Knit Stars | July 19, 2026
🧶Meet the GOAT📸
BY SHELLEY BRANDER
Happy Sunday! I’m freshly back from the Northeast filming trip for Knit Stars Season 11, and filming with a bunch of GOATS – literally and figuratively.
Let’s start with Gale Zucker, a former photojournalist who is widely recognized as one of the Greatest Of All Time when it comes to modern knitwear photography.
In our short time together, I learned so many great tips for taking and editing photos of my makes – and that’s saying something, considering my phone camera is full of more than 50,000 photos of makes and yarn, taken over the past 20 years of owning Loops and Knit Stars. 😅
(One of these days, I’ve really gotta clean out my photos!)
Jaime Lannister, one of the more roguish Olympia Farm residents.For the first half of Gale’s filming, we started at the crack of dawn at Olympia Farm in Guilford, CT, owned by Anne McIntyre-Lahner and Mark Lahner.
Here we were greeted by a sweet and lively herd of both sheep and (literal) goats. Including Jaime Lannister, apparently so named because his twin sister turned up unexpectedly pregnant (Game of Thrones fans will understand the reference).
He wasn’t the only frisky goat in the herd…
Gale and cinematographer Brad immediately vibed, geeking out over all things photography.
Brad and I both immediately fell in love with Gale, whose energy and zest for life are completely infectious. She moves around with the verve and flexibility of a teenager. We discovered that friends often joke that she’s a mermaid, she swims in the sea most every morning, kayaks with her 14-year-old granddaughter and recently earned her marine animal rescue badge.
When we moved locations from the farm to Gale’s house, you could see signs of her colorful personality everywhere.
And when we wrapped our filming, Brad and I were both a little sad to leave – this place, these lovely people and even the goats.
But the Knit Stars team’s work is never done…so next it’s on to Beacon, New York to film with Melanie Falick. See you there next week!
xoxo,
P.S. If you’re not yet enrolled in Season 11, you can join the waitlist here!
