Parcels all posted today!!  They should be landing soon so keep an eye out.  :)

The time draws near for posting our first parcel of 2010!  We are aiming to send all the parcels out on or around the 21st of January.  I emailed all confirmed members today to ask for any change of addresses -  please get in touch if you have not gotten this email. Hope you are enjoying the winter – perfect knitting weather! Now where is my log fire?

Ballot is now closed. Thank you everyone who put their name in the hat. I’ll do the membership allocations this week and you will receive an email either way letting you know whether you have a spot in the Knit Love Club 2010.

Cross your fingers & toes!

Remember Family Feud? I used to watch it every day after school.

Each question Richard Dawson asked started with “We surveyed 100 people and asked them…” then at the end he would reveal the most popular answer with ‘Survey Says!’.

Not quite the end, so just an interim ‘Survey Says!’:

From the respondents on the survey I am absolutey fascinated to find that:

• 53% of you enjoy  helping others out with questions
• 64% enjoy knitting in a group
• A whopping 89% enjoy trying out new techniques (go intrepid knitters!!)
• 85% use long tail cast-on as their cast on of choice (that’s my favourite too)
• 36% of you post on Ravelry
• While 82% love purple, the least loved colour is fluorescents with 37% of you wanting to spew when confronted with it. The marginals causing reflux are yellow at 12%,  then pastels at 11% and finally orange at 10%.
• And finally 65% of you were wearing socks when completing the survey and 36% not. If it makes you feel any better, I wasn’t wearing any either when I wrote it!

A fun little contest for you on Twitter – tweet why you love socks and tag it with hashtag #knitloveclub.

The Socktopus Sock Club’s 2010 incarnation is the Knit Love Club.  It has a limited membership which will be allotted by ballot.  See here to enter the ballot.

I’m making some changes to the club. This year was a little less smooth than I would have liked.  Part of it has to do with being a one woman operation trying to juggle 2 clubs, an online shop and a bricks and mortar shop, and working with similar one or two people businesses for both the yarn and the pattern.

So I am reworking the club to make it run better and also so I can spend more time with it.  Paring back down to essentials, next year I am only going to concentrate on one club – and that will be the 2010 Knit Love Club.  These are the current parameters of the Knit Love Club (I’m still working on them so they may change):

1) Designs. These will be Alice exclusives.  Yup yours truly is going to be sending out her design babies to you.  I may possibly have one or two guest designers.  What this means for you is I can tailor the club socks to your skill set and make them a little more modular and progressive in terms of learning.

2) Colourways. I get to choose them all! This means I can choose and arrange for all the six club yarns in advance and don’t need to juggle around additional schedules.  It means I can make sure that there is a good mix of solids semi solids and variegated. It also means you can tell me what you hate and I will see what I can do to avoid using it!

3) Now this is still under consultation.  Knit Love 2010 is going to primarily a sock club.  I love them socks and they are one of the best small projects you could dream of.  But I am thinking – especially the way I knit with a gazillion wips on the go to cater to my every mood- that perhaps it might be good to add a little bit of spice and variety to the club?  I want to still concentrate on yarns that are hard to find in the UK. But I also want to show case the glorious dyers we have here on home soil.  So -I was thinking of adding some lace to the mix. A couple bonus projects using local dyers.  A lace shawl? A scarf? Colourwork mittens?

4) Patterns will be pdf downloads for the club kits which saves on those cardboard envelopes. But at the end of the club members will receive a yearbook – a bound book (in technicolour!) of the year’s patterns, and member pages.

5) Finally – no more bells & whistles.  They are fun but I always worry people won’t like them and while some may love them others may not.  Maybe a club bag instead…