surprises!
2019 Twelve Days of Knitmas contents! Pre-orders for 2020 which will be slightly different, available NOW!
We will have a limited pre-sale of our 2020 Baaad Anna’s 12 Days of Knitmas ‘advent’ calendars, just in time to count down the last dozen days of summer, before the chaos of September! This year we will have a very limited run of 40 advents available in total, and starting today we will make one-quarter of these available for pre-sales. If you purchase now you can pick up your advent in-store by mid-August if you feel you just cannot wait until December! The remaining advents will be available for our regular sales in October (with a special pre-sale available to all previous Advent purchasers from past years… so no worries if this is an annual winter gift to self…we’ve got you covered!).
GET YOUR 2020 Baaad Anna’s 12 Days of Knitmas ‘advent’ calendars PRESALE HERE!
We also have a small number of our 2019 Baaad Anna’s 12 Days of Knitmas ‘advent’ calendars still available. These are in no way date specific, nor winter holiday themed. This Knitmas advent featured some of our favourite Canadian dyers and many other lovelies. If you didn’t participate in last December’s Knitmas advent and need some self-care, this is also a great gift to self!
BUY 2019 Baaad Anna’s 12 Days of Knitmas ‘advent’ calendars HERE!
And also…
We are thrilled to partner with another local talent, Sandy Bahrich of Firefly Notes, who created a 25-day stitch marker advent calendar and agreed to let us make a limited number available for our Knitmas in July event (so long as you can keep a secret so it is still a surprise for anyone who wants to keep it until December)! Firefly Notes is a creator of some of the most magical fibre arts notions ever; we even commissioned her to make a special Baaad-Anna’s notions tin that is ONLY available in the 2019 Knitmas Advent (available here)!
BUY 2020 Firefly Notes Stitchmarker calendars HERE!
Happy Knitmas in July! Make sure to take care of yourself in these amazing upside-down days!!
Brioche With Us!
Beyond the Basics: Intro to Brioche-Online via Zoom
In this project-based class you will be introduced to the amazing texture, colour and reversibility of the Brioche stitch. Over four weeks you will work together on the Briochevron Drawstring Tube by Stephen West to create a two colour, squishy, convertible cowl which can be worn cinched into a slouchy or brimmed hat. Other skills that will be covered in this class are the I-cord bind off, picking up stitches and seaming. Suitable for: Advanced Beginner, as skills needed are: knit, purl, cast on and bind off.
DATES: Wednesdays, August 12, 19, 26 and September 2nd from 6:00-7:30pm PDT
INSTRUCTOR: Rebecca Glazier
Rebecca has been knitting since she was 7 years old and has always had a love for textiles and colour. Teaching people how to knit and crochet expresses one of her greatest joys; sharing her creativity and passion with people. Originally from the UK, she has called Vancouver her home for the last 5 years.
To register call 604-255-2577, or register online here!
Project of the Month: Sailing Sweater
Our July project of the month is the Sailing Sweater designed by Canadian designer Beckie Paul, whom some might recognize as the dyer for Shirley Brian Yarns! Gabby, our community coordinator, knit this rust coloured summer version in local indie favorite Vegan Yarn’s Pakucho worsted cotton. It’s a perfect summer evening sweater and we’re predicting it will fit right in with all our fall and winter knits too.
BUY YOUR WORSTED WEIGHT YARN HERE
The Sailing Sweater is knit in two identical horizontal pieces, from cuff to cuff, that are blocked and then seamed together. Once the seaming is done you pick up and knit the cuffs (no sleeve island!) and you’re all done. The Sailing Sweater uses a beautiful lace motif throughout that’s easy to follow with both written and charted instructions. Knitters that are new to lace can easily pick up the lace pattern; it is a great sweater to learn on as after a few repeats it gets easier to memorize and anticipate what comes next.
The Sailing Sweater is knit in two identical pieces that make for lots of drape and positive ease.
The Sailing Sweater has lots of positive ease built in to it and offers two different options for sizing. A regular and tall size are outlined in the pattern and because the sweater is knit horizontally, it is incredibly easy to customize to your body. The tall size adds an additional pattern repeat or two in length to make the final sweater longer in the body and you can also knit additional repeats as you go across the body sections to increase the overall width of the sweater to get desired size and ease.
In order to make this a summer-weight shell instead of a fall weather sweater, Gabby did some yarn substitution magic! She used a 3.75mm/US 5 needle with thirteen 50g balls of the Vegan Yarn Pakucho cotton (~1300 yds) for this sweater. She sized down from the recommended needle size in the pattern to get the gauge and we recommend doing a gauge swatch (and washing it to see how the material acts once relaxed after a washing) before you start your project to make sure the final size is one that you are happy with.
The Pakucho cotton is a special yarn from local New Westminster, BC, yarn company Vegan Yarn. Pakucho is made from an ancient heritage variety of South American cotton and purchasing this yarn directly supports biodiversity and the amazing heritage of colourgrown cottons. The Pakucho yarn is EKO Certified Organic by USDA, adheres to the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), SKAL & Certified Fair Trade by Control Union Fair Choice, and it has been made for Vegan Yarn by Peru Naturtex. Check out our full post on Vegan Yarn’s Pakucho cotton from a few months ago to learn more about it.
The seven natural colours of Vegan Yarn Pakucho worsted cotton that we carry.
Here’s what you need to know about each ball of Pakucho yarn:
Fibres: 100% Certified Organic Cotton
Gauge: 20 stitches = 4 inches (10 cm)
Needles: 4.5 – 5.5 mm (US 7 – 9)
Weight: Worsted (4)
Length: 50 g / 88 yards (80 m)
You can also machine wash and dry it. Yup, you read that right. As long as you account for 10-15% shrinkage in length as you would with other cotton fabrics you can throw it right in the dryer after washing it (in cold water preferably). The colour will also intensify with washing rather than dulling.
While we knit ours out of Vegan Yarn’s Pakucho, there are other wonderful worsted weight yarns in the shop that would be great for this sweater, like Malabrigo Rios, Cascade 220, Briggs & Little Regal, Sugar Bush Bold, or Chester Knits. Depending on the drape, texture and colour that you want to achieve there are many ways to customize this staple sweater!
Sunday Special!
And now for something completely different… this week’s one-day sale is a joint THANK YOU from both Baaad Anna’s and our lovely neighbour Iron Dog Books who was able to secure a number of fun knit pattern titles (both in book and pamphlet form) that we could share with you for the unbelievable price of $2 per book!
* Just a heads up, any books shipped have to be mailed with AT COST SHIPPING; see product info in our eStore. In-store pickup is as always free of charge.
Pick through various titles at your hearts content but watch out as most titles are single copies so grab them while you can and treat yourself!
Enjoy your Sunday!
