2020, What Have You Done To Me?

October 10, 2020

I’ll be attending my first Rhinebeck next week, and though it will be virtual, I’ll be attending as a teacher. I didn’t see that one coming.

This time last year I was between weekends away, looking forward to a trip back to Strungalong at Port Ludlow, WA, wondering if I’d made the right decision in not heading across the country for Rhinebeck, and telling myself, “Maybe next year will be the year I finally go, when my youngest is off to college and I can travel really freely.”

2020 took a lot from me, but with the other hand, it gave. It took all my plans for fiber-related travel; it took my son’s plans for going away to college; it took my husband’s plans for a job change and my ideas about what I was going to do next in my life. What I gained in their place were things I would not have believed would happen in a year: A change from knitting as an avocation to knitting as a profession. With the industry’s move to online festivals I stopped being a dilettante teacher and started booking my schedule in earnest. I started this blog. I stopped telling myself, “Someday, maybe,” and started answering, “Yes, now.”

I gave myself permission to take some of my knitting sketches out of my head and my notebooks and put them into the world for other knitters. Today, I sold my first pattern.

It’s called Fizzy Drinks, and it’s a pattern for the colorful felted coasters that live all over my house. It’s the epitome of potato-chip knitting: I can’t wait for the next color to come and I keep making more of them because it’s such fun to pick and combine new colors. So much fun, in fact, that I designed the pattern with options for knitting in 2, 4, or 10 different colors.

I designed Fizzy Drinks using Morehouse Farm’s 3-Strand Worsted 100% Merino yarn, which is one of those yarns that’s so much fun to work with: soft, squishy, and available in 95 colors. Morehouse is selling kits for this project, and they’ll be hosting a Fizzy Drinks Knitalong in the beginning of November.

Fizzy Drinks is the only pattern in my Ravelry and Payhip shops for now, but I don’t expect it will be solo for long. I have notebooks full of ideas and needles full of half-knit samples. I’ve been designing since my first knitting project, really — using other people’s patterns actually came second for me. But now I’m learning how to translate my ideas into replicable projects that other knitters can understand. It’s certainly given me a new appreciation for what indie designers in our industry put into the work. Anyone publishing their own projects isn’t just a knitwear designer: They’re a graphic designer, editor, web developer, accountant, marketer, and customer service rep. And this year, so am I.