Are you a knitter or crocheter looking to knit for the holiday season and wanting to hang out with other fibery friends? Let me introduce you to the Indie Design Gift-A-Long (GAL), an event held through the end of December on Ravelry.
Side Note: Can't use Ravelry? View this spreadsheet to find the participating designers on other platforms.
The Indie GAL brings together knitters and crocheters from all over the world to support indie designers and create a community filled with fun and knitting/crocheting. In order to participate in the event for prizes, you must knit or crochet a pattern from a participating designer (there are 250 in total, so you have options!). The event starts off with a week-long sale (November 23-30, 2020) for 25% off select patterns.
Once you have your patterns picked out (or even while you're still deciding!), you can join multiple chat threads, including a huge chat with lots of talking going on, a “slow lane” chat, and a chat for each of 8 different categories (i.e. shawls, hats, sweaters, etc).
In the chat, you can chat about everything from Thanksgiving dinner to the yarn you’ll use for your GAL project. There’s also some helpful enablers that will help you find a pattern for your yarn!
A fun and unique feature for the GAL are the games and challenges, such as Designer Alphabet Soup, where a designer’s name is jumbled up and you guess who it is; and a Designer Hunt where you guess a certain pattern (based on clues) from a participating designer. The ultimate challenge, called an Opadoo, is to knit/crochet one item from each of the KAL/CAL categories!
A few more details that you might be interested in....
There is a thread specific to listing out the participating designers in the event. Here you will find a photo from each designer with a sampling of their work. They look a bit like my photo below.
There is also a Ravelry bundle that includes all of the patterns (there's over 20,000!) that are eligible for prizes. It's great if you have an idea of what you're looking for and use the Ravelry filter options. Otherwise, it can feel a bit overwhelming! What I've done to help with that overwhelm is that I created a list of over 50 of my favorite patterns that I've found in the bundle (and I didn't even make it all the way through the bundle...).
Here I've split up my list by category. The numbers start in the first row, moving left to right before moving down to the far left of the next row. You can also click each photo to view the Ravelry pattern page. See a design style that you love? I recommend also looking into more work by that designer!
Hats
Socks