An Introduction to the Concept of “Slow Knitting” | Podcast Episode #98

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Have you heard of slow knitting?

Not the kind of slow knitting we might be familiar with – how slow it can sometimes be to finish a project. This is much deeper and it’s not just for knitters either! Slow knitting is a concept that was brand new to me before speaking to today’s guest, Hannah Thiessen. Hannah wrote the book on slow knitting and she’s here with us today to share what it’s all about and how we can get involved. In today’s episode…

You’ll Learn About

• Slow knitting – what it is and why you might be interested in it.
• Best practices to follow the slow knitting movement.
• How to trace your wool or animal fiber yarn back to the source.
• How slow knitting flows with the meditative qualities of knit and crochet
• Hannah’s book, Slow Knitting

Episode Transcript

Brittany: 0:00
You’re listening to the Be Hooked Podcast, session number 98, with Brittany. Well, hey there, and thank you so much for joining me in episode 98 of the Be Hooked podcast. It’s such a joy to have you here, and isn’t it so refreshing to be in a new year? It’s like a whole new world of opportunities is right in front of us. All we need to do is take it.

Okay, so in today’s show, I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with Hannah about slow knitting. Now, don’t run for the hills if you’re not a knitter. This is more of a concept or a movement more than an actual slow knitting episode, right? We’re not talking about how it takes so long to knit things. It’s so much more than that.

Now, I had the pleasure of chatting and connecting with Hannah for the first time in the summer of last year. I had her and Rob from Knit Crate on the show to talk a little bit about what they do. Well, if you remember that episode, the last thing that Hannah said really just stuck with me. And I just had to have her back on to talk about what slow knitting is and how it can really help us to enjoy our craft that much more. So that’s what we’re chatting about today.

I’m really excited to dive right in, but I want to let you know about the show notes. So previously we’ve had the show notes as behookedcrochet.com slash session something. That’s a lot for you to type in. So I have worked a little magic and I wanted to condense that a little bit for you.

So you may have already heard that my husband worked some magic and he was able to get the domain BeHooked.com. We have been trying to get this domain for so long and he finally got it. I’m so excited. So don’t worry if you go to BeHookedCrochet.com or BeHooked.com, it doesn’t matter.

As a listener of the show, when you’re trying to go to the show notes page, I know that can be sort of a pain to type that much into your browser. So for today’s show, type in bhooked.com slash 98. The number’s 98. Super short, right? bhooked.com slash 98.

All right, let’s dive in to my chat with Hannah. Hannah, hi, welcome back to the show. It’s such a joy to talk to you today.

Hannah: 3:25
Hi, thank you, Brittany. I’m glad to be back.

Brittany: 3:28
Yeah, it’s such a pleasure. I know it was so much fun chatting with you last summer, actually. It’s been a little while. But before we get started today, in case there is a listener who maybe didn’t hear that episode, I’d love to dig into a little bit of what you do. I know you’re a very busy lady, and I would love for you to share that story.

Hannah: 3:25
I feel like I hate when people say that they’re really busy because usually that just means they don’t want to do stuff. But I’m busy because of all the stuff that I want to do.

So last time that we met, I can’t believe it’s been that long since we met up. I was talking about KnitCrate and what I do for KnitCrate, which is a yarn of the month club or like a yarn subscription club that I work for full time. So at KnitCrate, I’m the chief creative officer.

When I’m not doing KnitCrate, I work with small yarn companies or small yarn-related brands. So some of my other roles are marketing and social media or consultation and brand development for—right now I’ve got three clients. I have Quarter Moon Fiber Company, which recently launched, and they make really lovely luxury blend yarns that are milled in Italy.

And then I work for Salt River Mills, which is a Suri alpaca–based yarn company out of St. Louis, and they do everything American production—so they’re sourced, spun, dyed, and produced here in the U.S., which is really exciting to me and very in line with the book we’re going to talk about today.

And then I also work for By Hand Serial, which is a publication out of Portland, Oregon, done by Andrea Hungerford. And it’s like a travel guide for knitters. So it’s different cities from—right now—the U.S. and Canada, but we do have plans to do some international issues coming up. And Andrea basically travels to different places and talks about makers and the communities that surround them in those areas. So they’re not all yarn related, but they’re mostly crafting related—everything from knitting to leatherworking, weaving, glassmaking, and all kinds of cool things in between.

Brittany: 5:20
That’s really cool. I had no idea about that.

Hannah: 5:23
Yeah. So those are my three, like, incubation brands, I guess is what I would call them. And then I also wrote a book in October of 2017. It came out called Slow Knitting. And I just signed on to write my second book, which is a sequel. It’s called Slow Knitting Seasonally. So that’s all things, I think.

So when I say I’m busy, like I really am busy, but I also try to make time for, you know, friends and yoga…

Brittany: 5:56
Yeah.

Hannah: 5:56
Movie nights with my dad, you know, that kind of thing.

Brittany: 5:59
Yeah. Well, that’s important. I feel like a lot of us, we get into that hustle mode so that we can do those things that we really enjoy. And for a lot of us—I’m sure for you and definitely for me—the things I’m hustling with, like, they’re just fun. They’re fun things.

Hannah: 6:14
I don’t know that I would give any of them up right now. It would be very hard to pick anything to stop doing. I’m definitely in yes, lean-in kind of mode right now.

Brittany: 6:26
Yeah, that’s so cool how you can find so many different things around what you love and you’re able to grow in different ways, I’m sure, professionally for each one of those things. I’m sure they all test you a little bit differently.

Hannah: 6:40
Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. I learn so much from working with each brand. And while there isn’t any direct transfer of information, there’s definitely mental transfer of information.

So that if I learn a better way to send email newsletters, or I learn about a new Instagram algorithm change, or how to judge a trend that I feel like is up and coming—how that applies to each brand. So I definitely have a lot of crossover in that way.

But as far as the brands themselves, they’re so totally different, and I don’t know that I could do it if any of them were even close to the same. But because they’re so, you know—like KnitCrate is one thing, and then Salt River Mills is another thing—it just creates these compartments that I can kind of use different areas of creativity for, which is really, really nice. It’s very stretching and encouraging, and you kind of get different audiences with each, so you get to see all these different facets of people who are out there making things.

Brittany: 7:50
Yeah. And I’m sure you can use all of that knowledge and information that you’re gathering—not just learning skills, but just being in those different facets—to help you with your book writing process. So it kind of goes full circle.

Hannah: 8:07
Totally. The book—the first book—was such an educational process as a first-time author. And then the second book, I have so many more ideas about how to write it, but also how to market it and how to share it with audiences and make sure that people know that it exists.

And that has really been the big, huge change for me from book one to book two—just a better awareness of how to share what I’m writing with other people.

Brittany: 8:44
Yeah, I can’t even imagine. I’ve heard that the promotion side of things is the hardest part of writing a book. And that’s hard to wrap your mind around.

I have had a manuscript—gosh, probably like 80% completed—for a couple of years. And it just needs a little bit more. It needs to grow and develop more. And that’s why it hasn’t been pitched or really talked about too much outside of the podcast.

But knowing how difficult it was and is to put that together, I can’t even imagine how much more difficult it is on that promotional side of things too. So—a lot of anticipation around it, I’m sure.

Hannah: 9:27
Yeah, definitely. There’s so much… There’s just so much to do now. I really spend a lot of time thinking about how nice it would be just to release a book and not worry about all of the different facets of what we as authors—or also as knitters or designers or anything—you know, all the things that we have to do now to be seen and heard because we live in such a global market. So just all of the things combined, there’s a lot going on.

Brittany: 10:09
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely good things. You know, it’s great. These are great struggles to have, but yeah, it’s challenging, I’m sure.

Yeah. I would love to chat a little bit about the first book. So you released a book in, you said…

Hannah: 10:28
October 2017 is when Slow Knitting came out.

Brittany: 10:34
I’m really intrigued by the title of it. I mean, as a knitter—for me, knitting is very slow. It comes together very slow—a lot slower than a lot of my crochet projects. And that sometimes deters people from knitting in general. But I know that there’s so much more behind this little statement. So what exactly does slow knitting mean?

Hannah: 11:00
So I’m so glad that you said that because the funniest part to me about launching a book that was titled Slow Knitting is how many people thought that I meant like physically knitting. Knitting slowly.

So I was sitting at Rhinebeck for my first ever book signing that year when it came out. And so many people came up and they said, “Slow Knitting, this is the book for me.” Or they would turn to a friend and be like, “This is for you, Carol. It takes you six years to finish a shawl,” you know, or whatever.

And I was like, no, no, no, that’s not what I mean by slow. I mean, the act of knitting being slow can be meditative and it can teach you patience. And also, you know, the long-term payoff reward system in your brain can go off with knitting slowly. So that’s great in its own way.

But the idea of Slow Knitting definitely came from the idea of the slow food movement. And it’s not an idea that I came up with totally by myself—nobody exists in a vacuum. It’s actually a full-blown movement that’s happening among knitters, and among knitters specifically who are on social media. So places like Instagram—you can search the slow knitting hashtag and see a lot of posts that are not book-related at all.

So the idea of slow food—with slow food, you essentially have a full knowledge of the food’s entire lifecycle. So let’s take a carrot, for instance. If you knew that the carrot on your plate was raised in soil that was not treated with lots of chemicals… Carrots are one of those “dirty”—what is it? Clean 15, Dirty Dozen, or whatever—vegetables where if it’s got chemicals or pesticides in the soil, it gets absorbed into your food.

So the carrot is raised in wonderful, beautiful soil that’s not tainted in any way, and it’s raised by a small farmer who cares about the carrot and has, you know, picked out a special heirloom seed maybe, and they’re excited about growing that carrot. And when they pull it out of the ground, they’re like, “Oh, it’s… this carrot is beautiful.” All the carrots are beautiful.

And then they sell it to a restaurant that also appreciates the history of this carrot’s individual growth and then honors the carrot’s provenance with a dish that highlights it as an ingredient that is whole and pure in and of itself.

Slow food, I think the focus is very heavily on meat and animal byproducts—so like honey or eggs or butter or milk—with the animal being not factory farmed. I think that slow food is really geared towards that also, and not just the agricultural plant food. Because it helps us feel better as consumers of food if we feel like the animal wasn’t unduly stressed or treated poorly or injured in any way during the process—except for the moment of its death to become steak or whatever.

I eat vegan 90% of the time, so it’s kind of weird for me to talk about. But yeah. So the idea of slow food was this idea of celebrating the provenance of the ingredient and who’s making it and who’s behind it. And that started a long time ago with restaurants and chefs, and now it’s kind of grown into something that a lot of people care about locally at the home level. So you’ve got sort of a full return to the soil, so to speak.

So in a like way, the idea behind Slow Knitting is to know who’s producing your wool and who’s producing the fibers that make up your yarn that you’re knitting with—and to make a conscientious decision when you’re setting up your yarn for a project to pick a yarn that is going to be celebrated in the best possible way in your final project.

So when I wrote the book Slow Knitting, the idea was to highlight a bunch of different yarn companies that were not just buying from a mill directly. Like a lot of yarn companies in our industry—the way that you buy yarn is you go to a mill and you say, “I want a yarn that is 75% wool, 25% nylon. I want it to be sock weight. I want it to have eight plies. I want it to be tightly plied or loosely plied, this many yards,” or whatever. You aim for certain parameters, and then the mill spins that for you.

And you don’t really typically ask where the wool is coming from. And even if you ask, you might just get a country of origin. You probably won’t get, like, “Oh, it comes from Los Mantiales in Uruguay.” You wouldn’t know that for sure. So it’s really nice to be able to know that for sure about a yarn.

You know, to look at a yarn—one of the yarns in the book is Woolfolk yarn, which I think a lot of people have heard of by now. And Woolfolk is a very, very soft yarn. It uses wool that comes from Ovis 21, which is like a production/conservation effort out of Patagonia. And the wool is super hyper-soft, but it’s available in very limited quantities and extremely traceable.

So Kristin Ford, who produces this wool, she can say to you, “Oh, well, here are the names of the ranchers that are involved with the project.” And she talks to them directly, and she gets the wool. She has the exclusive right to the wool for hand knitting yarns.

And so having that kind of traceability in wool is a relatively—I don’t want to say it’s new—but it’s new at a level of production. So it used to be that the way that you could get a fully traceable wool was to go to a fiber festival like Rhinebeck or your local fiber festival. We have the SAF festival down here. I know there’s Maryland Sheep & Wool, and a lot of people go there, and they would wait and then speak to the farmer directly who’s selling the wool in their booth. And you got it and you picked it up and you bought enough for your project—but you couldn’t always order that online.

And now most of us are buying our yarns online. I know that the yarn store model is not totally dead—it’s not dying out—but it is slowing down. And so fewer and fewer communities are finding themselves with yarn stores to go to or reference. And a lot of the yarn stores are still buying and carrying wools that don’t have any kind of long indicator. They don’t have any kind of traceability to them.

And so people kind of want to know. I think people are getting more and more excited about knowing the story behind whatever products they use. I see it on Instagram all the time, where a clothing manufacturer posts an ad and nine times out of ten, like the third or fourth comment is, “Where are your clothes made?”

And you think—that’s becoming very important to people. So that’s kind of what I wanted to do with Slow Knitting—offer up some options for knitters who were seeking that.

So the book goes through different sections, and in each section, there are, I think, two yarn makers. And then there’s a few listed in the back of each section in the “Yarns for Thought” section. And it has like—oh gosh, I’m trying to remember exactly how many—it’s like five times five, so it’s like 25 yarn makers or something listed total in the book that are all traceable in this way.

Brittany: 19:51
Wow. Yeah, that’s really cool. I know when I was looking through the outline of the book, I noticed that there were some different concepts to Slow Knitting that you outlined. And without having the book in hand, I’m curious how that worked—like how it comes together. You had mentioned things like source carefully, make thoughtfully, think environmentally, experiment fearlessly, and explore openly. So are those the categories that you’re talking about? And each one of those has different farms associated with them?

Hannah: 20:23
Yeah. So those are kind of like the tenets, in my opinion, of slow knitting. They’re sort of like rules to live by—mottos or mantras.

So when I say something like source carefully—is it source carefully or source softly? Sorry—
Brittany: 20:39
Carefully.
Hannah: 20:40
Right, carefully. I’m talking about where the wool comes from.

So in that chapter, I really focused on—I think the first yarn in that chapter is Green Mountain Spinnery, and they are a co-op. So they know exactly every farmer that’s sending in wool to become yarn. So the idea of source carefully as applied to Green Mountain Spinnery is that they are feeding back into the wool production cycle of their local and semi-local regional communities by making yarn.

Brittany: 21:06
Very cool.

Hannah: 21:07
And then in the Explore Openly chapter, which is kind of at the end of the book, it’s about looking at different fibers outside of what you would consider your comfort zone. So I talk about MYAK yarn in that chapter, which is a yarn that supports Tibetan yak farmers. So that’s definitely outside of what we would consider, as Americans, our regional zone—but it also supports something really wonderful a lot further away from us.

And it allows us to play with so-called exotic fibers in a way that is a little less concerning. Like, a lot of cashmere has sort of unknown provenance a lot of times, or we get yarns that are like camel. Or there was a big to-do about mink a few years ago, where a yarn was advertised as mink, but then it was tested and none of it was really mink.

So there’s a lot of that kind of thing happening in major production yarns—mass-produced yarns. So getting information about yarns that are high-quality, commercially spun yarns, but that also have these interesting exotic fibers that knitters want to play with is sort of the Explore Openly chapter.

Or like the Think Environmentally chapter is a lot about how different yarns that we have embrace the natural materials. So Bare Naked Wool is in that chapter. Anne Hanson—when she creates a yarn, she doesn’t create it to be dyed because dyeing a yarn changes the way that it feels. And so by adding a dye, you’re actually taking away a little of what the original wool felt like.

So her yarns are all undyed and they really celebrate the natural wool feel—or the blended wool feel. She’s got some alpaca blends and cotton blends and mohair blends. So there’s a lot going on there that kind of… The idea is a back-to-nature sort of feel, but without the rusticity that happens a lot in our industry.

Her yarns—I would not call them rustic. They’re very clean and beautiful and ready to be made into garments. There’s nothing farm-like about them, you know?

Brittany: 23:59
Yeah. And I’m not saying farm is derogative—I love a good farm yarn—but a lot of people think that if you buy undyed fiber, you’re going to get a farm yarn, and that’s not necessarily the case.

Hannah: 24:19
Yeah. I definitely tried to give a really broad look with the first book. But obviously, you can’t cover everything in one book. So that’s one of the many reasons why I’m writing a second in the series.

Brittany: 24:34
Yeah. Are you able to share anything about the upcoming book?

Hannah: 24:39
Yeah, sure. So the next book is tentatively titled Slow Knitting Seasonally, and it continues the work of the first book, but it addresses a few feedback notes that I got from the first book. And anyone can read these reviews—they’re on Amazon.

But I had some reviews on Amazon when I launched the first book that really hit home for me—not, I mean, sometimes in a keep-you-up-all-night kind of way. Someone reviewed the book and said they felt that all the yarns featured were very expensive and that Slow Knitting was only available to people who had a lot of money.

Which, I would argue, some of the yarns in the book are definitely not expensive. But I could see where they were coming from in that most of the yarns featured were yarns that you would have to order online or direct from the company. And you can’t necessarily just walk into your yarn store and find them.

Brittany: 25:37
Yeah.

Hannah: 25:38
And then another of the feedback items that I got was that the book felt a little salesy because it had such a yarn company focus. It was all about each of these individual yarn companies, and then there were patterns—and the patterns were very luxurious. I mean, one of the patterns is, it would cost you $400 to make it. It’s like the magnum opus of the book. It’s this beautiful sweater coat called Luma that’s in Woolfolk Far, which is a super luxurious yarn.

And I totally get it—I don’t have the cash on hand to make a $400 sweater. I know that a lot of other people don’t have the cash on hand to make a $400 sweater. And I didn’t like the idea of slow knitting being something that was elitist in any way, because I think a lot of things that are environmentally beneficial are being labeled as elitist as a way of minimizing their effects or the ability to do them.

Veganism is something that gets labeled as elitist a lot because buying tofu and seitan is kind of expensive, and a lot of people are like, “Oh, I don’t want to give up bacon.” And that’s okay. Like, that’s okay. And so I really wanted to bridge the gap on price point.

So a lot of the yarns in the second book are yarns that you can just walk into your yarn store and find, but they’re also still following the tenets of the first book.

And then another thing that was talked about was that there were just not that many ways in the original first book to add slow knitting to your life that didn’t involve making a project. I didn’t really preach using what you have as much as I could have. So this time, I’m really focusing not only on project ideas, but also on ideas for minimizing the stash that you have, ideas for more conscientiously buying if you’re going to buy something, and ideas for using up little bits that you have around.

There are a lot of at-home projects, meditative exercises, that sort of thing throughout the book. So it’s a lot more diverse in terms of content.

I’ve just begun writing it, so I feel like the process often changes the work significantly. I don’t know where it’s going to end up or what it’s going to end up being. But right now, it has sort of a farmer’s almanac structure, and it’s very seasonally driven. So there are different sections for each season, and exercises within each season.

We’ll see kind of where it goes, but the main goals for me were to write a book that was a little more accessible. I felt slightly alienated by the first one.

Brittany: 28:44
Yeah, I know that’s oftentimes a big challenge or hurdle for people because a lot of animal fiber yarns are more expensive. And for somebody who’s coming in and they’re used to buying their yarn at big stores, it’s very affordable. You can do a big project for, you know, 20 bucks, 50 bucks—a big project could be worth that much. So making that transition is… It’s a step. It is a transformation.

So I love that you’re able to bridge that gap, maybe bringing it back to reality for other people’s reality so they can relate to it a little bit more.

I know for me personally, I’m thinking I am really just getting into animal fibers. And honestly, I have KnitCrate to thank for that. Nope, no plug or anything intended there. But I have so many beautiful yarns from my subscription. And I don’t always get to make the projects myself when they’re shipped to me.

But as a result, I’ve got this amazing collection of beautiful yarn. And I don’t know a lot of these things—I wouldn’t even know how to figure out the source of that. So do you have any insight on that, by the way? If somebody has yarn in their stash, is there a way for them to trace it or to know that it sort of follows the tenets in the book?

Hannah: 30:12
Well, yes and no. So yarn falls in kind of this gray area with labeling, where some countries require yarns that are made and sold in certain stores to have significant labeling.

So if you’re buying from a big box store like Michaels or Hobby Lobby, your labels typically will say the country of origin on them. And they’ll say ingredients. Ingredients are really the key.

So let’s think about a yarn that comes from a big box store brand—it might be 100% acrylic. So knowing more about acrylic as a fiber is a research project of sorts for the knitter. Acrylic as a fiber is not really environmentally friendly at all—it’s a petroleum product, so it comes from oil.

So when you buy acrylic yarns, you’re supporting countries that have high oil production, some of which—especially if people have been keeping up with current events—we might not agree with what their governments are doing.

So that’s kind of the first way that I begin thinking of it—I look at the fiber and I say, okay, where does this fiber come from? So let’s say that the origin of the yarn is labeled as China. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the petroleum product comes from China. That just means that’s where the yarn was manufactured.

Brittany: 31:42
Okay.

Hannah: 31:43
So if it was made in China and the origin country is China, that just means that’s where the final production of the yarn was—the label was put on it.

And then there are yarns that don’t have an origin country on the label, and they just have something like 100% wool, and they don’t even tell you what kind of wool that is. It could literally be from anywhere. So you have to know all of the potential places that wool can come from.

Australia is the biggest producer of wool, followed closely by South America, and I think China has a very high wool production as well. Merino wool, specifically, is even higher likelihood to come from Australia or South America.

So if it’s labeled Merino, well, it probably comes from one of those two places. It could come from a lot of other places, but usually if they’re going to say like domestic Merino, well, they mean United States or domestic for whatever country you’re in. So if the label’s in French and it says domestic Merino, it probably means French Merino. Not always, but usually.

And then you think about issues potentially related to the country of origin. So like in Australia, they have a terrible parasitic fly called, I think, the bot fly. I’m not going to go into details about what it does, but essentially it infests Merino sheep because they’ve got a lot of layers of skin. And it does some really particularly nasty things.

So in order to counteract that, they remove part of the skin layers around the rump of the sheep to keep this fly from infecting the sheep. And traditionally, because herds of sheep are like thousands of sheep, this is done without anesthesia.

Brittany: 33:43
Oh, wow.

Hannah: 33:44
So if your Merino wool comes from Australia, a lot of people… So this process is called mulesing. And so a lot of people worry about Australian Merino being mulesed.

Now, this is kind of like a catch-22 because if they don’t mules the sheep, they die. So if you leave the sheep unmulesed, they’re going to be very sick and in a lot of pain and die. But if you mules the sheep and you’ve got a huge herd, you probably can’t afford to give every animal anesthesia.

So it kind of becomes like, all right, if I buy Merino from Australia, I know that the sheep has probably been mulesed.

So then we begin asking questions like, is the wool that I’m buying from a large farm or a small farm? Is the ranch able to provide any documentation that they had a vet present to do this or did they do it themselves?

And so you kind of get into all these little sticky burrows that are under each category. And some Australian ranches now are saying, “Here’s our certification that shows that we are selling Merino wool that has been mulesed with anesthesia,” or “Here’s our certification that we’re participating in a breeding program that’s designed to eventually phase out the need for mulesing.”

So each country is kind of handling their own issues in their own way.

South America doesn’t require mulesing, so if you’re getting Merino wool and you know for sure that it comes from South America, then your Merino wool is not going to be mulesed. So you can kind of skip that issue.

So like for KnitCrate, it was very important to me that even though we were commercially producing these yarns in kind of a lot of quantity, we were buying the wool from South America so that none of the wool was mulesed.

And so all of the labels for KnitCrate say that, I think they say on the bottom that all KnitCrate or Knitology or Vidalana, any of our brands, our in-house brands, are hand-milled and dyed in Peru.

And so that’s our way of kind of saying, like, here’s where the yarn comes from.

I find that more and more companies are trying to be more transparent about that.

Yeah. So generally for me, if I’m looking for a new yarn, I look for a company that has a high level of transparency in the very beginning, before I even see what I’m going to make or what I might consider price-wise.

I just find transparency—a yarn that matches my requirements that also is super transparent about their process.

So like a good example would be the Woolfolk yarn I brought up earlier. She’s got all of the information about where her yarn comes from. It’s built into the site as part of her yarn’s story.

Or with Salt River Mills yarn that I work with—Liz who runs it is very transparent. Everything is made in the U.S., so I know that it’s going to meet a certain environmental standard, even if the American milling isn’t held to crazy strict environmental standards.

But I know that the alpacas have all been treated very well, and the wool comes from the U.S., and the angora comes from the U.S. So I know that the animal husbandry rights are at least matching the country that I live in.

So I have an idea of what I’m kind of starting with.

So I guess the long, short answer to your question is—we can only know if we ask. And if we ask enough, the companies will begin to put it on their labels.

Brittany: 37:40
Yeah, definitely lots to think about there. You probably wouldn’t even realize—well, I certainly didn’t realize—some of those things occurred or happened or anything. So, man, I clearly have some more learning and reading to do.

I want to wrap things up on the topic of meditation. I know you brought it up a couple times. It’s really important to me, and I know it has the potential to help change somebody’s life. I really do. So I’d love to get your thoughts on meditation and how that relates directly to knitting and crochet.

Hannah: 38:14
Yeah. So I’ve never been really good at the type of meditation where you just sit and you’re quiet for any amount of time. I am very—I’m very busy in the sense that I have to have something going on all the time with my hands or, um, my brain just never seems to turn off completely. I don’t have like ADHD or any real excuse for that. It’s just how I am.

So I found that through knitting, I was able to become a more patient person because things that you knit take the time that they take. You can’t really rush yourself along and knit faster or make something faster without making mistakes along the way—that sacrifice time anyway.

So for me, my meditation has sort of become a sacrifice, a willing sacrifice of time in favor of peace through activity. So when I sit down and I knit for an hour on a project, my brain can be really busy during that time, or I could watch a show or whatever. But if the project is more complex, I have to concentrate fully on that project.

And I think that when you reach that sweet spot of complexity plus enjoyment—like you’re loving the material and you feel good about where it came from and you feel wonderful about knitting with it and you’re excited about the project—and then you’re sitting down and working on it, that is a form of meditation for me: to sit down and really focus for a moment on all of these things coming together and forming something. Exactly what I needed to get away from my everyday.

Brittany: 40:06
Yeah, that’s such a great way to put it too. And it’s a real way to get into the practice because, like you said, a lot of people—they just don’t have it in them to sit and do the practice. You know, air quote, traditional form of meditation. I know that there are benefits to it if it’s right for you, but it’s not right for a lot of people.

And we already know that knitting and crochet is right for us. It’s something that we love and enjoy doing, so we can sort of reap the benefits of meditation but like you said, do what you love—being able to make that sacrifice. And I love the way you put that.

Hannah: 40:45
Oh, thank you.

Brittany: 40:47
Well, I would love for people to have the opportunity to connect with you after listening today. So where can—well, first of all, where can people get Slow Knitting and then, you know, connect with you so maybe they can hear about the upcoming book and that sort of thing?

Hannah: 41:05
So in the nature of like asking people to kind of shop local—obviously, if you have a local bookstore, most of the small-scale bookstores do have accounts with Abrams Craft, which is the publisher of my book, and they should be able to put it on order for you.

If you don’t have a local bookstore, which is really more and more common, it is on Amazon, and you can get it delivered in two days with Prime. Yay! Thank you.

Copies are also on my own website, which is www.knittingvividly.com, and those are signed copies. So I typically will sign them and inscribe them for the person receiving. I don’t always have them available, but I am putting an order in really soon—in January—for a whole bunch of those books.

Other places you can buy the book are obviously occasionally at shows, but I think really the fastest and easiest is to either go into a local bookstore or to order on Amazon. And if you order anywhere, please leave a review for the book on Amazon—even if you didn’t buy it there—because my publisher really, really, really likes reviews.

Brittany: 42:20
Yes. And they’re not always so easy to get, I hear. Yeah.

Hannah: 42:23
Yeah. The book has sold, I think, upwards of 8,500 copies, and there are only 25 Amazon reviews. So I’m like, come on. I know there’s more than 25 of those books out there.

Brittany: 42:36
Yeah. Well, it’s been a pleasure. I know—so for me, I would love to hold out maybe for that update in January. So perhaps I can get a copy in on that.

Hannah: 42:51
Yes, I usually announce those on my Instagram, which is @hannabellknits. So if you just kind of follow on Instagram, then you’ll get a heads up when those go live. I’m all about Instagram.

Brittany: 43:05
Me too.

Hannah: 43:06
Yeah.

Brittany: 43:06
All right. Well, it has been such a pleasure. I will have all of the information that we chatted about here on the show notes page where people can connect with you. I definitely want them to take that opportunity. And thanks again. It’s been so much fun talking with you about this.

Hannah: 43:25
Yeah, it’s been so good. Thank you for having me back, Brittany.

Brittany: 43:26
All right. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Hannah from Knitting Vividly. She’s such a joy to talk to. And thank you so much for listening.

Feels a little one-sided at times for me because I really can’t hear and see your feedback. So I would encourage you to head over to the show notes page for that reason, but also because Hannah has agreed to do a giveaway for us.

So Hannah will be giving away one signed copy of her book, Slow Knitting. So cool, right? Now to sign up for the giveaway, you’ll need to head over to the show notes page, bhooked.com/98, and scroll down to about the middle of that page, and you’ll see the sign-up form there.

Now you will have to enter your email address in order to get access or basically secure that first entry into the giveaway. And when you do that, that will also sign you up to be on my email list. And that’s the place that I really love to hang out and connect with you and also to share some of those resources, the free patterns and that sort of thing that I have.

So full disclosure—you could always unsubscribe from that email list if you don’t want to be on it after the giveaway is over. But I would hope that you would stay on because I would love to have the opportunity to connect with you outside of this podcast.

Now, once you sign up for your initial entry into the giveaway, there are things that you can do to earn additional entries. Hannah is really trying to grow her Instagram following, and so you can earn additional entries by following Hannah on Instagram. You’ll find how to do that exactly—you actually have to go through the giveaway signup form in order to do that.

But you can earn additional entries that way. You’ll also earn additional entries by subscribing to the podcast and by liking me on Facebook. You’ll see all of that right there on that sign-up form.

All right. So good luck, my friend. I hope you are the one who is randomly selected to win a signed copy of Hannah’s book. You’ll find the date information on the show notes page. Once again, bhook.com/98.

And that’s all for today, friend. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, and I hope you learned as much as I did throughout this process.

Oh, and please don’t forget: if you have read Slow Knitting, or when you get your copy, if you could please leave Hannah a review on Amazon, that would be really helpful for her. And I would love to be able to help her as well.

I think it’s a great concept and she gave us a really great episode today.

I will see you next week, my friend. Bye-bye.