What have you got up your sleeve now Lisa? Well funny you should ask, we are really excited to have been picked by Creative Scotland as part of their initiative to support local creative projects! We are so proud to tell you that our yarn planner and online creative hub has been selected... let me tell you more.

What is the Creative Hub? 

Our project is simple, we want to build a creative hub for people to access to spread our love of all things craft. We know only too well the benefits that knitting, crochet and crafting can have on peoples mental health and we want to help where we can.

Learning a new craft can be extremely rewarding and we want to spread our knowledge by creating workshops and online courses with all the tools you need to set you on the right path. One of our main goals is to create an online how to course teaching dye techniques that we use here at For the Love Yarn. Normally we would invite people to our studio to do this but during the current Covid 19 circumstances to enable us to continue to spread our knowledge we plan to build an online course.

Our aim to create a community focused on tackling mental health in a positive and creative way, bringing people together.

Dye workshops and crochet classes are just some of the skills we want you to be able to access, we have plans to invite other teachers to create content to offer a wide range of skills, really making this the Creative Hub we envision.

So what is a yarn planner?

We aim to create a community focused on tackling mental health in a positive and creative way, bringing people together. So another element to our project is to produce a Yarn Planner system as we know from experience organisation when learning any new craft can be key, it serves a dual purpose in keeping our minds clear and relaxed therefore helping our mental well being. This system will appeal to those already well versed in all things yarn, however those new to the craft will find it equally useful, we aim to make it a planner system to suit everyone.

So we plan to build a ring bound system where customers can build a planner with cherry picked packs that works for them.

We aim to have things like:

• diary/calendar section (undated)

• current project area

• to do list section

• colouring sheets and positive affirmations

• wips list

• project trackers

• stash catalogue

and so much more.... filling this planner with positive affirmations and goal setting targets based around the fibre arts.

Not only that we also plan to have a digital version on the yarn planner for those of us who enjoy digital planning via a tablet or iPad, I can not tell you how excited I am about this as I have been digital planning for a long time so to build a planner aimed at us yarns is a dream come true! I can squeeze all my favourite elements into this planner and really make it purposeful and useful.

This is a rough sample pf a digital planner, the finished item will be very different to this filled to bursting with content.

So where does the Creative Scotland initiative come in?

The initiative works by donation matching, and all I have to do is reach £1,000 of donations and Creative Scotland will match it to fund our project!... but here is the snag (there is always one isn’t there!) there is a set fund pot and when it’s gone it’s gone. So its a bit like fastest finger first.

So I'm reaching out to all you lovely yarnies to back this project, we go live at 9am on August 17th so I am hoping you'll get behind us and help us reach that target. If you can't donate then sharing the project to your yarny friends will be equally helpful.

So for now thats a snippet of what we have planned - and again I hope you can get behind this new project because we are so excited to get started.

Stay safe

Lisa xx