The Stars of our upcoming Premiere Masterclass Season and our stellar production team have truly leveled up this year. The inspirational “yarn life” documentaries and one-of-a-kind workshops are almost complete, and I just know they’re going to make a huge impact across the whole yarn world when Season 8 debuts in November.

So, for the first time ever, we’ve decided to add an all-new, live + online event Saturday, September 9th, 2023 from 1-5pm Eastern.

💌 We’re calling it the Knit Stars World Premiere Screening Party, and you’re invited! 💌

Join your hosts Gaye Glasspie, Casapinka, Sunnie, me and our Season 8 Stars as we reveal a whole new level of knit and crochet inspiration and learning in this FREE 4-hour spectacular!

Whether you’ve already snagged your online seat for Season 8 as a SuperEarlybird or Earlybird (thank you!)…

Or you’re a Yarnie just like us who loves a great sneak peek, a chance to level up your own yarn game, and amazing prizes…

Click here to grab your FREE online seat now.

P.S. This just in…there will also be a special appearance by beloved designer Joji Locatelli and a chance to win one of the bags her team created just for Knit Stars Masterclass Premiere Season 8!

Now that you’re (hopefully) all registered for our big Screening Party…

How about a sneak preview of the sneak preview? 😎

One of the most-anticipated masterclasses in Season 8 is Dawn Barker’s workshop on Assigned Pooling.

You know how variegated yarns can be kind of intimidating, because they can sometimes create unexpected “pools” of color in your work?

Well Dawn figured out her own way to take those “lemons” and turned them into glorious lemonade!

Assigned Pooling isolates texture stitches within a specific length of accent color in a skein of variegated yarn to mimic the look of embroidery on a knitted fabric.

In her masterclass, Dawn will break it all down for you and show you all her tips and tricks.

But you don’t have to wait that long to get in on the magic!

Have you noticed how your yarn skills align with other areas of your life?

Knitter, designer, indie dyer, and upcoming Masterclass Season 8 Star Dawn Barker found that her previous careers set her up for her current career incarnation where she hand-dyes yarn at home.

This is especially true for the type of yarn that Dawn loves to dye – skeins for her signature technique called Assigned Pooling, where a change in stitch and texture is assigned to changes in color within a skein of variegated yarn.

Dawn started out her professional life as an X-ray technician in a hospital, then went back to school to become a radiation therapist where she worked with cancer patients. (It’s also where she met her husband, who was also a radiation therapist.)

“There were a lot of wonderful aspects of that job,” said Dawn.

Dawn would work with radiation patients for 2-8 weeks, building relationships. Some she could help cure, some she couldn’t. But whether patients were fighting for their lives or she was giving them as much comfort and dignity at the end of their lives as possible, Dawn found the process beautiful.

“You have to be extremely accurate and be able to replicate what you did the day before. That’s also what you have to do as a professional dyer. You have to be able to reproduce a technique so that it knits up the same way,” says Dawn.

A lot of people think that being a dyer is freeform and fun, but Dawn notes that it’s also hard work. Not only is it physically demanding, it takes a lot of effort to make things reproducible on a large scale so that the skein you see on the website is similar to what arrives in your mailbox – without looking like it’s mass-produced.

Although Dawn has garnered a lot of recognition for her signature Assigned Pooling technique, it all started out as a lesson in what not to do. She taught a workshop on preventing pooling, and afterward had the thought, “What if we made it a feature?”