Hello friends,

Here we are with one twelfth of 2024 under our belts — and it’s been a pretty full year already.

Claire and I had a fabulous time at APCE 2024 in St. Louis, which was held at the very impressive Union Station hotel — the city’s former train station. The shot below is of me knitting in the foyer, and gives you some sense of the grandeur. It was impressive.



Full disclosure, there were a few tense moments when our Projection Operator, Zev Shoag, had his flight out of Toronto canceled due to fog and it looked like he might not be able to make it for the show. So, while I was working through registration and attending conference meetings and events, Claire was working the phones and social media platforms looking for a back-up theatre tech in St. Louis who knew how to run Q-Lab and whose idea of fun it would be to be thrown into the deep end of running a 65-minute show with hundreds of sound and video cues with almost no rehearsal. Kudos to Claire, she did indeed find two back-ups… who fortunately we did not need, because Zev finally made it to “The Gateway to The West” — at 2:00 AM on the day of the show. Phewf!

Happy to report the show was a hit, and we’ve had people reach out to us to express an interest in bring The Knitting Pilgrim south of the border. If you know of anyone below the 49th parallel who might want to add themselves onto a Knitting Pilgrim tour, please let them know they can reach out via www.kirkdunn.com.

The other success of our St. Louis experience was the inaugural presentation of a “Knitting as a Spiritual Practice” workshop.

Not much of a surprise there, really, because when asked about how they would define spirituality, the workshop participants talked about feeling linked to something greater, a sense of compassion, love and enlightenment. It didn’t take long to connect those things to knitting — an act of creating, of linking loop after loop, knitting items for others that express care and compassion in a rhythmic, calming, mindful way that opens us to inspired thoughts and ideas. We might say that knitting cannot help but be a spiritual practice… whether we realize it or not.

Once the workshop and the show were under our belts (both took place on the 25th), I was free to enjoy the last two days of the conference. It was a refreshing and rejuvenating experience to be among hundreds of people, focused on celebrating their faith and actively looking for ways to seek justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with their God in a spirit of radical inclusion.

the knitting Pilgrim talks

We continue to release new episodes of The Knitting Pilgrim Talks, which explore the imagery of the Stitched Glass tapestries in conversation with faith leaders and academics.

episode 119: burned at the stake

Burned at the Stake

In episode 119 of The Knitting Pilgrim Talks, I speak with Rev. Dr. Stuart Macdonald, professor of Church and Society at Knox College, University of Toronto, about the section of the Stitched Glass Christian window tapestry depicting a corruption of the burning bush: a figure being burned at the stake. While the church’s response to heretics or non-believers is no longer so drastic, Stuart and I discuss the kind of thinking that can lead to such extreme responses to theological differences.

“If you can persuade people the way they can deal with their fear is to attack someone else, that’s pretty powerful. ‘If we only get rid of this group’ -- and that can be a heretic, a witch, a communist, a capitalist… The labels change, but what we are doing is very similar.” — Rev. Dr. Stuart Macdonald

Episode 119 is available on YouTube here: KPT 119: Burned at the Stake

Or, all of the podcast places, like KPT on Spotify, if you’d rather listen than watch.

If you have any questions about any of my projects, would like to book a talk, workshop, The Knitting Pilgrim or Spycraft, please reach out to me at kirkdunn.com.