Greetings fellow Bigganites and generalised knitting fans of the internet. A happy Friday to you all.

I feel I have been neglecting you all a little so thought it was time to pump out a full-blown blog update. First things first, it’s now winter down under and therefore prime knitting time yay!   Fear not those of you enjoying what little summer the Northern Hemisphere has been able to manage this year, it is also a good time of year to sort through your stash (and if you’re anything like me your not-insubstantial project backlog) and clear out to cobweb s for next seasons knitted wonders.

Being an Englishwoman born and bred I find something comforting about the return of slightly-less-hot weather for a few months. When I first landed back in Aus land about five years ago I refused to even call this colder Queensland season winter, my theory being that it was never actually winter here, it was just summer for fewer hours each day! However a few years down the track and I find the Queensland ways have truly weakened my constitution to the extent that I actually have to get rugged up in winter. The good thing is that it means I can don knitwear again without the fear of overheating and looking somewhat like a lost, confused and partially cooked lobster in a cable-knit scarf! I’m pretty much transparently pale and allergic to the outside so the warm climate doesn’t do me any favours, plus I desperately miss the cosy feeling of retreating from the cold into a warm house full of friends, family and food. Fortunately I have found that a lap full of knitted magic serves pretty much the same purpose and is pretty much a portable isnta-coziness kit. To go along with that this year I was lucky enough to be sent care of my forward-thinking Granny some knitted slippers her friend had made. I LOVE THEM. They are, in my humble opinion, the most fun thing I’ve ever put on my feet. Sure the colours a so bright they are almost guaranteed to clash with something you wearing but who doesn’t enjoy stomping around the house with warm toes and the added assurance that your booties could probably distract speeding traffic if you needed them to?

Also I feel we need to take a moment to reflect on how well they set off a truly magnificent blogging outfit (featuring unfinished jumper project)?! The lesser spotted knitting blogger is a species with excellent camouflage abilities, if you see them just going about their business in town then they blend in with the usual folk pretty well. Leave them unsupervised however and this kind of thing is liable to be their choice of suitable business attire  for a day slogging away at the keyboard.

Anyway that is quite enough rambling without a point for now. I shall endeavour to post more frequent updates from myself to compliment the video magic from Biggan herself that has been enlightening the blog and the youtubes for the last little while. In fact I shall be more serious than that dear blog reading people, I solemnly swear by the points of my needles and in the Light of the Seven (too soon?) that I will post again next week. To prove this I’ll even tell you what it will be about; a few weeks back I went in to Biggan Design HQ on a sacred mission. I, like many people, when faced with the overwhelming array of stunning colours BD has on offer sometimes find it hard to pick the right ones to suit my humble visage. My sneaky plan was to use some colour-profile cards I had done for me years ago and try and match the colours that suit me (Spring colours for those who are curious) with some of our yarn colours, this is a sneak peek of some results.  A Spring Yarn Colour Wheel …

Until then Adeiu fair reader, keep checking the website and don’t forget that you can get free postage on big orders (over $50 in Aus, over $150 overseas) – great for ordering big projects!

C x

It’s no secret that some of the BD team, and many of our customers, rely on knitting to keep us sane. Despite the misgivings of many an airport security agent, the world is actually a safer place if we’re packing knitting needles. Turns out that what I thought was a manifestation of my dislike of crowds and my love of slightly old fashioned woolen things does in fact have some serious therapeutic grounds.

This is just one example from Tumblr of the many people who share this point of view (psst you can see gems like this on our purls of wisdom board on the Biggan Design pinterest page – http://pinterest.com/biggandesign/).

There are groups, such as stitchlinks, who run support networks based around knitting, even actively researching the therapeutic benefits of knitting and the possibilities it suggest for future health management strategies.  There was even a Study Day dedicated to the field of Therapeutic Knitting in Bath last year, this event brought together academics, patient reps, group leaders and clinicians from a whole range of backgrounds, the press release tells of Occuptational Thearpists mixing with textile artists and fMRI specialists.  It is now a cause of some considerable interest to find and utilize the ways knitting can have a tangible, beneficial impact on people’s lives. A Daily Mail article last year told of how one woman’s turned to knitting to help her through chemotherapy, it said:

As I watched the jumper grown inch by inch, I felt a quiver of pleasure, and for the first time I dared to hope that I might actually live to wear it …

A growing school of thought believes that repetitive actions disable the brain’s ‘rage pathway’ – the area that becomes active when we are under attack, causing adrenaline to sour and your heart to race. Neuroscientists believe that these tasks – knitting, weeding your garden, doing a jigsaw or even running – deactivate the rage pathway, and renew our sense of ‘agency and control’, making us calmer and more at peace.

Tessa Cunningham, ‘What would you turn to when facing death?’ Mail Online, 26 Nov 2012.

It seems that, whether you rely on your knitting simply to keep your silly frustrations with the world at bay or to dispel dark clouds of illness and mortality, you are not imagining its success. I myself can vouch for the power of knitting  with some of our luxury yarn to help me through a trivial but traumatic temporary Internet blackout!

So there we have it folks. Knitting: not only will it save your sanity, it might just save your life.