Well, students, you've done it! This is our very last summer school lesson at Jimmy Beans Wool University! Can you believe how much material we've gone over this summer? We learned everything we could possibly think to ask about yarn, fiber, and crafts: the different kinds of fibers that yarn is made from, where we get our products, how we use them all around the world...just to name a few of our topics! That long and winding road has led us, finally, to one of our most-discussed daily subjects: art.  Perhaps one of the biggest considerations when starting any project is the color. But how do we choose the right colors? ESPECIALLY when you are trying to combine colors, and you're ordering online, say??? How can you know what goes nicely with what? That is just what we're learning...

Good morning, class! Or, good evening, or afternoon -- whatever time it is where you are, we are glad to have you here, because today is music class at Jimmy Beans Wool University! In our newsletter this week, we did a nice and thorough tour of music genres, from hip hop, to indie, to pop, to rock, to disco...a little bit of everything in our lives. Music is a source of continual inspiration for us Beans, when it comes to choosing our projects and discovering our colorways. Today on the blog, we want to share with you some of the crocheters, knitters, and musicians who inspire us! Let's start off with an oldie but a goodie. Is anyone here for improvisational drumming? Drummer Corey Fogel had an ongoing series of performances where he would knit WHILE drumming!  Isn't that...

We are coming up on the last month of summer school, and I know some of you have been wary of some of our classes...math included! Well, I'm here to assuage those fears: if you've ever knit, or crochet, or cross stitched, or done any weaving, guess what? You're already doing math! record scratch Wait, what? Yeah, it's true! Maybe it's not the complicated equations like whatever is in the graphic above, but it's most definitely math. Any time you've done a pattern repeat in the round, for example, that's math right there. Say you have an 11-stitch repeat that goes around your cowl pattern 17 times...that's 187 stitches every single round! For a 120 round cowl that's 22,440 stitches! How many stitches do you think that you've done in your life? In the hundreds of thousands? The millions? And,...