Welcome to our WIP

We're beyond excited to introduce you to our new work in progress, Farm & Fiber Knits. This is the very first installment in a series of weekly explorations and discoveries. In upcoming newsletters, we'll help you find a new pattern to cast on right away, understand why your substitute yarn works (or doesn't), and discover what makes that yarn so very special. You'll go on virtual farm visits and get the inside scoop on your next fiber festival. We will follow fiber back to the source and help you understand your knitting a little better, and with it the world around us.

So why do we call this a WIP (work in progress)? Well, we're still dreaming up interactive ways that we can share our knitting spaces, seeking out stories from around the world and our own backyard, and working with some of our favorite knitwear designers on patterns that celebrate the connection between fiber source, yarn, and knitter. This is where we start, but there are so many stitches yet to be worked.

Another way of looking at a WIP is as a UFO, which I'm going to rename from UnFinished Object to U Find Out: What do you want to know about? What stories do you think other knitters would love to discover? We'll be coming to your inbox every week, but we invite you into ours, too. Drop us a line at support@farmfiberknits.com.

About Works in Progress

Some knitters look ashamed when they tell you how many WIPs they have, as though casting on one project before you finish another is the sign of some moral failing. And when your every knitting bag is full and you still don't have anything to wear, it can seem like another WIP is the last thing you need.

Then you come across a skein of something special on a road trip or at a fiber festival, and it calls out to you. Or you come across a knitalong from your favorite designer. Maybe a yarn producer you love opens up a yarn club, or there's a fiber that you just can't wait to try, and . . . there's another WIP.

I think we forget the most important thing about works in progress: they're the only time you're actually knitting. You need to have something on the needles to be, in the present tense, a knitter. No matter how much you want the finished object (and I am not knocking the bliss of the last bound off stitch), you will never be more connected to the fiber, the farmer, or the designer than when you have a project on the needles. And what is knitting for but connection? Never mind a fiber-optic link; if you want to feel plugged in to the world around you, look more closely at your knitting. Stitch by stitch and skein by skein, the work in progress is the best part of knitting.

I hope you'll come along as we follow fiber to the source, trace yarn to the finished object, and see where knitting can take us.

—Anne