Nightmare Before Christmas Knit Along Coming This October!

If you’re looking for additional KAL details, including yarn amounts & needles needed, check out this more recent post.

Great news, everyone! I have a new pattern, the Spiral Hill Sweater Vest, coming out this fall in the new book, the Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Official Knitting Guide to Halloween Town and Christmas Town. It’s an honor to be part of a genuinely impressive collection of patterns inspired by such a beloved movie.

To celebrate, we are bringing back knit alongs (KALs) on Hands Occupied! Knit alongs on Hands Occupied aren’t just about having a chat as we knit the same pattern as our internet friends. I like to use KALs as a motivator to share new video tutorials and posts featuring information to help your technique too. I think I did something around 45 minutes of tutorial content for the last one, so buckle up! Scroll on for more teaser images, what to expect from the KAL, and a short rant about why I say knit along and not knit-a-long. 😎

P.S. Newsletter followers heard about this first, so if you’d like, you can sign up here to catch future announcements before they reach the blog.

The History of Hands Occupied KALs & CALs

In the past, we’ve done technique-focused knit alongs featuring cuff down socks and bottom up sweaters, and the read along knit along (we also did crochet) was a fun pairing of a knitting pattern and book. My favorite RALKALs featured the Worker Bee Bag (crochet) and The Scarf of Dreams (lace knitting). It was also the RALKAL that inspired Intarsia Mountain, the pattern that really solidified my interest in intarsia design, and it’s also the pattern that attracted the attention of Tanis Gray when she was on the lookout for a Magic Carpet pattern designer for her Knitting with Disney book. She also wrote the Nightmare Before Christmas book featured in this new KAL, so this felt like the perfect time and pattern to bring back a favorite program.

Save the Date: October 1-29

I love it when the first of the month lands near the beginning of the week. Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Official Knitting Guide to Halloween Town and Christmas Town comes out on September 26, so we’ll be starting the KAL the following Sunday, October 1. Well wrap up the KAL on Sunday 10/29, just in time for folks to wear their finished projects on Halloween!

The pattern we’re knitting is called the Spiral Hill Sweater Vest, and it’s exclusively available in the Nightmare Before Christmas knitting book. I can’t yet tell or show you what the inside of the book looks like or the pattern, but I’ll post an update when I can let you know what needles and yarn to start looking for. Stay tuned!

In addition to the community and education opportunities, there will be a giveaway prize pack with several chances to enter, including participation, watching a tutorial, and finishing by 10/29. I’m finalizing all of those goodies, so I’ll share the official prize list in the coming weeks.

Why Knit Along and not Knit-a-long?

I have hosted all of these KALs and never explained by I prefer knit along to knit-a-long, despite the latter being how I often see it spelled colloquially. Just in case anyone is wondering why I don’t use hyphens when I refer to knit alongs, it’s just a personal pet peeve/preference. If you have a compelling reason for preferring knit-a-long, please illuminate me in the comments, I really am curious, but here’s why I don’t hyphenate the phrase:

• Knit along and knit-a-long can both be abbreviated KAL
  • I’ve always wondered if this is where the -a-‘ing punctuation of the phrase began.
• Knit-a-long? Knit a long what, exactly? What long thing are we knitting? Knit a long feels like a command to grab your needles and start stitching, baby, because you’re gonna be here for a long time. (A Dr. Who scarf comes to mind.)
• I always felt the phrase ‘knit along’ implies that we are knitting along together, like the phrase ‘sing along.’ We didn’t buy Sing-A-Long tapes as kids, we were invited to sing along with the characters in the movie. Everyone singing from the same sheet music (or song) is comparable to everyone knitting from the same pattern.

Thanks for indulging this former librarian and current knit designer for her finicky little lecture about punctuating knitting community slang. Consider this the first tutorial in our knit along. 😆 As LeVar Burton said, “You don’t have to take my word for it.”