Baaad Anna's Yarn Store

Do you have any Hue Loco Backyard Chicken yarn that you have been meaning to get on your needles? Now’s the time to cast on to join our knit- or crochet-along and get a dent into your project as we have put this awesome group of prizes up for offer! Drumroll please…….

Some yarn and matching pattern book, pom poms, and pom pom making kits donated by Baaad Anna’s as well as this amazing Sock Yarn Studio book of patterns donated by Hilary of Iron Dog Books. Also I will be handing out a half a dozen of my precious, precious backyard chicken eggs from my own little squakey ladies as a dealer’s choice prize!

If you haven’t had a chance to browse our Wall of Fame, there are some amazing photos of FOs (finished objects) and WIPs (works-in-progress) that have been entered into our #fowlKAL over in the Baaad Anna’s Ravelry group. So inspiring! Be sure to add yours before the end of Feb to be eligible for our prize draw!

BUY BACKYARN CHICKEN SETS HERE.

I just finished my second chicken project of 2021, and get this… even with extra repeats to knit up tall socks, I had enough leftovers to KNIT A SECOND PAIR from this set!

Hilary of Iron Dog Books did a different take on the same yarn set colourway above! I passed along my leftovers to her to help grow her shawl into a giant FO! Can’t wait to see how it ends up!

If you missed our previous post on our Knit’Em Up Chicken KCAL, you can catch up here:

POST UPDATE: See below to find out how to join us before the end of the month and enter our draw for Knit-/Crochet-Along prizes!

Do you have a Backyard Chicken that you have been saving for a rainy day? Or have you been eyeing one of these Hue Loco beauties but haven’t made the leap yet? Join us for a casual knit along (KAL) to get these gorgeous birdy yarns onto your needles and into your 2021 FOs (finished objects)!

BUY BACKYARN CHICKEN SETS HERE.

Our lovely neighbour, Hilary Atleo of Iron Dog Books and I have decided to cast on our chicken yarn and egg each other onwards towards completion. This yarn is so pleasant to knit because every stitch gifts you with a new colour/shade. In the past have finished complete projects (two shawls and a pair of socks) with these sets in just over a week, and that is our aim for this KAL! We both have two sets of chickens we plan to work on over the next few weeks, so join us if you wish and we can celebrate together!

Check out this great photo essay Hilary posted yesterday on Instagram:

Pick up your favorite chicken set here, and cast on a Downhome Shawl, a pair of socks or just play with us using the free skeleton shawl pattern by Stephan West, The Boneyard Shawl, which allows for your own adornments of playing with lace or colour segments! Email us at baaadannas@gmail.com if you want to join in; And stay tuned for updates as we go!

My backyard chickens.

My backyard yarn.

My backyard produce!

BUY BACKYARN CHICKEN SETS HERE.

We now have a place to chat and enter our draw for prizes in the Baaad Anna’s Ravelry thread:

We’re keeping it simple: cast on, or finish a project with a Hue Loco Backyard Chicken set, and post a photo in the CHICKEN PHOTOS NO CHATTY thread (one post per chicken), we will do a RNG (random number generator) draw for prize winners at the end of February.

If you need help adding your entry to Ravelry, email us a photo with your name and phone number at baaadannas@gmail.com and we can post it for you.

No other rules: play fair (ie. put some good amount of stitches into the project), share progress photos in our Ravelry Knit Em Up CHickens KCAL thread, and enjoy the chicken knits!

While we may still have a wee bit of winter ahead of us,  we can safely start think of spring and all its joy and new colour. Accessible and affordable, needle felting is a wonderful fibre art to celebrate all things Spring. Cheeky gnomes, Easter eggs and flowers are just the start to the endless projects one can create with just a few materials.

At Baaad Anna’s we are thrilled to have local fibre artist Mel Broome as our Needle Felting Teacher. Our Learn To Needle Felt Workshops Online via Zoom are available to all ages and a great value with all the materials you need for the class and beyond included in the cost. And now they are also accessible from the comfort of your home!

Mel’s classes are fun, encouraging and inspiring. To learn more about Mel, her journey and the art of needle felting here in our Teacher Spotlight .

Learn To Needle Felt  Workshop-Online Via Zoom

FEB DATE: Sunday February 28th from 10:00am – 1:00pm PT ∼or∼

MARCH DATE: Sunday March 21st from 1:00 – 3:00pm PT ∼or∼

APRIL DATE: Sunday April 25th from 10:00am – 1:00pm PT

Register online here!

Join us for this 3-hour workshop online to learn a new art!  Needle felting is quick and fun way to create three dimensional fibre art pieces.

Baaad Anna’s is happy to welcome local artist Mel Broome to come teach the basics of needle felting. Participants will learn: the basics of 3D needle felting, the tricks to creating a fine finish on your work, how to mix and shape wool like a pro. No previous felting experience necessary.

MATERIALS INCLUDED (to be picked up from Baaad Anna’s prior to the start of class):

• 50g Roving Fibre
• 2 Medium felting needles
• 1 Felting Block

Minimum 3 and maximum 8 participants. For ages 7 and up.

COST: $50 (+tax) Includes materials.

INSTRUCTOR: Mel Broome

No not wool tattoos, which before the Pandemic it might have been since we had a local tattoo artist lined up to host a tattoo knit night… BUT ‘wooly tattoos’ are taking your hand knits to a new level by the addition of embroidered artwork to your finished piece. Type that into Instagram, Pinterest or the web and you can be lost for hours in the gallery of hand-made brilliance. But guess what? We are bringing this skill to our little corner of this community, by presenting a zoom workshop to help make this skill something anyone can try!

Bloom Handmade Studio Class coming this Spring!

We at Baaad Anna’s have long admired Carolyn Bloom of Bloom Handmade Studio’s gorgeous reverse embroidery techniques and are thrilled to announce that we will be hosting her Reversible Embroidery on Stockinette Class online via Zoom this Spring.

In this class Carolyn will show how to turn straight stockinette into a blank canvas for embroidery on both the right and wrong side of your work by embellishing it with contrasting yarn.  The end result is a gorgeous effect that has garnered the hashtags #stitchesonstitches and #woolytattoo on social media that we cannot get enough of! You will learn ways to add decoration to your projects with truly unique results and will never look at knitting the same way again!

REGISTER HERE

To learn more about Carolyn Bloom please visit her website bloomhandmadestudio.com.  You can also follow her on Instagram @BloomHandMadeStudio and Facebook at Bloom Hand Made Studio.

Reversible Embroidery on Stockinette Class Online via Zoom

Are you craving a unique way to add visual interest to your knitting? This class will have you looking at straight stockinette with a newfound appreciation!

Using the right side and wrong side of your work into a canvas for embroidery, over the course of the class we will talk about anchor stitches, grids, motifs and more. You’ll be delighted to discover that this technique can be applied to right and wrong sides of the same fabric for a gorgeous, reversible piece!

Students will work the technique on both sides of a swatch during the class as a starting point to be able to incorporate this style of embroidery into other projects in the future.

In addition, we will talk about the design process and how to approach incorporating “stitching on stitches” into your work. Before you know it, you’ll be craving the meditative qualities of stockinette, confident in your ability to turn it into a unique masterpiece after the knitting is complete.

DATE: Saturday March 20th from 10:00am-12:pm PT (Vancouver BC)

COST: $45(+tax)

Wanna know who’s behind our little LYS, virtual-LYS, online store, and yarny community? We are going to start a monthly feature on the Staff and Teachers that make our little corner of yarny heaven possible. You can check out all of our Staff and Teacher bios here.

For our first staff spotlight, we’d like to introduce our amazing store manager, Sarah! The hero of our store, she helps the rest of us take on the days. A crafting inspiration, Sarah can complete a project every time you turn around. Check out her Ravelry page to view her extensive collection of personal work.

Sarah wearing the Zaftig Tee. Photo courtesy of Sarah L.

Journey to Baaad Anna’s and Knitting

Sarah discovered knitting in 2004 and loved the portability of the work and the usefulness of the final projects. A few years later, she added crochet and then, in 2018, sewing to her list of crafts. She loves having the ability to make her own wardrobe; getting to make things that fit her and her family just right, that were designed to be special and one-of-a-kind.

Coming from an office job, it was in 2015 that Sarah decided to take what she loves doing and spend all her time around yarn and crafting. She’s found herself a great community of yarn lovers, and we love having her on the Baaad Anna’s team!

One of 5 crochet blankets Sarah has made for Desert Bus for Hope to help raise money for Child’s Play Charity. A summer project that takes approximately 150 hours.

We sat down virtually with Sarah to ask her a few questions:

What do you have cast on right now?

S: I generally try to keep to no more than five projects at a time (I am not always successful at this). Right now I have:

1. Ridgeview Tee crop top in Sugar Bush Crisp in Boreal Forest (for me)
2. My Knitted Vanilla Heart Sock in Shirley Brian Sock Set Tesseract (for me)
3. King Edmond the Just socks in Black Cat Everyday Sock Starforce (for my husband)
4. White Karin dress in Wollmeise Lacegarn Blaue Tinte (for me)
5. Baby Owl C2C in Uptown Worsted (crochet) (for my new baby cousin)

Sarah’s current WIPs.

How do you take to learning a new technique?
S: I usually look for tutorials online. Then it’s just a matter of getting some yarn and practicing until it makes sense. One of the great things about knitting is that you can rip out your work and try again with the same yarn over and over until it looks the way you want it to.

Sarah also keeps a yarn stash graph as a way to be more mindful when picking patterns for yarn she already owns.

What is your comfort show/movie/book?
S: I read pretty much constantly, it’s one of the reasons that I learned to knit without looking at my hands. In 2020 I read Becky Chambers Wayfarers series for the first time (and then twice more) but for true comfort reading the Terry Pratchet Discworld books are a series that I re-read once every year or two. I don’t watch a ton of tv or movies but I spend a lot of time watching Twitch streamers play games or make art while I knit. There are some really great communities out there to join. I’m an introvert at heart so for the most part my life hasn’t changed too much due to COVID-19. But I very much miss knitting and having a beer in a brewpub!

Sarah in Vietnam, 2019.

What is your hottest knitting take?
S: I don’t know if it’s a hot take but please please please swatch before you knit a sweater. It’s worth it. Also if you are using hand-dyed yarn alternating skeins while you knit is a pain but your finished project will look much more cohesive.

We hope you enjoyed getting to know Sarah. If you frequent Baaad Anna’s, it’s more than likely you will run into her. Be sure to ask her about her one-skein Wollmeise Lacegarn dresses!

Welcome to the weekend! We have Valentine’s Day to celebrate our loves, and Family Day to spend time together and as the second Sunday in the month we at Baaad Anna’s are reminded about the opportunity to strengthen our community with knits that give joy to others. Whether you call it charity knits/crochets or fibre art donation projects, we take Give Back Sundays as a monthly heads up that we are part of a greater whole: a community. Through Fibre Arts we have the opportunity to clothe, warm and delight others, and these are done in a number of amazing ways. Today we will highlight two amazing initiatives that do just that.

Project Linus is an international non-profit named after security blanket-toting character from the Peanuts comic strip. With the motto that a blanket is like a hug when you need it the most, this group organizes blanket-making efforts, be it knit, crochet, or quilted to give to any child facing substantial distress in their lives. Project Linus Burnaby is based within blocks of our East Hasting location, and we are thrilled to be able to contribute both upcycled yarn donations, blanket squares, as well as fully completed blankets to their efforts. These donations are collected and distributed through our various Community Programs, including our previous Give Back Sunday efforts, and we would be happy to continue to do so. You can read about these and other Give Back Sunday efforts here.

An anonymous donation of four full bedspread-sized blankets passed along through our Give Back Sunday efforts to Project Linus Burnaby.

Another amazing project quietly happening around town is the silent appearance of beautiful fibre art pieces in various corners of the city. Dee of @deirdrepinnockdesigns has been placing beautiful fibre art pieces endearingly called Yarn Bombings on corners and fences that make you stop and reflect. With messages of ‘Be Kind’, ‘I Care’, ‘Pride’ often in places often intentionally overlooked, these pieces have been delighting the local neighbourhoods for months now.

Equally important, she has been added culturally relevant pieces throughout Vancouver highlighting the corona epidemic, ‘can’t breathe’ and various Downtown East Side initiatives. Through our Upcycling initiative, we were able to direct two large bags full of underloved yarns to Dee in the early months of winter to help supply Dee with the raw materials needed to continue on these amazing public art projects. Be sure to follow her efforts via Instagram @deirdrepinnockdesigns.

If you want to focus some of your fibre art adventures on community building, please take some time this weekend to work on a project that would be a gift for someone in need. A gift of a blanket or warm hat truly embodies the strength that can be found in a healthy community. We will continue to focus on community growth and give-back projects with our monthly Give Back Sunday feature, on the second Sunday of each upcoming month. Join us in any way you wish!

POST UPDATE: See below to find out how to join us before the end of the month and enter our draw for Knit-/Crochet-Along prizes!

Do you have a Backyard Chicken that you have been saving for a rainy day? Or have you been eyeing one of these Hue Loco beauties but haven’t made the leap yet? Join us for a casual knit along (KAL) to get these gorgeous birdy yarns onto your needles and into your 2021 FOs (finished objects)!

BUY BACKYARN CHICKEN SETS HERE.

Our lovely neighbour, Hilary Atleo of Iron Dog Books and I have decided to cast on our chicken yarn and egg each other onwards towards completion. This yarn is so pleasant to knit because every stitch gifts you with a new colour/shade. In the past have finished complete projects (two shawls and a pair of socks) with these sets in just over a week, and that is our aim for this KAL! We both have two sets of chickens we plan to work on over the next few weeks, so join us if you wish and we can celebrate together!

Check out this great photo essay Hilary posted yesterday on Instagram:

Pick up your favorite chicken set here, and cast on a Downhome Shawl, a pair of socks or just play with us using the free skeleton shawl pattern by Stephan West, The Boneyard Shawl, which allows for your own adornments of playing with lace or colour segments! Email us at baaadannas@gmail.com if you want to join in; And stay tuned for updates as we go!

My backyard chickens.

My backyard yarn.

My backyard produce!

BUY BACKYARN CHICKEN SETS HERE.

We now have a place to chat and enter our draw for prizes in the Baaad Anna’s Ravelry thread:

We’re keeping it simple: cast on, or finish a project with a Hue Loco Backyard Chicken set, and post a photo in the CHICKEN PHOTOS NO CHATTY thread (one post per chicken), we will do a RNG (random number generator) draw for prize winners at the end of February.

If you need help adding your entry to Ravelry, email us a photo with your name and phone number at baaadannas@gmail.com and we can post it for you.

No other rules: play fair (ie. put some good amount of stitches into the project), share progress photos in our Ravelry Knit Em Up CHickens KCAL thread, and enjoy the chicken knits!

Ever wanted to learn how to crochet?  Or maybe you have the basics covered and are ready to take the next steps?  We have two great classes for you and a fresh shipment in the shop of Sudz as well as a great selection of the Estelle Double Knit and Yanbowler Faux Fur Pompoms to inspire your creativity.

Hand-dyed, knit and modelled by the talented Rebecca Glazier of Wild West Dye.

Pick yours up today! And keep an eye out on our upcoming blog posts as we will be hosting a KNIT ALONG for this amazing pattern, to help get this kit on your needles and finished by Easter!

Through the quiet and sometimes lonely winter its so great to have some additional yarny events start up locally, and the next one on the books is an online relaunch of Knit City! Slated for Feb 5th -7th it will include online classes and a great lineup of virtual trunk shows. We will be featuring another free online Yarn Tasting on Saturday Feb 6th at 9:30 and you can join us through a day-of link on this Marketplace Schedule.

Our first online Yarn Tasting was held in mid January, and can now be viewed in full at the Fibre Love Affair youtube channel HERE.

We launched an online version of our fun Yarn Tasting event for the mid- January Fibre Love Affair event, and though it had some technical challenges, we got some great feedback that the yarn tasting is a fun, creative and educational way to showcase our favorite yarns and continue to build our yarny community.

Join us on Feb 6th to chat all things yarn! The Tasting is free of charge and whether or not you got your hands on a Yarn Tasting kit, we are sure to have fun. We are now sold out of our first batch of yarn tasting kits for the Feb 6th show, but if you missed getting yours we are currently taking a waitlist. You can add yourself to it via our online store and by Wed we will decide if we will indeed have more to offer.

Our Yarn Tasting consisted of four featured yarns and this round includes Uschitita, Wild West Dyeworks, Malabrigo and Estelle. I invite people to cast on and knit along while discussing the merits and specs of each of our featured yarn, as well as offering pattern choice options and showcasing garment samples for each. The yarns selected included a variety of weight and fibre contents to showcase the array of diversity to choose from when planning your next project. Although these events are always better in person, together we made an attempt to create a new opportunity for yarn lovers to connect from the comfort and safety of home. They are free of charge to join, can be viewed at your own convenience (are recorded and can be linked to afterwards).

ADD TO YARN TASTING KIT WAITLIST HERE.

Hope you can join us this coming Saturday!

We have a wonderfully active Business Improvement Association in the Hastings-Sunrise area who do some great community building and engagement activities. A really cool initiative that they have recently launched is a BIA buck program where they are investing in the drive to shop-local by providing BIA Bucks: $10 for any $20+ purchase that can then be used locally for other small businesses. We have a limited number of BIA bucks to give away, starting February 1st!

Here’s the details:

BIA Bucks
Participating businesses are giving out $10 BIA Bucks those who spend $20 or more! The $10 BIA Bucks is for future use at any of the participating businesses in the East Village until March 15th, 2021. Each participating business will return the redeemed BIA Bucks to be reimbursed by the BIA!

Participating Businesses:

• Yolks
• Callister
• Baaad Anna’s Yarn Store
• Save on Cartridge
• Infinity Printing
• Yan Bakery
• The Learnary
• Jackalopes
• Pacific Bread Company
• Steam Teahouse
• Fresh Headies
• Tamam
• The Goods
• Coho Coffee
• Green Room Yoga
• Plant Life Nutrition
• Plenty + Spare
• Willow’s Wax Bar

To help spread the love we will be handing out one $10 BIA buck for any $20+ purchase, with a one per day per customer limit. There is no minimum for redeeming your BIA bucks, we just ask that you use it to explore the hood and shop at one of our participating neighbouring establishments! Come by and support some awesome local businesses!

We have some pretty cool businesses in this area. Check out how ahead of the curve our neighbours, Iron Dog Book and The Learnary are: