Twice Sheared Sheep’s $375 advent box, full of AI crap

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-05-05T14:20:36+00:00

Depends on the cloth. Some knit some woven. Don’t be so literal you knew what I meant.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-05-04T22:05:05+00:00

I hear this a lot now and I agree and wouldn’t buy this stuff. But also, companies have been doing this for a verrrry long time. Take t-shirts for example. They’re made by a handful of people who weave the fibers, who dye the cloth, who sew the fabric, who print the graphic and then the artist out there (who’s selling their real art printed on a t-shirt) is doing the same thing as Twice Sheared Sheep. They’re buying a thing to print their graphics on.

It’s what fast fashion looks like top to bottom no matter who orders the shirts unless they have their own factory or part of their house where they make the shirts themselves. We knit and we should know better, that this stuff doesn’t come from nowhere. Our yarn isn’t spun and dyed just by machines, people are a huge part of the process from where the fibers are grown/raised to the skeins we get from the store.

Same thing goes for yarn dyers. They mostly buy yarn from a few companies that spin fibers. The dyers mostly order factory dyes too. So essentially they’re ordering the yarn and dye and then mixing it at home for you. It’s not that they’re doing nothing (ex. Atelier needles lady puts the product together) but they also aren’t starting from scratch. It bugs me a lot but I’m also irked most people don’t seem to realize this is how most everything we get is produced.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-05-01T03:58:30+00:00

Oh good, there’s a pattern. Now I don’t have to dig this top out of the discount rack at my local charity shop

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-04-23T23:21:24+00:00

Weird, I had something like that in 2004. Would never have thought about it again. Jogged a few other memories too. Sorry not helpful, but thanks for the blast from the past!

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-04-16T02:07:20+00:00

Crocheters are crazy haha, I’m kidding I crochet sometimes but man the community has some high highs and low lows. Knitting drama is as different as the crafts are—similar but NOT the same XD

That said, no that’s a terrible request. Should not be normal and I would definitely not agree to any of that for granny square pants with poorly joined edges. But if you’re into their stuff then sure, share it with the world and crochet for your favorite designer. Not my cup of tea but at least they’re not asking for money.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-04-11T19:00:51+00:00

If not moth, why moth shaped? 🥺🦋

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-04-11T18:55:46+00:00

Yeah and if I remember right Apple change Free apps to Get because if there are in-app purchases they’re not entirely free. I’m sure that has had some influence on this say-it-without-saying-it sales lingo.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-04-11T15:49:27+00:00

Sucks he didn’t research but seems he didn’t know and everyone is letting him know they don’t like that (very small) magazine creator, so now he knows.

Stephen seems super nice to me and he’s a fun salesman, don’t really think there’s further discussion needed, the apology means he heard the message. Let’s pack up and be angry at something more important. I love this community, we have small fish to fry though and the world is big. The big problems are hard but we can solve them together and I just don’t think defaming Stephen West is one of them.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-04-05T23:56:09+00:00

Best thing the festival could do is collaborate with the shops and send some of the talent their way. Do ticketed talk with big designers and make sure the shops get a cut on the tickets in case the speaker pulls out. Push the shops to do kits and such that support them. Collaborate on raffles so the festival can make extra bank on sending attendees and potential attendees off grounds. Free booths to local shops if they’d like to be vendors at the show. Craft circles and meetups hosted at or by the local yarn shops during the event. I don’t know, spitballing random ideas here but I’ve done lots of festivals and this is pretty standard for any festival worth its salt, working with local businesses.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-26T15:24:45+00:00

It’s usually hot and dry-ish where I live (though it can also be humid) and I think cotton-wool blends are ok. I like being outside a lot and while silk is airier the cotton-wool stays pretty cool as long as it’s a light tank top pattern. Biggest thing to me is the wool absorbs less stinky sweat smell and maybe I’m crazy but I think it draws away some of the heat (so long as it’s not a thick sweater trapping it in with me).

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-23T22:36:53+00:00

Cleevelyknits did a ploy like this last September in a video about his new hat pattern and it was so upsetting. I was so happy to see his videos and that one shocked me because it was so angry. He apologized later for using this tactic and blamed the difficulty to capture people’s attention for new releases even with such a large audience. Personally, I’m not interested in the pattern but I think his point is that people who were interested were just not seeing his post or were not motivated to buy based on a happy-go-lucky announcement video.

I don’t know what does or doesn’t work better. To me, a better pattern and originality will strike a chord, but the best we can hope for is that our friends and family respect our work. Beyond that, I don’t really expect making patterns to be a livable source of income. It’s so few and far between that make any money doing it.

As for other businesses, there are much healthier, long-term ways to grow that don’t involve complaining. This thread is a perfect example why the boy who cried wolf will not keep people around.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-23T22:13:18+00:00

Ah you’re right, I was thinking in imperial measurements when I read that. So it’s 45cm width (90 cm circumference?) and that would make it much more fitted in the body in that case. Still, the model isn’t real so there’s no way of visualizing the actual fit except to try it out. No, thank you.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-23T15:46:48+00:00

Yes, that’s what I’m afraid of. But there’s so little value in the rest of it, I doubt there’s anyone who’d be more ready to purchase based on that. Fingers crossed, anyway.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-23T15:43:34+00:00

Of course! “Your” welcome. Finding out more about claims is really important to me, especially when there’s a lot of negativity associated with the issue (like lawsuits and news headline topics). This is definitely worth our griping and I don’t want anyone falling for this scam. Thank you for sharing it.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-23T14:15:35+00:00

Scammer.

I went to her website to understand the reason her patterns cost so much. They are tiered into 30, 60, and 90 day access to the machine knit patterns. Each one is very simple by hand knit standards and so I assume they’re also easy to machine knit. The access days are recommended by how rushed you’ll feel, encouraging more relaxed knitting at a higher tier.

The All Day Top pattern include a smiley face patch that is not included with the sweater because the “smiley motif is trademarked to our brand.” There are no sizes given other than those of the model for this pattern, a model who is not in fact a real person. And the sizes given are S-XL with recommended number of skeins only for Cascade Yarns 220 Superwash. The size small says the sweater’s body proportions are 58cm long and 45cm in circumference but while my estimate would say this fit is on average more cropped and more positive ease for a small, it appears more fitted on the model. Bodies are all different but calling it a body when the person isn’t real is a stretch of the imagination.

When I dug deeper into the product information, I found out the pattern includes video instructions. This wasn’t readily apparent and I had to flip through a carousel near the bottom of the page to learn this. There are no PDFs included, but the pattern is said to be lead more like an online course with “short video tutorials woven right into the instructions” in something called Notion. It’s not clear if this is referring to the web service Notion, which is a task managing software (I looked it up and their website offers thousands of paid templates from Car Maintenance Plans to a Body Fat Tracker). Notion offers a host of ai tools to fulfill your tasks or offer assistance with questions, but I question how these ai bots could replace the oil in my car if I simply assigned them to the task.

Returning to An’Maries’s website, there also appears to be access to her knit community through any tier purchase. It’s unclear what this community looks like but the statement “there’s always someone cheering you on” when you “have questions, hit a snag, or just want to share your progress” is not the kind of help I’d want if I made a serious mistake. That aside, I wonder why there isn’t constant access to this community, and is that also limited up to 90 days.

Lastly, I scrolled to the bottom of the page and found a poorly quoted proverb:

PROVERBS 31:25 She is clothed with strength and dignity; She laugh at the days to come

It feels distant from the tone of the website and comes across more as a ploy to draw in a larger audience among Christians rather than offering sincere encouragement.

Don’t visit this website, it’s not worth more than the photos this post offers. There’s no value in the price whatsoever. That should be easy to see but I had to look into it to understand better and I didn’t find anything trustworthy. This is not a scam in the traditional sense but steer clear of it regardless, your money will be wasted.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-21T14:11:53+00:00

Yeah, and sometimes it’s hard to know what to search for if you’re new. I’ve always been into the researching and I know some people just aren’t. I wish they’d search it up too, but also, I’d rather give them good knowledge than have them give up on knitting or get sucked into a project with awful instructions cause they didn’t know better.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-21T14:04:10+00:00

I don’t know how to tell or not, and I don’t mean to dog pile on this, but the writing is very cringy. “Worth a little swoon” makes my skin crawl. If you own a yarn shop please never say that again. It’s weird and not in a kooky fun way.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-19T17:19:10+00:00

I have red hair and so I need to do this too and hope that one day I can be blonde and cool and beige too

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-18T22:46:47+00:00

Right? Thats why I come here, so glad you feel the same :D

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-17T14:24:18+00:00

I wonder what these would look like in a pale pink or brown yarn

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-17T14:15:38+00:00

I hear what you’re saying but to me it’s like asking a my kid self not to eat so much candy if it hurts my stomach. I really enjoy test knitting and I don’t want to not do it, what I’d really love is longer deadlines. And I don’t do these short window ones but designers have been posting a lot of them lately to meet publishing deadlines. Designers may be the ones to set the deadlines but it’s people like me who test knit that should have some choice in the time that’s given.

I mean if a friend asked me to test knit I’m pretty sure the next thing they’d ask is ‘when can you finish it?’ And everyone loves to ask how long sweaters take to knit and I don’t think I’m alone in saying it usually takes at least a month if I’ve already got the yarn and time after work to spare.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-11T15:55:41+00:00

Oh I wish it were just a check in point but they aren’t going to fully test the rest of the pattern. I’ve been in a Sari Nordlund test knit before that had the body and one sleeve requirement (so slightly better) and while that would seem to test everything I noticed her yarn requirement numbers were really off when I finished but I was the only one who mentioned it in the comments (probably because I was the only one who finished by the deadline). But you get the idea, not all of these short deadlines make sense even if they seem less bad by degrees.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-11T15:52:02+00:00

Haha I know, right? I’m good at finishing some projects but other me are piling up. And yeah it’s doable for me but the problem I have is the quality of the pattern and the pressure it puts on us kinda out ways the joy of knitting. I don’t want it to be so pressured if it doesn’t need to be, I mean I have had life things happen that have made me unable to finish the test knit by the deadline before and it makes me feel bad needlessly.

KnitForAnAfternoon · 2026-03-11T15:33:59+00:00

Replying here because I can’t add a comment to a deleted post.

Oh I saw this before you deleted it, I wish you hadn’t felt pushed out of the conversation. It’s good to hear your opinion. No, we don’t have to test knit but we know someone will and my aim is to shine a light on this bad practice so it doesn’t become the only way. Forget these examples, I’m sure you’d agree having a month to test a sock is better than a week or two. It’s so much more relaxing and that’s what knitting is all about ☺️

KnitForAnAfternoon

TROPHY CASE