The recent explosion of yarn stores, conferences, and printed books and magazines dealing with various aspects of knitting, crochet, spinning and weaving has been fuelled by an even larger explosion in online venues for people to talk about what they do to and with yarn. Fibre lovers have lots of spaces online, ranging from online magazines such as knitty.com to online communities such as Ravelry.com and crochetme.com, from blogs of all sorts to a plethora of Yahoo! mailing lists. We'll talk about some of these venues and how they've changed the way we knit, spin, crochet and weave, sharing some of our favourite sites and projects along the way.
On a rainy Saturday in 2004, Kim Werker started a website called CrochetMe.com, which struck a nerve among yarn crafters desperate to push crochet to be fashionable, fun, and sometimes delightfully subversive. Since then she has written six crochet books and served as editor of one of the most popular print crochet magazines. She sold her website in 2008, and now focuses on writing, speaking and blogging about crafts, creativity, living creatively, and making a business of it. She blogs at kimwerker.com (http://kimwerker.com), and her newest project is Mighty Ugly (http://mightyugly.com).
Felicia Lo, aka sweetgeorgia, is a graphic designer, dyer, blogger and entrepreneur based in Vancouver. In 2004, she started a simple blog (http://blog.sweetgeorgiayarns.com) to wax poetic about her knitting. Unsatisfied with just knitting yarn, she used the blog to document her explorations into spinning and dyeing yarn. After setting up a tiny shop on Etsy in 2005, readers of the blog quickly became customers of her hand-dyed yarns and now Felicia focuses her energies entirely on designing and dyeing for her hand-dyed knitting yarn company, SweetGeorgia Yarns (http://www.sweetgeorgiayarns.com).
Mandy Moore is co-author of the book Yarn Bombing: the Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti (http://yarnbombing.com). She is senior technical editrix of popular online knitting magazine Knitty.com, and teaches knitting and crochet locally. Mandy has contributed as editor and designer to numerous knitting and crochet publications, including the Interweave Press magazines Crochet and Knitscene, and the Big Girl Knits books. She has been blogging intermittently since 2003 at yarnageddon.com.
