magic3mal recap

our annual craft-along making three items for young people...

It has been five whole months, not easy months but full-on ones, meaning it has been a longish time since last recording a full blown chatty knitting podcast and finally this happend- uploaded and ready for you to watch, whenever you have a moment.

Hooray for youtube being a 24/7 for 7 days a week kinda place ;)

please find a click-able link in the underlined row below:

Ep68 ….magic persists.

(PS: the magic3mal2024 winner was drawn by yours turly at the end of the Podcast. And if you want to see it rather than read it this is a spoiler warning for the newsleter

- further along in this post I share the winning set!!!!)

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The end of magic3mal2024 has finally been announced and the prize draw happened for an overall winner from all the completed sets of three items which were shared to our hashtag #magicthreemalflatlay …

I am so delighted and thought

‘why not share a whole post dedicated to a little review of our annual craft-along?’

2024 was an unusual year for me, it was heavy, it was important time spent with important to me people and it flew by…. somehow I guess I must have had an intuition about that, or a faint inkling - which meant already at new years eve I had decided & announced that we would run the craft-along completely different to any of the previous years

from 1st January 2024 until 31st December 2024… a full -fledged roman calendar year.

I guess at this point I should say that #magic3mal2025 will be starting on 1th May (our traditional kick off day) and run until 1st October….

back to the original way of scheduling this craft-along where we knit, crochet, sew, embroider, mend, toy-make etc in sets of three items for children:

top

bottoms and

toy/ or accessory.

Anyone who wants to join can make sets for young people in their lives:

friends, family, neighbors, for gifting to someone young …..anyone you feel might be happy to hold a little hand-made joy close to their hearts.

Then, there are Flatlays of finished items and I thought I would show you just a couple of magic three make-along FLATLAYS as examples and in lieu of a round-up form the recently finished 2024 make-along:

by under.eagle.mountain

by laura_wise

by nakamil

by urseliflets

by abenaia_yarn

by ence_pece_tangled_hands

We had super-fun finished sets in 2024 - including mine we had 15 sets of three items completed. A few of our craft-along friends made a single item, or two of the three items they had planned, as we are definitely process based crafters in this corner of the internet that is always totally fine and worth celebrating, too... Hence, I will be recording a separate shorter vlog for the “complete big band” of crafters with prizes given out to the different categories’ winners:

my fave top, my fave bottoms, my fave toy or accessory made in 2024.

Please watch this space for the announcement when this vlog goes up on youtube :)

Also, I will show my own finished sets for children then - as my sets are obviously not eligible for the prizes we gather from friends of the yarnchix Podcast in sponsorship and as a big present box for one lucky person in the group this round-up group was 13 finished sets. ALL SETS HAD A LITTLE NOTE IN MY BASKET OF ENTRIES.. then I drew one of the notes from the basket and shared the overall winner.

Some of us were productive and managed to share several sets (which is fabulous as it hightens the potential winning ratio quite a bit for those busy crafters! I am definitely here for this kind of productivity… as in non-capitalist, and mainly for the JOY of making sth magic with our own hands…).

And the winner is (drawn live at the end of yarnchix Podcast #68)

aechmay !!!!!!!

Congratulations, Ksenia!

Fellows of the 3 magic making squad and beyond: let us all revel and celebrate this gorgeous set and bow our heads: a nana duck queen of hearts….. Plus that sweet sweater in the best pinks! I hope you will agree: we love it. I love it… and slowmail is sneaking its way to you, Ksenia xxxxx thank you for sharing your magic!

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New & returning crafters are forever welcome to make sets alongside one another during the make-along and I am so excited to kick of the new round of magic3mal in a couple of weeks.

Are you ready? New and want to join the fun? Would love to return, but are nervous? Wondering if stuff has changed & you will not get across that threshhold somehow? As the world crumbles you want to find the glue?

Community is a thing of beauty to you, but how/where/when to start?

Ask any questions you feel you have at any point. Honestl, no question is a wrong question!

We are all here to help you join in! There is a lot to look at in the #magic3mal hashtag from our long running make-along Story-line as well as additional photos of projects from the different annual tags if you need inspiration for example :)

Often times we have friends in our group, who plan to craft a selfish set… and to be honest those are as great a craft-along make contributions as any of the makes for young people. Because, well

why not create some things for the child inside of us? Why ever not….

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One-such-child-inside people was me, this was the set I planned & made

and as sketched in the intro text for this specific newsletter 2024 being the hard and rocky year I said it was (it will stay a faint pencil drawing of fact for today, as I cannot yet write about it this will have to wait for a later date to be turned into factual text in pen or ink.)

The resulting items I crafted for myself :

In previous years, I had had dreams of making three items and a flatlay in the magicthreemalflatlay style for me. And as my children grew from young tumbling beings into tall, sensible young adults ( yep_ I am mother to one adult and two teenagers) I started to realise: Aw, well the sizes I would have to make by now are almost my own size.

:)

So, in all honestly why not - in consequence- think about some items I would like to have & plan a selfish set afterall?

here: a stripey sweater

some scrappy mittens

a hot water bottle cover

and yes: it was completed within 2024… plus a few toys and more that I might cobble together into two actual child-sized sets, tbc.

More and more - as I get better and more precise with my knitting skills growing-

I love to see that:

my hands can help me; my time invests itself into somethings that I then truly end up caring about. Things I really love to wear.

I hope you also have such dreams of crafting things for yourself, of fixing sth you love to wear, maybe adjusting a waistband or adding a button back onto your nice coat after it has fallen off. If you have such ideas, make them turn real and use your skills to make your dream garments come to life…

or even if you do not have these skills yet, well.. write your dreams down in good lists about your mending and/or creating -and maybe I have had an idea how I can help.

….coming up locally here in Berlin.

Let’s see where my ideas take me and if they can help your ideas along the way.

For now I wish you a very happy weekend,

Thank you, for reading my newsletter today… it will always be free.

Yours,

Mimi

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what mimi loves:

this time I want to share a silly little short self-advertisment PLUG, as it is true: I love that my podcasts are just out there for you to find them whenever you have the time in your life to sit & watch… maybe whilst you craft, complete some chores, whilst the kids build a castle from lego or wooden bricks, maybe when you stand in your kitchen to cook, watch the paint dry on sth you painted, or maybe you are lying on the sofa- any time it makes me smile to have you visit, so please-just dream onwards and forwards, lovely friend… here , again: the link for my most recent podcast episode sixty-eight as well as the completed playlist of vlogmas 2024.