Game of Wool: Holiday Week

Adam (00:00): Everyone's view of what makes a brilliant knitter is going to be different.

Georgia (00:03): It's giving Berlin nightclubs.

Adam (00:04): I'm just going to highlight that I'm not as cultured as your butter.

Adam (00:12): Hello and welcome to Episode 5 of Yarn Library podcast with me, Adam Cleevely.

Georgia (00:16): And me, Georgia Denham, Tulipurl on Instagram.

Adam (00:20): We can't talk over each other. We have to work out how not to talk over each other.

Georgia (00:24): Otherwise we have a podcast editing nightmare like last week, but I'm glad that we eventually got podcast out to you guys.

Adam (00:29): I've already said this Georgia in person, but I need to just let all of you know the enormous lengths and trials and tribulations that Georgia and her husband have been through to repair last week's two podcasts. We recorded both podcasts back to back and both were recorded with what turned out to be appalling microphone settings and they had to go through literally minute by minute or second by second.

Georgia (00:54): Sorry, I'm totally interrupting you, but I wanted to say that I did not expect my music degree to come in handy when you asked me to do a podcast. A lot of transferable skills, it turns out, which would make perfect sense, it's audio, but I just didn't think about it. So I was very glad last week that I'd had a lot of experience of that.

Adam (01:13): I just want to say how incredibly grateful I am to Georgia and her amazing husband because without them you would have had nothing last week because I think by the time we got, well, they got anywhere with it, we were ready to just give up.

Georgia (01:23): We learned a lot of lessons, I think.

Adam (01:25): We certainly have. And we'll cover a couple of housekeeping things first actually because I think one of the things that some of you have noted is that we do have exceptional audio quality on this podcast.

Georgia (01:34): Do we now!

Adam (01:36): And that is absolutely intentional to try and bring you as high a quality podcast as we possibly can. Georgia is also very passionate as we've talked about having the whole transcript completely available and also show notes. So we want to be able to put out all of the references, websites, all of any helpful articles, which particularly Georgia brings up because she's more brainy than me on that front by a long way. And so we have a website yarnlibrary.co.uk, is depending on when you listen to this, it may be live, but...

Georgia (02:04): Yes, may be live! One of the really great things I've been able to bring to this podcast is my husband who is a computer scientist. So he has become our free web developer, the website. It's pretty much there. It just needs kind of some styling with our colors and logos. So hopefully later this week, Wednesday, Thursday, it should be out. Adam's already mentioned the transcripts and references, bibliography, however you want to put it. Lots and lots of people have got in touch with me or commented saying, "where are the references? I really want the references." And I totally understand that, 100%, especially when I'm saying names in transit or you're not sure which word I've referred to. We definitely want all of that information to be available and also to override a lot of the transcriptions and automatic subtitles and captioning that happen on other streaming platforms. So one of the big frustrations we've had in the last couple of weeks is spending a great deal of time sorting out transcriptions, captioning, only then to go upload it and all the respective platforms just to go, "Oop, no, we'll just do our own again", which is frustrating, but we've hopefully figured out a way now where we can take the transcripts, upload it into the portal, but it just might take a bit of time for those to all sync up and us to get a rhythm of it basically.

Adam (03:17): So bear with us, we are trying our level best. We didn't expect to launch and have what I will tell you is the number one podcast in the world.

Georgia (03:27): Boop boop boop boop!

Adam (03:28): In craft. According to the only benchmarking platform I've been able to find we're the number one podcast, quite something. We also did briefly, last week we were hitting number one on Apple's list of all of Leisure. So we beat BBC Gardeners' World, there were two podcasts on that. I was quite proud.

Georgia (03:29): I know! I told my dad and he said, I've never liked Gardeners' World world. Good on ya.

Adam (03:50): But we also beat a couple of car shows which seemed to hold the top spots.

Georgia (03:53): Which now seem to have booted us off. So we're now back at last time we checked, we were like sixth or something. So send it to your friends, get listening. We've got to beat Formula One. It's been funny launching this podcast because I got an email the other day from someone saying, "Oh, I heard that you're not doing music anymore, that you're doing something else. Are you still doing your PhD?" And it makes sense that lots of people don't actually understand the interdisciplinary craft research practice stuff I do. But I was at a concert last week as well and someone who I'd not seen for a really long time. I was kind of high off the fumes of success. I'd not seen this other composer in a while and they're like, "yeah, how's it all going? What's new with you?" And I was just like, I'm the co-host of the number one leisure podcast in the UK. And they were like, "What? Wow." And these kinds of things, you're not supposed to brag or say anything positive that you've done. You're just supposed say, yeah, no, good, good, good, just making.

Adam (04:43): Well, I think it's because it's us. I'm going to brag a little bit more, because we, we also, peaked at about 140, number 140 in the UK for all podcasts. That was a big one for me. And then there were, there were 44 countries in the world where we hit number one, which, within, within sub-sectors of like craft or– Suffice to say we were not expecting to be quite at the level we were at to with.

Georgia (05:07): Absolutely not!

Adam (05:08): I initially said to Georgia, let's work out how we get a hundred listens to our podcast and then work from there. And we are quite a long way past that. Anyway, also one of the things that you have wanted is that you write to us, so we've set up, we've set up, we need be really careful. Georgia, your husband, feel like you might be taking advantage of his free services in the same way that–

Georgia (05:29): He married me!

Adam (05:30): –he might say, "can you just knit me a jumper?" You're asking him to build your website.

Georgia (05:33): You know, that has actually come up weirdly. I mentioned last week that I really wanted to knit a Fair Isle inspired style, not Fair Isle jumper of computer objet d'art and maths, like lambda calculus things. Super cute. He's on board. I just haven't had the time to figure that out and draft it. It's like whirring in my head. I'd like to do it. I don't want to start another project when I've got all these other WIPs on the go. 'Work In Progress' for anyone who doesn't know what that means. I'm not a dominatrix. So–

Adam (06:07): I didn't expect to be going there quickly.

Georgia (06:09): So the work in progress is I've got a lot of things on the go. I haven't yet knit something for Dima, like a jumper for him. I was on a family call yesterday and my family really don't really understand what's going on in terms of the podcast and Instagram and everything. My grandma said, "Oh well, I hope you've knitted something for Dima by now." And said, "No, actually I haven't". She went, "Well, what are you doing?" And then she like fully started shaming me for not having knitted something for him. And then I wanted to tell her about the jumper curse. Not that my husband's gonna leave me over a jumper. We're kind of past that point, we are actually married.

Adam (06:40): But where we started this Georgia was I was going to say our email address to contact us is podcast@yarnlibrary.co.uk. And if you want to contact either of us or both of us, if you use podcast@yarnlibrary.co.uk, your email will get through to both of us. We read everything that comes in. We can't promise to reply to absolutely everything, but we promise that it all absolutely gets read.

Georgia (06:41): Yes. That's not discouraged comments because one of the really lovely things that's been happening a lot is actually seeing conversations between different people. And if you share it directly to our email, then that's not necessarily gonna go out to everyone else who's listening. Then actually it's an opportunity for everyone else to go, yeah, that really resonates.

Adam (07:16): I'll say that YouTube seems to be a brilliant place for that as well. The comments on YouTube have been amazing and I love reading through those. And also when we post on Instagram, obviously the comments that follow there are amazing.

Adam (07:27): I think it's time to move on to talk about the content of our Episode 5, which is all going to be about Episode 3 of the Game of Wool. I also want to make it clear at this point that this is full of spoilers. If you don't want to listen, then absolutely you need to move away now, just pause this. Other thing I'll say is that we're recording this first thing on Monday morning after the show went out on Sunday and there seems to be a pattern here that we're trying to record really quickly because we want to get the podcast out quickly but also there are the stuff that comes out in the week can be quite big in the conversation and we miss that because we're trying to get something out early.

Georgia (08:03): We are doing this fresh, fresh brand new.

Adam (08:07): And hopefully that's how you're getting it, is the freshest opinion we can manage.

Georgia (08:10): We haven't even talked about it.

Adam (08:11): I want to start because again, it's a comment I'd seen on YouTube. I was looking at someone else's review online of @KnitWithDeborah and I was looking at comments underneath her sort of wrap up of the show and she pulled together some comments which talked about Di and Sheila's judging and how long that takes. And it's obvious that they're choosing little bits and little clips of how they've judged it and they're summarising it. But I think that there needs to be way more background on the judging because Di and Sheila take hours over the judging, apparently. It's not minutes, it's not an hour, it is multiple hours, which I think shows a level of respect for the work that goes into it. And also, if you don't know Di and Sheila as people, it's worth going back. If you want some wholesome podcasts to go and look at, some wholesome old YouTubes, go and look at Di and Sheila's. Particularly they did a little mini series about a year ago on YouTube (Di Gilpin, 2025). It's absolutely fascinating. You see the beautiful and intricate work that they're obsessed with and it is really like I don't think they are yet coming across in the show just how much knowledge they have, just how much experience they have and just the eye for detail that both of them have. And they talk about in these old series about how they run kind of a, guess a factory or a craft workshop where people are creating knits for like ultra high-end TV shows and for fashion and so on. And they talk about how a knitter's gauge can change. And these are professional knitters, but if a knitter's gauge changes halfway through a garment, because they took a break for a week and then they've gone back to it, then they're looking at a gauge across a sweater, which might change by a quarter of a centimetre or so across the width of a sweater. And they will then ask for it all to be ripped back as a result. And that kind of, that's the kind of level of attention to detail, which doesn't come across in the show. And I find that frustrating on their behalf, because I think you see the comments online about how they aren't, you don't like, why are they judging it? Where is their experience from? They are two incredibly experienced and talented knitters. And I don't think that comes across. And I guess, my vent is that I'm sad that you don't see that. You're sad. I'm sad you don't see the hours of fastidious picking over of knitting because I'd like to nerd out about that. I know there's not time on TV for it. I got super excited because we saw a guest come onto the show to judge and she, I felt she had a great dynamic. I loved seeing her on the show.

Georgia (10:50): I don't crochet and I loved the little explainer between the treble and the double... treble and double?

Adam (10:56): So we should say that in the UK that's a treble and a double for our US listeners they were explaining between the double and a single crochet. And for those who you can't see the face that Georgia just pulled– So for the terminology the US and the UK use different terminology for crochet and what is in it? What in the UK is called a treble and the US is a double and what is a double in the UK is a single in the in the US.

Georgia (11:18): And here I was thinking that chunky and bulky were the worst offenders.

Adam (11:22): No there's many many more different terminology differences. It's a real difficulty for crocheters.

Georgia (11:26): Actually, to be fair, there was, again, someone in our comments, our comments are very interesting, somebody who was talking about a master's thesis, I think they did in 2015, that was looking at the regional differences in crochet terminology.

Adam (11:40): It was wonderful to have that short segment showing the difference between a treble and double crochet or a US double and single crochet because she was explaining why a treble crochet would sag and stretch more on a chair than a double in the UK or a single in the US stitch. But it was great because we saw that bit of extra expertise and obviously then, I mean, they may have filmed that after what happened because, spoiler alert, what happened with one of the chairs that was knitted in the second was that it sagged. And they explained, that's why.

Georgia (12:11): Talk us through our first solo challenge and the parameters with which our contestants needed to operate.

Adam (12:17): Our first solo challenge this week was to make swimwear. And the swimwear had to be striking and a glamorous design. It could be knit or crochet. It had to be close fit and the fastenings were crucial. And then the contestants had a choice between either knitting a bikini, a ladies swimsuit, or a pair of swimming shorts for a man.

Georgia (12:38): With an accessory.

Adam (12:39): Exactly, if they went for the swimming shorts for a man, they then had to include an accessory. I'm gonna put you on the spot, Georgia. Which one would you have chosen?

Georgia (12:48): Okay, I've literally not thought about this. Which one would I have chosen?

Adam (12:52): We are such different people. I was literally, I watch it and I'm sketching stuff out of my book immediately. Look, there it is.

Georgia (12:58): Oh my god. I think I would have chose maybe a woman's thing because of my own familiarity with that bodily setup. Bodily setup. I think maybe bikini. Basically I'm attracted to what I am interested in as a wearer of swim wears. So I would probably try for a high-waisted kind of little bikini bottom and then a top, but then... Do we have time for that? But we do have time for that because we of course had Lydia who did a full one piece.

Adam (13:30): She did. I mean, that was remarkable. So my laziness would have absolutely taken me to a bikini because there is so much less material to worry about. And the fit and the contouring on a swimsuit is so much more complex than a bikini. So if you're going to go for one of those two, I would have instantly been in the bikini. Not quite how it sounded. The difficulty with the shorts is that they're, you know, it's a much larger thing. And then you've got the accessory to go on top. I don't think it's as hard to fit a pair of shorts as it is, you know, as you say, womanly shapes.

Georgia (14:02): We say that, but I feel like we saw consistently the shorts, they all seemed a little bit low. It gave me like, what do the kids call it? Y2K? You know, the really low Paris Hilton.

Adam (14:12): Yeah, the low-cut jean.

Georgia (14:13): Not crotch line, hip line. What's the top of a thing called? Waist line, but it's not on your waist. Hip, top of the–

Adam (14:20): Waistband?

Georgia (14:21): Waistband! Yes. Low waistband.

Adam (14:23): The one mistake that I thought was made by too many of them was that they crocheted a lot of these garments and left large holes in important places.

Georgia (14:34): See, that's the thing. Crochet generally, my understanding of it at least, is that it comes up quicker than knitting. And so I can understand in this challenge. I mean, tell me what you feel, is that as someone who has done both, but my understanding is that crochet will work through a lot of yarn much quicker than say knitting will. Also will generally kind of knit up into something more quickly.

Adam (14:55): The other thing you've got with crocheting is you can shape it, I think, more easily. I mean, you've got the example of amigurumi. That is a more complicated thing to do with knitting than it is with crochet. So crochet is better for creating slightly more complex shapes. But yes, you absolutely have the problem that you have holes in it.

Georgia (15:17): I just, feel like there's a, yeah, pros and cons. Like, yes, it's quicker in theory. Yes, it's got that shaping, but do we wanna see a bum crack?

Adam (15:28): That's a question for everyone else, I guess.

Georgia (15:31): Do we want that?

Adam (15:32): And also to what extent is that glamorous?

Georgia (15:33): Well, that was a funny thing actually. So I was watching it, I'm mentioning my husband again, who was actually crocheting at the time. I went to the knit and stitch show a while ago and I bought him a book about amigurumi. And he's actually doing little, he's making a little chicken. I know, I know it's amazing. So when they kept referring to glamour and glamorousness, he kind of cut through that and went, I feel like what they mean by glam is just nakedness.

Adam (15:58): I think, when I think of glamour in terms of swimwear, I find, like a lot of the colour–

Georgia (16:05): I don't really think crochet, I'm going to be honest.

Adam (16:06): Yeah, crochet or knitting, frankly. Those are not my top glamorous materials to start with. And then I would say the shapes you can access are not ones that you easily be able to knit or crochet.

Georgia (16:19): But I have to say, remind me if I'm getting this wrong, but I don't think any of the items that we saw, any of the results were necessarily what I would constitute as glam.

Adam (16:29): I agree with that and actually for a lot of that was colour I mean there were a couple that had a little bit of like gold coming into it but again I can't help when I see yarns like that I know they're a bit scratchy and from my sensory point of view that's not okay.

Georgia (16:44): Colour-wise, I don't know why. I don't know who the yarn sponsor was last night. I mean, maybe we didn't find out because they all looked so dull. I think it was Isaac. He said it himself. He said, "Yeah, it's quite dull. Dull."

Adam (16:55): They were all really muted tones.

Georgia (16:57): Yeah. Which I just, was that what was available in the haberdashery? Because it was so consistent. You could see the places where people were trying to use bright colours and they were still dull tones of those bright colours. I mean, maybe it was a filming thing.

Adam (17:11): Glam for me absolutely would have been colors that pop probably against black. I would have had a lot of black in there and then I would have had colors that really popped off that. That would have been my color palette.

Georgia (17:22): Was it Tracy wanted to have the flowers and by coincidence I told someone the day before about fuchsias and how when I was a little girl my grandma would call them little ballet dancers because they have the little [doots the Sugar Plum Fairy tune] little feet at the bottom and they're really gorgeous bright pink and purple you can get yarn in that color and we weren't seeing bright flowers. We were seeing this sort of like muddy yucky palette.

Adam (17:50): Yeah, it was bizarre. It was strange. You're right, actually, maybe it was just who the yarn was available from for that week. The other thing, the other tricky thing is that I've seen comments online saying, why aren't they spending more time talking about the heritage of the yarn, where the yarn comes from, and exactly which materials?

Georgia (18:08): Because it's mass-produced stuff that isn't of heritage interest!

Adam (18:12): I mean, that's part of it. But I also think, like, we don't get to find out about whether someone uses live cultured French butter on the Great British Bake Off to just enhance the taste of something. Like, we just have to take it as read that they've got Lurpak or whatever it is.

Georgia (18:26): Sorry, you are really walking into all of my tangents today because we're making cultured butter at home at the moment and we've now referred to it as being cultured butter like it's been to the theatre because it's cultured. When we put it in the cupboard for the three days that it needs to culture, we say it's going off to university. So Dima came in and said, "do you want to say goodbye to it before it to university?" And he was just putting it in the cupboard.

Adam (18:51): But it's not a documentary about yarn. It's not a documentary about knitting and craft and crochet.

Georgia (18:58): You what though? We make a lot of Bake Off comparisons here. In the original serieses– serisies– serise...?

Adam (19:06): You're the one to do PhD Georgia and not me.

Georgia (19:08): You went to Oxford.

Adam (19:07): To do engineering.

Georgia (19:18): The serieses of Bake Off, the original ones on the BBC, they had more time because effectively in runtime they had another 12, 13 minutes, not of adverts. Yes. We used to have those really cool little Mel and Sue, "let's talk about, cold water pastry with food historians. And let's find out about this layer cake from Eastern Europe."

Adam (19:30): In an episode like last night, there's in excess of 160 hours of knitting that go into creating that episode. And of that, 160 hours of person knitting and crocheting time, we see maybe five minutes of it. It might be as much as 10. It's a fraction of a percent of the time that we actually get to see. We don't...

Georgia (19:48): It's like an iceberg on steroids.

Adam (19:49): Yeah. Given that they can't show us that, that's why we can't find out about, I guess, as you're saying, all the culture. It's a shame, then maybe there's spin-off, maybe if this gets enough attention and viewer numbers, I think are pretty solid, there's more than two million people tuned in for the first episode.

Georgia (20:20): That's alright.

Adam (20:21): Which I think is pretty big for Channel 4. Hopefully it just encourages, okay, there's interest in this as a craft, let's bring some more audience in by starting a documentary.

Georgia (20:13): Probably from experiences and lessons in this first season. We've already spent a lot of time talking about it, so I won't go into it, but the things about Shetland in the first episode, hopefully in future seasons, we'll be seeing a bit more learning from these situations so that we do have more of that representation, more of the heritage of crochet, cotton yarn that has been mass produced from a large seller.

Adam (20:35): It's also fascinating how animals are reared. That's one of the things I love about knitting is there's so many different avenues you can choose and go and educate yourself about. If you want to understand why a merino sheep is different, or rather why the wool of a merino sheep is different if it's raised in the UK versus the US versus South America versus Australia, there are meaningful differences to the fibre that comes off those sheep. Some to do with environmental factors, some to do with feeding, some to do with the animal husbandry. Like if you want to take those deep dives, that you can make an hours documentary on that all by itself. That's where you have to decide, are you going to nerd out on that topic or are you going to produce an entertainment show?

Georgia (21:13): You know what I feel like is weirdly missing is the technical challenge.

Adam (21:18): I want to see that too. I really wish, I really wish–

Georgia (21:21): I feel like a lot of these things could be addressed by having you've got to knit this thing, color work, or you've got to knit this kind of stitch or do blanket stitch or something from memory and they don't get any resources to do it. I was surprised that that was not happening because if I was going for this, I was instinctively thinking we would sit down and we would definitely be some kind of interesting technical challenge thing.

Adam (21:44): I was saying this, I gave an interview on an Australian podcast last week.

Georgia (21:48): Oooooooooh!

Adam (21:50): And I give them all over the world, Georgia.

Georgia (21:51): Alright then!

Adam (21:52): I was giving this interview on an Australian podcast last week and I was talking about what challenge I would like to set if I was on there. I'd love to be giving them half of a panel of lacework, like quite small, maybe just 10 by 10 centimetres, 20 centimetres by 10, 20 centimetres, and just say, finish this, you've got an hour or two hours, whatever it is. Because everyone's view of what makes a brilliant knitter is going to be different. But for me, if you could look at a piece of lace work and work out what it is–

Georgia (22:20): And read it, yeah.

Adam (22:21): And read it and then keep knitting it, like that would be a sign of an amazing knitter.

Georgia (22:25): Maybe they just realized that that was not viable.

Adam (22:28): It's difficult isn't it because also you get expert knitters who don't necessarily read a chart.

Georgia (22:32): The twisted stitch thing that we talked about briefly last week, I think it is worth directing people's attention to the whole, so Meadow did release a video in response to her casting off and I definitely recommend going and having a look at it (Snazzy.mj, 2025). One of the things that she covered was she twisted her stitches on the show and actually there was a lovely learning moment that happened with either Di and Sheila or just Di, where they talked her through and showed why she was doing it, how she was doing it. Meadow was saying was it's a lot more common to twist your stitches in Ireland. And it's more of a cultural learning thing that you could have someone who's knit their whole life, who's like in their eighties, who's won all kinds of knitting competitions, is really, really accomplished knitter, but twists their stitches. And you don't necessarily know these things until you're in the moment. And we've had a lot of comments from people saying, there was one in particular, I don't know who it was from, I'm sorry, but they were saying that they taught workshops and it wasn't until they got to doing brioche that they found out that the way they'd done their yarn overs wasn't actually the right way their whole life because everything else could kind of cope with the yarn overs being the wrong direction. And then you get to brioche and you give yarn overs need to be the right way round. And that doesn't get exposed until it doesn't work. And if you don't have a teacher who can identify those things, it comes back around to that whole idea about tacit knowledge and proximal recognition. If you don't have someone around you who can see what's going wrong, identify it and then tell you, you just don't know. And so doing something like a lace work thing, I wonder if actually, if they just wouldn't get anywhere with that kind of thing. But I would love to see it.

Adam (24:08): I absolutely love to see it.

Georgia (24:09): I'd love to do it! I think it would be like–

Adam (24:12): You'll turn up here next week and to entertain you whilst I prattle on I'll just give you half a panel of lace work. So did you have any favourites? What was your favourite one? Or pulling a face that says you don't really like any of them?

Georgia (24:23): I think that Lydia's was structurally really beautiful. And I think that it took me a minute to kind of process how beautiful it was. And I really wanna be careful about how I say this for the body shape of that amazing athlete. It took me a second to actually think, yeah, this looks really good on her, that it's a really nice fit because the athlete and– Oh God, I'm walking into to, you know, don't cancel me. And she just had obviously such a strong, amazing physique, quite broad shoulders, the kind of the, I think the line across the top that was quite square neckline, and then also the panelling with those horizontal lines. For me, looking at it from like a woman's perspective, I was like, is that flattering for that body shape?

Adam (25:12): It's interesting you say that because I looked at that and I wanted the body to get out of the way. I really didn't see the woman at all because I was transfixed. In fact, you know, it's close to bringing tears to my eyes as well. Like the intricate shaping of the central part of the body of that garment was absolutely out of this world.

Georgia (25:34): It was amazing.

Adam (25:35): Because the way that she used different sections of knitting in different directions to bring together that body and to give the level of contouring that she did was just, was phenomenal. I just wanted to reach out and hold that knitted garment. I didn't want a human anywhere near it. Like it wasn't, it wasn't worth–

Georgia (25:56): I do you see that? I mean, I'm really scraping the barrel for criticism on this one because it was incredible, like really gorgeous. I just wonder if it wasn't perhaps the most flattering swimsuit that she might have worn, though I don't know what internalized misogyny this is serving right now. I thought it was gorgeous. And obviously everyone who modelled the stuff is just incredible. And yay, go Team GB and diving. Amazing. There we go. I'm covering all bases here.

Adam (26:23): That was a stand-out for me as well. I was surprised that Holger chose to crochet. You know, he's such a strong knitter.

Georgia (26:29): But didn't he say that he was wanting to show some diversity? The cheeky string vest.

Adam (26:32): I mean, yeah, the cheeky string vest, that was brilliant.

Georgia (26:36): It's giving Berlin nightclubs. It wasn't really giving Mallorca.

Adam (26:39): But he was one of the very few to get close enough and dense enough stitches in the important places so that you wouldn't have had any accidental viewings.

Georgia (26:50): So Simon with his little lacy-wacy down the side. Do you think that was deliberate or did he just like muck up?

Adam (26:57): I'm sure he made a comment early on that he was going to leave the sides open and lace them together. So I think I understood mentally where he was going with that because I think again a swimsuit that is sort of laced together where you have these intricate straps going in between different important panels can look very carefully engineered and beautiful, but he only showed it when it came to the judging. I'm sorry Simon. Those straps didn't look amazing.

Georgia (27:22): It was not giving glamour. It's the second time now that they've said that Simon is doing freeform crochet. I don't know enough about crochet, but that sounds bad.

Adam (27:32): No, I'm, uh, freeform crochet is...

Georgia (27:34): Is it just improvised crochet?

Adam (27:35): Well, it can mean improvised crochet, but it's where you're adding the material because it's kind of like 3D printing crochet. You've got a single point and you can go around and add material basically anywhere you want on the garment. And so freeform allows you then to travel around to the place you want to add more material and you add more material. So freeform can be used to create these beautiful objects which are very organic. And you know, it's like sketching. You're just sketching away and doodling and you can create wonderful things. I think freeform crochet is a bit further away from what Simon was doing. I think people are going to be cross that I've got this wrong. But I think the context in which freeform crochet was being used was probably more improvisational and adding the material to get it to the right size, rather than Holger, I sure, had gauged-swatched that more than a thousand times to get it.

Georgia (28:23): If you want to cancel Adam for his comments about crochet, you can email us podcast@yarnlibrary.co.uk.

Adam (28:31): And please set your title to "Cancel Adam". So we know exactly where to file that.

Georgia (28:35): You plucked that right out of my brain. Also, you going back to the fact that we don't necessarily get the, we don't have the time, the BBC luxury of let's get to know our knitters. I love these little insights in this solo challenge, the signature challenge, if you will, where you get to find out like a little bit about them. And so you have any big reactions to the holiday destination?

Adam (28:55): I have literally no reaction to Georgia. But I can tell that you've obviously got a reaction.

Georgia (29:00): I mean I wrote down this little list and I think this also will help jog your memories for anyone who watched the show. So we had Simon Disneyland, which now thinking about the slutty side cuts, I'm like, wait, what?

Adam (29:12): Slutty Simon's Disneyland friend.

Georgia (29:15): I didn't make that connection to literally just now, but he's like, yeah, I wanted it to be a bit sexy. And he's like, it's Disneyland.

Adam (29:21): No, but the color palette was from Disneyland.

Georgia (29:24): Okay so we've got Slutty Disneyland for Simon. We've got Venice for Elsa. Excellent. She said that she struggled a little bit with the shaping, I mean, incredible, lovely inspiration. Lydia. Both of us can't remember where Lydia's holiday destination was.

Adam (29:36): Send us an email.

Georgia (29:37): Yeah. Dipti. Las Vegas. Whilst being on the choir tour, very cool. Yeah. Simon's saying, "Was it like a show girl?" And she had quite a reaction to that one.

Adam (29:48): It was quite a closed "No."

Georgia (29:50): No. I did feel for her though, because like in different contexts, like showgirl means different things. If anyone's seen the Pamela Anderson film, then maybe Dipti has seen the Pamela Anderson film. Anyway, so Stephanie, Seychelles, where she got married, but the marriage didn't last.

Adam (30:03): No. Do you know what I thought about my cousin who was a lawyer once telling me about why you shouldn't get married abroad? Because if you do ever want to get divorced, don't know what the laws are that govern divorce in the country where you get married. So if you get married abroad, you know, you are bound by the laws of marriage in other country. And so that was my, that was my only really passing thought married in the Seychelles. And then she immediately said, and then I got divorced. And then I thought, I wonder how legally complex that was.

Georgia (30:32): I mean, spoilers, but I am gonna miss Stephanie's sort of life coach view on things. What was it she said? "The marriage didn't last, but the memories did." So nice. I mean, great. Isaac, New River Gorge in Virginia or West Virginia. I'm not sure which one. West Virginia. So New River Gorge. He struggled with the glam element, but I do appreciate that he tried to make a little climbing bag. Tracy, Isle of Wight. And then last but not least, Holger, a small village in Mallorca called Deià. Have you heard of it before?

Adam (30:45): No, I hadn't.

Georgia (31:01): Well, I Googled it. American Vogue wrote an article saying that it was where all the hot people went on their holibobs (Bailey, 2018). So, apparently Richard Branson has a house there. Kate Moss goes there. Beyonce. Andrew Lloyd Webber probably wrote some musicals there. The Beatles.

Adam (31:12): I mean we've got a question coming up I can tell about are we doing on location podcasts in future? Maybe well it's a good time to talk about our sponsors Georgia.

Georgia (31:27): Travel with Knitting Travel.

Adam (31:28): Yeah if any travel agents want to sponsor us that's absolutely–

Georgia (31:30): Ooh, yeah, I mean there are some cool knitting holidays out and about.

Adam (31:38): Can I take a moment to show off our Not Yarn sponsors? Just so that everyone can understand what an amazing spot this is to be on such an enormous podcast. So this week my microphone is made by James Makes Yarn (James Makes Yarn, 2025). He's an independent designer, UK based. And this is a absolutely gorgeous chunky yarn. You might recognise it from the first couple of episodes, but it's now safely wound into a ball. So I'm talking into a ball rather than a [baa].

Georgia (31:58): Also really excellent Instagram. Can I just say like, it gives me joy. I would highly recommend following James.

Adam (32:05): It's beautiful. If you want to know what the colour is, it's Tamagotchi.

Georgia (32:09): Ooooh! Tamagotchi, tama-tamagotchi. So good.

Adam (32:12): Yeah, chunky yarn. Absolutely love it. Thank you, James, for making that. And the other one, Georgia, I've changed your microphone over this week because I was sent this by a fan in Canada, I think.

Georgia (32:23): Ooh, Canadian yarn, my in-laws live in Canada.

Adam (32:25): The lady goes by the nickname Scout, but her company is Finch Mod (FinchMod, 2024). This is the first time I've knitted with yarn, is zebra stripey. And she actually dyed this and gave me first pick in the batch. She sent me pictures of all of the pinks and said, which one do you want? And I chose this skein. I already whipped it up into a hat. I was knitting this last week.

Georgia (32:43): That looks really nice actually. Just a little bit the black variation that then tie in with the other yarn of the hat. Excellent Adam. Design challenge.

Adam (32:50): Exactly, I'm very pleased with this. Design challenges, this is me done. But yeah, there we go. There's the advertising slot from a couple of our yarny friends.

Georgia (32:58): If you would like to advertise on the number one craft podcast in most of the world.

Adam (33:03): Most of the world. Drops an email, podcast@yarnlibrary.co.uk.

Adam (33:07): So, the second challenge was to create a deck chair and I am well informed that I am not to refer to it as a deck chair for our US listeners. It is a lawn chair. So what we're talking about is a folding wooden frame which folds out and there's a single piece of material that runs from the sort of top at the back down to the front and you just sit in it. It's just a sort of cradled sling and they had to crochet– They were split into, so the eight of them were split into pairs. Four teams had to go and create this piece of material to make a deck chair.

Georgia (33:40): They had the option of three different yarn types, I think. So there was a fine one, a leathery stringy kind of tape one, also like a thicker bulky.

Adam (33:51): Really thick cotton yarn. Basically all of them chose the thick stuff except for, and you can probably guess it, Holger's team who went with a thin because they just went all out on the detail.

Georgia (34:02): So many feelings about this.

Adam (34:03): Then what they had to do was create a striking holiday design and that was the brief they were given. So striking holiday design on a deck chair or lawn chair.

Georgia (34:12): And not bottom out. You need to be able to sit in it and it wasn't going to break. Bottom out, which is the technical term apparently for hitting the bottom of the pool when you dive.

Adam (34:20): Yeah, or a saggy chair.

Georgia (34:21): Soggy bottom. Ozempic bottom is another one.

Adam (34:28): I've knitted with tape yarn. It's a bit of a bugger. I don't really like it.

Georgia (34:31): I'm trying to think, I've knitted with similar things, not take that kind of yarn explicitly but long strips of fabric.

Adam (34:36): Which arm would you have gone with?

Georgia (34:38): Probably the thick one, even though it took a bit longer because straight away I had feelings about the thin one being too stretchy.

Adam (34:48): Interesting, you thought the thin one would be too stretchy.

Georgia (34:49): Well to have the amount of tension and security that you need for that. You're playing a lot of risky games without the ability to kind of figure out in advance, okay, how stretchy is this gonna be? So I wonder if just in anticipation of the fact that you're not gonna be able to test this, test how stretchy it's gonna be in a large body of fabric like that. I probably wouldn't have wanted to do that because I would have thought, yeah, it's just gonna go [vzzju].

Adam (35:16): Interesting, so I would have, I think I'd have been tempted to just go with the large one, again, being lazy and wanting to know that you got it done, because like you couldn't have something not complete. But if I'd been paired with Holger, absolutely what I would have done, because obviously Holger's gonna want more intricate detail, we've seen that, that's his style, I would have then just mixed the two. I would have absolutely done the bottom half or found to do one side in a chunky. I would have found a way to incorporate that into the design because a large part of their deck chair was just stripes. And I think that would have lent itself fine to having a chunky yarn and then picking out a picture in detail, which is what they did. So their picture that they depicted on this beautiful stripe deck chair was a cone of chips and the cone, you could see that it was newspaper and then the chips or French fries, I guess that some of our listeners might call them. They looked three dimensional because of the shading. It was great.

Georgia (36:07): It looked incredible, the clarity of design and everything, amazing. I wonder if it's almost, it's not even about the yarn itself, it's about okay how quickly can we crochet this fibre up to give us enough time to experiment with the structure given that we don't have time to swatch and get gauge and have a sense of the properties of the fabric that it results in. So the ones that were able to crochet something up quicker could kind of do a bit of playing around with, yeah no that's not going to work or we need to cut this and redo this part or double this over.

Adam (36:38): Before we leave Holger's design and I'm sorry to Isaac that we keep calling it Holger's design because I know Isaac the other team member–

Georgia (36:43): Also, Isaac's expressed before that he's really into intarsia as well.

Adam (36:47): Also, the little clip of footage of we saw of Isaac crocheting, he's a fast crocheter as well. It gave rise to one of the most interesting parts of the show for me, and you could see they were teasing up to it. So we got that little talk from Jamie Crowe about is it a triple or a double, or the double versus single crochet, and that the treble, or the US double crochet, is less tight and stretches more. So Holger and Isaac ran into problems basically with a few hours to go that they realised they weren't gonna finish and so they had to switch from double crochets or US singles to triples and doubles, which meant that the bottom part of their chair was then going to be too flexible. And you could then see it coming a mile off. What was gonna happen is that this was gonna sag and that's exactly what happened. Poor Tom Daley sat in it and his bottom touched the floor. Sad deck chair moment.

Georgia (37:34): Soggy bottom.

Adam (37:35): Soggy bottom. Again, I feel like they could have tested that, seen it was going to happen and then wrapped it around the wood a couple of times to make it a little bit shorter.

Georgia (37:42): That's the thing, Holger said, "I'm not sitting in it, there's absolutely no way we're not risking breaking it". And then Isaac said, "I wanna sit in it." "No!", I was kind of racking my brains through that scenario. If I was in that position, would I want to risk sitting in it? Because if you wreck it and go to judging and can't sit in it and it's broken, then you're definitely going home.

Adam (37:59): I'm sorry, the engineer in me is test it.

Georgia (38:02): Yeah, exactly. I would definitely be like, test it, test it, test it. But I could understand where he was coming from that he was like, okay, we know this is maybe not going to work, but we just want it to look pretty.

Adam (38:11): There we had a sharp contrast with another team who did choose to test it and then find out that it was absolutely not going to work. So Stephanie and Dipti made–

Georgia (38:22): Crochet queens!

Adam (38:23): Crochet queens. Came in last with their effort and it was a real shame, but they crocheted something which turned out then to be massively too big. Absolutely a colossal piece of fabric and it was too long. And there was an interesting moment because Stephanie said to Dipti, We've got to cut this bottom part off and Dipti just looked at her and said, "No."

Georgia (38:42): And I know it could have come across as being quite blunt or rude, but it wasn't like a, "No, absolutely not!" It was just "No :(". And later on when they did eventually cut it, she said, "I know how painful this is for you, my love. Like, I'm sorry that we're doing this," which was really nice of Stephanie. I understand it though, because instinctively cutting anything you make or feeling like you're gonna risk something like that or chopping through something feels really scary. It's one of the reasons that I think people in this country certainly, or in America, like people are so nervous of steeking, even though it's very common in different places because it's seen as something that is destructive, rather than something that is functional. And when you start to look at things in a functional light, like, okay, well, this cut is going to help us make this a viable thing rather than seeing it as I've knitted this lovely thing and I don't want to cut into it because cutting is bad and cutting is destructive. Sort of weirdly reminds me of when the fire brigade came into my school when I was a child and said, "you mustn't touch fire, you mustn't touch matches. Like, don't go anywhere near them, you're gonna burn the house down." Valuable to teach kids that, right? I then went home and said to my dad that this had happened. We were very outdoorsy, had fires in the garden, grew up in Scouts, all that kind of stuff. Basically the fire department had said that I shouldn't go anywhere near it and I shouldn't participate and help dad build the fire. So I referred this information to him and my dad was like, "I'm not having this!" And so like all of that Saturday morning, he like put me in his leather jacket and tied my hair up and gave me goggles and let me play with fire.

Adam (40:07): I mean, I absolutely salute your dad there because I 100% took the same stance when my children started growing fearful of fire. I wanted to explain to them exactly what it was to get a proper understanding of it, to have a respectful relationship with fire, which I think is what you need. You shouldn't just be absolutely panic-stricken by something. You need to understand what it is, what its limitations are, and how to manage your relationship with it. And whether the scary thing is fire or steeking or–

Georgia (40:36): Abstinence is not the answer.

Adam (40:37): No, you've got to engage with something in order to have an understanding for it. I think that's my view. So Stephanie and Dipti, created this object which then had to be cut back. It was done in super chunky yarn and they had done something. So the judges had said, without the contestants being there, they were saying, I really hope we don't see granny square type things because it was a little bit too basic. And then lo and behold, that's what they did.

Georgia (40:59): Oh with a cocktail, were they the cocktail, people?

Adam (41:01): Yeah, they overlaid the cocktail.

Georgia (41:03): When they described it I was just like, that's gonna look... and it did.

Adam (41:06): I thought as well it's not comfy if you've got two layers of thick chunky at different points and then with outlines it's not gonna feel comfortable to sit in.

Georgia (41:14): Again, for me, it came down to that idea of design being led by a pictorial idea as opposed to the function. And we didn't quite see that in the Holger's situation because yeah, it didn't function, but we saw a clarity in the design and we saw it integrated. Whereas with that cocktail, it's like having the nice idea of, "ooh I can imagine this", but then the imagining of it doesn't necessarily align with what's happening on a material basis. That links into all kinds of what you might a dematerialized view of things. So increasingly in design and in art practices, people don't have the material skills, material knowledge, but it's how you get things where they just break straight away because the designers made them on a computer and don't have any material concept or material understanding. And so that doesn't carry through into the design.

Adam (42:03): I think that's also a problem where we come onto fibre choice as well. They're obviously given these three fibres. And again, that's another complication. I'm going to go a little bit bougie here and describe something, but if you've never knitted with silk before, I'll an example. I got very excited by silk as a new fibre to knit with.

Georgia (42:19): I've never knitted with silk, I'm afraid.

Adam (42:22): You sometimes see it as a mix in fibres. You definitely get it in mohair a lot.

Georgia (42:25): Fair enough, I've got it in mixes.

Adam (42:27): But I can guarantee you, knitting with pure silk is a wholly unusual experience. And if you've never done it, you won't know just how complex it is and what different skills it requires. And that's what I thought of last night is like, if you've given these three yarns you've never worked with before, I'm building this kind of innate feeling for yarn. The more I knit, the more I feel like I intuitively understand how it's gonna behave. Throw me a bulky cotton that's been puffed up like one of those yarns has. I don't know how that's gonna stretch and behave, because I've not knitted with it before. Now, that's probably because I'm not the most experienced knitter in the world. I'm not UK's best knitter. I'm not on that show. So maybe that's where that all comes from. Maybe that's part of it, you need that experience. But I do feel for them that they are exposed to materials where they don't necessarily have that, it's not their their choice of material is not their second nature.

Georgia (43:20): And whether this is by design from the producers of the show, ultimately your experience gets tested in these things and if you were to break down like what is actually going on when you're testing someone's experience or seeing how someone is getting through these challenges, you know, you're looking at skills but you're looking at material knowledge, you're looking at time management and process, you're looking at design, all of these different elements, but the producers themselves, when they set these challenges, or when Di and Sheila set these challenges, when the knitters do them, they themselves might not recognize that it is, it's a test of my skills, my material knowledge, my this, this, and this, because those things are embedded and embodied within the doing of the thing and not necessarily perceived. So it comes back around to the idea of tacit knowledge and flow in practice. So Csíkszentmihályi (1990) had this idea of getting into the flow and the rhythm of something. And then when you're in those flow states, you'll have a very proximal experience, a very close experience with the things that you're using. And so you don't necessarily perceive what's going on. With materials, we'll talk at some point, we'll go into the whole craft versus art debate, but it's one of the reasons that I'm really grounded in wanting to identify my knitting as being craft. I don't really like thinking about it as being art. A) because that's like assuming that art is on somehow a higher plane and trying to elevate craft to somehow transcend into the art realm that's somehow higher up than craft. There's that element to it. But there's also like increasingly in art practice influenced by a lot of ideas about, "you can do whatever you want, anything's art" and freedom of practice, creative liberty. Because of all of those things, generally art schools, art education, turning away from a lot of material practices. And it's the word often used to talk about it is de-skilling, the de-skilling of art. And craft doesn't survive that same process of de-skilling because the skills and the material understanding are inherent in the practices themselves. And so if you adopt that kind of art, like freedom of practice, if you adopt that art identity, you also sign up to that de-materialized practice that craft doesn't survive. And so when you start to have in these challenges, you see people making like fun, free, creative ideas that are not backed up by the materials behind them.

Adam (45:40): Are you saying that from an artist's point of view then, if you're dematerialising art, what's the equivalent for that? Are we saying that if you take a violinist, that you can give them any violin and it should be the... Is that the material that you take away? Or is it a painter... If you were to say to Van Gogh, okay, no more oils for you, Van Gogh. You've got to paint everything with its watercolours instead.

Georgia (46:00): Well, yeah, it's about respecting the different mediums. It's about saying if you had this challenge and you said, OK, well, you can either paint this thing in watercolour, in oils or acrylics, and all of those three different things have different properties. If you go into this and you do not have an understanding or knowledge or a dexterity, a skill with each of those three materials, or maybe you've got a real experience with one of those materials, not the other ones, your choices are going to be led by which ones you choose. The thing is, though, that if you go in there and you've done an entire art degree that is basically just thinking, and thinking about what is art and thinking about concepts. And then you go into that challenge and you are still an artist, but you don't have the material skills. And art schools now generally don't teach material skills. I was actually writing about it yesterday on my thesis and this morning before we recorded. So there's the whole kind of history of de-skilling within art schools kind of from the 1960s onwards, where they stopped teaching a lot of technical things, stopped teaching life drawing and painting technique. And people would go straight into the course and be treated like an artist and told that it wasn't really essential for them to do those things. And then because that has happened for so long, you've now had this sort of like a mass exodus of skill where lots of generations of artists aren't actually able to do these things. And you have to go to very specific places to learn them. And actually there wasn't really anywhere to learn them until the Royal Drawing School, which sounds like, oh, that sounds old. It was set up in 2000.

Adam (47:26): Oh wow!

Georgia (47:27): Yeah, it used to be called the Prince's Drawing School, King Charles was involved in it. He's a very good watercolour painter. You might not know that.

Adam (47:32): I did not know that.

Georgia (47:33): Yeah? And he was recognising on visits to art schools that students had no idea how to paint anymore.

Adam (47:37): That's interesting, it? So art becomes more of an academic process and therefore you lose the inherent understanding about their medium or which media they use.

Georgia (47:49): I was looking at a paper this morning actually, let me just find this. Yeah, so the Freelands Foundation (2025), they also are more recently set up organization. Let me find the mission statement. "At Freelands Foundation, we believe in the intrinsic value of art and that making is fundamental. We champion art education – nurturing and fostering material literacy and making." So the reason that I'm doing my PhD on composition is because this dematerializing practice thing has started to become more common in composition and in music, where people don't wanna learn how to do technical skills and technical things.

Adam (48:22): So it's something that's come over from visual art to composition.

Georgia (48:26): Technically speaking, the ideas from postmodernism were originally more from literature, have jumped over into art and to music to a lesser extent, but now are coming like second, third hand from contemporary artists and musicians and composers feeling like, "Oh I want to be an artist, I want to think of myself as an artist." So they're sort of signing up to this stuff. I mean, a really practical example, right? I was reading a book yesterday, think it's Martin Gayford's How Painting Happens (and why it matters) (Gayford, 2024), and he says in this, this little quote from Damien Hirst, where he's like, oh yeah, so and so, I think her name's Rachel, How[ard], second name definitely means the H, I'll put it in the notes. She paints the most amazing dots, like really incredible. So Damien Hirst was a famous artist, famous of lots of different things, but he did these dot paintings (Gagosian Gallery, 2012). Have you seen those? Do you know those?

Adam (49:13): I'm not sure I know Damien Hirst's dot paintings.

Georgia (49:15): Okay, so they are some of the most recognizable like paintings of the late 20th century it says in this book, right? I'm just creating the book as opposed to me just flippantly saying that, okay?

Adam (49:24): I'm just going to highlight that I'm not as cultured as your butter.

Georgia (49:26): So these dot paintings, right? This is such a tangent, but I hope it's an interesting one for people. Damien Hirst literally says, "Oh, the best dot paintings that you can buy of mine were painted by her." Because Damien Hirst, and I've got lots of examples I could bring up about this. Damien Hirst didn't paint those paintings that are in his name. He came up with the concept for them and then hired her as an assistant who painted the dots.

Adam (49:51): That's amazing.

Georgia (49:52): And this is the level of de-skilling that is happening. People talk about walking down corridors and seeing which are the fine art classes and which ones were like illustration or design students, because the fine art students were all sat around talking and the design and illustration students were actually doing things. And this listeners is why I personally feel that allowing craft to have its own identity and its own sovereignty, if you will, as a discipline and as a field of research provides craft with the independence to determine its own relationship to materials and skills. And if it signs up to the all-consuming umbrella of art and what is art and art can be anything, if you personally want to think of your craft as art and put it in that context, then you can do that because art's not policing it, because anything can be art. But if anything can be art, that means that really poorly made crochet that doesn't work on a material level is also art if you think it's art.

Adam (50:54): Such a good point because it is inherent in when we talk about craft it is the manipulation of material as well. It is understanding how the material is going to flow or not flow and move or not and fold or not and all of those things that's critically important.

Georgia (51:07): And critical judgements of quality and quality control in that process of checking in with the material and going, is this working for me? Is this working? That's a really important part of a craft practice and an artistic practice technically as well. But if you sign up to that art idea, you also kind of sign up to not being able to say if something's good or bad, we shouldn't make judgements of quality. I've had that a lot increasingly in composition stuff. I remember saying to someone, "but I just want people to have the best possible tool kits as composers so they can make whatever they want to make." And the person who was examining me in this thing said, "No, we don't want to say best because we can't say best" because that was viewed as a judgment of quality that is very much in line with this postmodern theory.

Adam (51:47): The other thing that you've said that makes me think very hard about art versus craft is that I do think in a craft world I feel fairly shocked by your comment about a painting basically being subcontracted to another artist however what I think about that happening in craft is I do think for example if I could come up with a swatch of how I want a scarf to be or for example if that was going to be a shawl I could then give that to another designer who I could say look just this is the thing that I want and this is how it will work as a jumper create that overall. And I think because crafters have a communication of language and an understanding of how that works, how swatching, scaling, all of those things work. That does work. You say, make it with this material and this is how this part will work. You can specify that and that works as a craft design, but there is something icky about that from an art point of view.

Georgia (52:35): I was wondering about Di and Sheila about them working with big brands and stuff. When someone, when a designer comes to them with a design for some knitwear, how they go about realizing that and making a pattern for it and figuring out how it's gonna work. And if they've built understandings and relationships with the designers so that the designer knows, yeah, I can't put this element in or this element in because I know from previous experience that that thing's not gonna work because X, Y, Z. Or if Di and Sheila are having to consistently navigate with the designers and go, look, this isn't going to be doable and this is why. It's kind of like with me as a composer, again, you can see how this all feeds in and why I'm a composer doing craft stuff. When you're a composer and you write for an orchestra, if you don't arrive to the situation of writing for that orchestra with an instrumental knowledge and a knowledge of orchestration, you just end up writing potentially a load of music that's not playable by instruments. And so then you arrive in the rehearsal, dish out the music and no one can play anything.

Adam (53:37): Yep, absolutely. That's so important. There are classical composers who were well-trained, supposedly well-trained across orchestras, but they had their instruments which they really didn't know and understand well. Mozart, Beethoven had instruments that they didn't write well for because they were their weaknesses.

Georgia (53:53): In the same way that we see with a knitter and a crocheter, you see their strengths come out. I think even when you think back to like Dipti, predominantly a crocheter, in her challenge last week when she was knitting, I maybe got like kind of crochet vibes from her unicorn costume, which sounds mean and savage because I said I didn't like the unicorn costume. But I just mean that sometimes you see someone's prominent discipline or prominent craft come out in the other thing. So I have a background as a singer. A lot of the way I write lines in music are like single lines. They're quite melodic. And that comes out even in a string texture. I think of harmony in lines. Whereas if you talk to a pianist, I mean, you're a pianist, then maybe if you were going to write down something, you might think of things in more chords and harmony in that sense. And so then when you try and write for melodic instruments, I do some teaching and I see when students aren't coming from a single line melodic instrument or from singing.

Adam (54:46): I remember when I did my music A-level, when it came to composition, I remembered the pianists in that group were way ahead of everyone else very quickly, just because when it comes to understanding Bach four-part structure, it is inherently much easier to do if you're a pianist than if you study the clarinet and that's your instrument.

Georgia (55:02): And practical abilities to actually sit down and practice and play what you've written down.

Adam (55:08): You can compose four lines and then you can just play it.

Georgia (55:10): Yeah, and see if it works. All of these materials are so important for understanding. And unless you're building a practice that incorporates these different things and reflects on these different things, then you might not recognize that, okay, if I have this idea of having a cocktail glass that is superimposed on the top of another chunky thing, that's not gonna be very comfortable and it's not gonna look great.

Adam (55:32): But on the same basis, we should also then heavily discount Holger and Isaac's effort because it sagged, because they didn't have the inherent material understanding.

Georgia (55:41): I mean look at my notes. "Why Holger?"

Adam (55:45): Honestly, last night I watched and as that happened I thought, could this actually be that Holger doesn't make it through? I know. But it was a massive gamble for him. And I'm obviously pleased. I'm team Holger. Sorry, I haven't got the T-shirts yet, but I think he's going to go through. I think if we see something like that again, that is a real weak spot of his. Wn could see what we saw as a winning combination, know, Simon and Elsa, where they stuck to something nice and simple. They had sky, they had sand, and they had beach huts in the middle. The sand they'd use a slightly different crochet stitch so it looked like shells. It was brilliant. It had clear vision of what it wanted to be and they did it super well. And that from Simon's point of view, that rescued him for this episode. He wasn't whittled.

Georgia (56:29): Honestly, seeing that Ailsa just had the opportunity to kind of take a task forward, because in the previous tasks, she's kind of been with other people who've come forward with the idea and she's quietly executed it. But it was really lovely to actually see her just like take a lead and Simon just go, "okay", I felt like I could literally hear him just take a little hop and jump onto her coattails. Ride away.

Adam (56:48): Exactly. And he did brilliantly as well. They both executed that one fantastically. The design was brilliant. It was celebrated by the judges.

Georgia (56:57): Simon was very much involved in the success of the project.

Adam (56:59): They did a superb job. But again, it comes back to clean, clear, precise vision.

Georgia (57:05): Clarity of concept.

Adam (57:06): And then mastery of the materials as have, which unfortunately Holger and Isaac didn't.

Georgia (57:11): Mastery is another can of worms that we can open at a different time. But yeah, understanding, material understanding.

Adam (57:17): Overall, I think this was a magnificent episode. I really really enjoyed that we're seeing more of the people that we're seeing more of the craft. We're getting little bits more insight. Obviously, it's never enough and it is never going to be enough for me and I suspect so many listeners who, Who are just want to nerd out on the craft all day and unfortunately they've only got 45 minutes of actual TV time to do it in.

Georgia (57:41): I'm interrupting here. When you're saying "the craft", I think that we would be amiss given how much we talked about terminology in the last episode

Adam (57:47): I'm sorry, did I drop my S? Did I drop my S? I meant crafts.

Georgia (57:51): Crafts!

Adam (57:53): Let me just be really clear.

Georgia (57:55): Because we've already had this conversation, we've already had this soap box. I will not reopen the soap box for business, but this is supposed to be the best knitter and why is there crochet? This week very much felt like crochet week because one challenge was explicitly you got to crochet this and the first challenge whilst you could knit or crochet, a lot of people went to crochet because actually it's going to take less time and kind of give you the thing that they want.

Adam (58:21): You wait until macramé and needle felting week.

Georgia (58:24): No needle– Ah, see I could be there for needlefelting.

Adam (58:27): No, we're gonna stop Georgia going off on that tangent.

Georgia (58:29): Right, so of course crochet and knitting need to be respected as independent disciplines because the terminology and stuff, it helps preserve the practice of either one. It's useful and valuable for both parties to be recognized individually. But we had a really cool comment in response to us having these conversations last week from DeeDeeCatMom (2025) .

Adam (58:49): What did DeeDeeCatMom say?

Georgia (58:50): She said that "in previous generations, it was EXPECTED that a knitter knew how to crochet. Patterns from the 40s and 50s often have crochet necklines and finishes." Basically going on to saying that in the past, patterns were kind of vague and minimal instructions, which I'm kind of familiar with. And so often there wouldn't have been instructions in a knitting pattern on how to crochet. It would just say crochet neckline. And so you had to have that kind of skill. So then I thought, okay, I'm going to go on a bit of a deep dive on this and I won't go into masses of details in it now, but I will put it in the notes if you're interested. There is a paper in Textile History journal, Defining Crochet by Cary Karp (Carp, 2016). I haven't read the whole article, but the abstract was talking about how textile classification systems in the 19th century or prior to the 19th century didn't refer to crochet explicitly, but referred to being knit. And then the way that you differentiated between whether it was crochet or not was whether it said it was one hook or not.

Adam (59:39): Interesting. So perhaps what we're dealing with is it turns out is a production team that just is very very very outdated in its view. It's just–

Georgia (59:47): It's just one hook instead of two. That was the gist I got from the abstract. I haven't read the whole article, as I said, but yeah, it is fascinating.

Adam (59:55): So I love the episode. I think it's brilliant. I think the show is building. I can't wait to see more of it. I can't wait for next Sunday. Also, we've got some interesting challenges coming up. Next we've got crochet kids fancy dress as the solo challenge and a wall hanging as the team challenge. There are seven of them left and I think they divide into a team of three and four, which I'm interested about how you make that fair between two teams, but we'll see. But yeah, we lost our knitter Stephanie. It was a shame to see her go. She was lovely.

Georgia (1:00:22): She definitely was a sort of a warm presence within the group.

Adam (1:00:25): I would love to be in that show in a room of 10 knitters knitting away all day. That's fantastic. I think it's going to be an interesting challenge when they get down to three because the conversation is going to be a little bit more stilted by that point. The last thing I want to say before we bid you goodbye is that we are going to change the cadence of the show. So we're hopefully going to drop this one as soon as possible, but it's going to be a couple of days and we hope to get another episode out to you. We might be dropping as many as two a week.

Georgia (1:00:50): Funny story about, won't go into it now, but cadence and running. Not now. Definitely not now.

Adam (1:00:55): You see, I'm trying to end the podcast, Georgia.

Georgia (1:00:58): I want that too!

Adam (1:00:59): I feel that you're taking some opportunities for segues. I'm going to say goodbye and then I'm just not going let you talk again.

Georgia (1:01:04): Bye! Bye! Bye!