…or some of them are, anyway. At the moment, 6 of my 2022-23 BuildingBlox virtual workshops are live on YouTube and beginning to rack up views. There are 16 more that I’ve prepared and uploaded; the final stage is to watch through each one and put in timestamps so people can jump to the most useful parts for them. This is a time-consuming process but at least it’s something I can do from anywhere.
The plan is that I will release them in roughly the same order they came out as workshops — so of course the Intro one was first, then Designing Two-pattern Double-knitting, etc etc. I really want to get them all done and out there before society collapses this Fall (only sort of tongue-in-cheek there). I am also planning to embed them into my workshop pages on my website.
If you’re not already subscribed to my Youtube channel, I recommend you subscribe so you can be notified when new workshops are posted!
Book sales are in a slump
I can’t really reduce the book prices much more; at this point I am sort of regretting not continuing to sell them through Amazon because even though I’ve done a couple of guild presentations and virtual workshops, I’ve still got a lot of books left. My hope had been to sell them all by October — because the machine I use for fulfillment is running Windows 10, which will expire by then. But at this rate I may just need to move my fulfillment software to my main machine so I can continue past October. So it goes.
I am hoping the Youtube videos will expose more people to my work and more books may sell. We’ll see. In the meantime, if you know of anyone who’d enjoy my books in physical form and doesn’t yet have them, please either buy them as gifts or forward a link to my store. Thanks for any word-of-mouth help you can offer!
In other news
I don’t often put personal stuff in here (OK, maybe that’s not true given all the ways my personal life has affected my ability to do knitting stuff) but any signal-boosting I can do can only help.
I live in Boston and am car-free — instead, I ride an ebike. It’s a Class-1, so before you assume I’m one of those awful people speeding on the sidewalks and knocking down pedestrians, my bike has to be pedaled and can’t go any faster than a regular bike piloted by a fit rider. Or more to the point, it couldn’t — it was stolen a couple of weeks ago. This has been a big setback for me, mobility-wise. I ride 10-20 miles per day to get to work and back. I was approaching 15,000 miles on the bike’s odometer when it was stolen. I have a backup (non-electric) bike but it is a chore to ride such a long distance.
It’s an expensive bike — but insurance won’t cover it without heavy consequence after all the insurance we’ve used for the fire over these past several years. I’ve set up a GoFundMe if anyone wants to help me get back on my feet/wheels. I don’t expect it’ll be fully funded, but even if it reduces the amount I have to shell out, it’ll be worth it. Thank you for any help you can offer.
Victorian Raffia has long been one of “my” most visible pieces. I can’t count the number of people who’ve been drawn to my work via this piece. It is truly stunning.
Ironically, it’s also not fully mine. You may have heard the story — it’s written in full in the Revised Edition of Extreme Double-knitting — but in a nutshell, it’s based on a pattern by Kieran Foley, and for the past decade or so, he and I have split the proceeds on all sales of the pattern.
In my recent quest to simplify my relationship with the business side of Fallingblox Designs, I decided to offer Kieran a new arrangement, since sales have quieted down considerably lately, and the quarterly process of tallying sales, crunching numbers, and sending a Paypal payout has grown tiring after doing it for 10 years. Instead, I offered Kieran full rights to the digital version, while I’d keep rights to the physical version I sell at shows etc. He was happy to accept.
But then I decided to stop selling physical media. So at this point, I have no ownership over the Victorian Raffia pattern at all. Its time as a self-promotion tool has ended. I could still use it to promote my Off The Grid workshops, but I have other pieces for that.
Some years ago, I did a little thought experiment to determine the value of my work if I were to sell pieces as finished objects. I calculated the average amount of time a row required, then multiplied that by the total number of rows, then multiplied the total number of hours by a fair hourly wage. Then I doubled it — because if I were to sell one piece, I’d need to immediately make another one so I’d have one to use for show and tell in workshops.
For Victorian Raffia, the amount I got was around $10,000. Obviously, this is not realistic — it was a thought experiment, not a real expectation of what someone might buy a piece for. It’s a helpful way to think about the value of a person’s work, especially when that person is the original creator, and an acknowledged expert at the techniques used.
However, now I am faced with the end of the sample’s use to me, except as a keepsake and lovely warm winter neckwear. It has made me a reasonable amount of money over the past decade, but that’s over now — any more money it generates goes to Kieran only. So I thought: why not give that thought experiment a chance to become reality? Why not try to sell a finished object for once?
Now I’m not selling it for $10,000 — in part because I don’t need to double the amount anymore because I don’t need to make another one. But it’s also not $5,000 — although it’s not far off. And I kind of doubt it’ll sell, to be honest — but where’s the harm in trying?
So here’s the deal (such as it is):
Buy the original Victorian Raffia scarf, adapted/designed and knitted by Alasdair Post-Quinn in 2010, and rescued from a fire in 2020. It will come with a beautiful wooden storage/display box and a certificate of authenticity. You are welcome to display it, wear it, gift it, donate it — whatever you so choose. The price I’m charging is $4,000, including insured shipping within the US.
Non-US customers should get in touch with me first to ensure shipping options are available. This will remain up on my website until it sells, or until my heavily-discounted books and patterns sell out, triggering the end of my e-commerce site.
Thank you for your interest and stay tuned for more soon!
This pattern is a long time coming. Literally, since it’s simultaneously a nostalgic nod to a childhood blanket, a long-overdue foray into metapixel knitting, and a symbol of regrowth after a life-changing disaster.
In June of 2020, mere weeks after the loss of my home in a catastrophic fire, a fan named Cindy emailed me to offer two skeins of Kauni, famously a favorite yarn of mine, which she had no immediate need for. I graciously accepted, and when I opened the box, the colorways she’d offered brought tears to my eyes: fire and ash, a symbol of the disaster but an opportunity to build something new.
Over the next 5 years, in parallel with the grueling task of rebuilding our home, I slowly worked on this sample. What few personal effects I still owned were in a storage unit, and in a small wooden chest there were some blankets that I’d grown up with — including a very 1970s yellow-and-brown cotton one with an overshot-woven motif. I decided to chart this motif and work it into a pattern. I took some liberties with the chart repeat so that the scarf width would be manageable, and I took a risk in choosing the sequence of repeats — I only hoped that it would be doable in a single pair of Kauni’s uniquely massive skeins.
My intention was for this pattern to help me “rise from the ashes” of my literal house fire, but over the ensuing years, much has changed in my knitting life as well. The ashes are now metaphorical as well as literal — the last two years spent largely disconnected from my knitting has given me perspective on how I want the future of my knitting to work; you can read more about that in my previous post. I had been working on this sample off and on but, like a lot of my knitting, it had been on pause at about 2/3 finished. When we moved back into our rebuilt condo, I decided to return to it and make a push to have this pattern be the first release of my new life in the new space. A few months later — it is. Oh, and did I make it within the original two skeins? Well, yes, but it was close:
Without further ado, please welcome Phoenix to the fold — a scarf that symbolizes a new life grown out of the ashes of the old.
p.s. What is “metapixel knitting” I hear you ask? This is something I came up with years ago as I was mulling over the next steps beyond the Parallax patterns. Essentially, the idea was to map non-checkerboard patterns into the Parallax-style frameworks. I intended to do a lot more with this concept, and even had the start of a web-based app to help with designing these strange patterns, but life got in the way as usual. It also turns out that overshot weaving is a very good example of metapixel motif work, so even if I didn’t use the app, I did end up with a solid foray into that style.
In other news
I will be teaching a few workshops at Red Alder in Tacoma, WA next February; they are now in my calendar but here’s a quick list:
Sat, Feb 14, 9am-12pm: Intro to Double-knitting
Sat, Feb 14, 1:30-4:30pm: Two-pattern Double-knitting
Sun, Feb 15, 9am-12pm: Advanced Beginner Double-knitting
Sun, Feb 15, 1:30-4:30pm: Multi-color Double-knitting
Also, my book/pattern sale continues, albeit on Priority Mail only during the holiday shipping chaos season. Please help me clear out my inventory to make room for a better, more sustainable knitting future for Fallingblox Designs. You can save money, help one of your favorite designers, and give the gift of creative adventurousness to a knitter in your life — what more can you ask in this economy? Media Mail shipping will return in January. Shop now, shop later, shop early, shop often. Thanks!
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have plans to make some changes to Fallingblox Designs. The first and easiest to put in motion is now beginning.
A couple of weeks ago, I moved all of my remaining physical books from storage into my condo. I took a count of what’s left, updated my site’s inventory, and dropped their prices. The plan is to sell all of my remaining physical books (I will keep a few for posterity and nostalgia) and then retire the e-commerce section of my website.
I have also streamlined this process somewhat by removing the “signed book” option, as well as the book bundles. You are already getting the books for less than the bundles would have been, and for signing — well, you’re just going to need to find me in the wild sometime.
As of the time of this post, these are the current counts:
Double or Nothing, formerly $29.95, now $19.95. 499 copies available.
Parallax, formerly $19.95, now $14.95. 150 copies available.
Bipolar, formerly $6.00, now $5.00 (the PDF is $4.95 so you’re getting the physical copy for a nickel). 31 copies available.
All of these still come with the free PDF download I’ve always offered.
Just to be 100% clear: I have no plan to reprint these. Amazon will not be getting more stock from me. The copies above are the last copies available, ever, of the physical books. The digital books will remain available indefinitely.
Please spread the word. I will be doing my best to let everyone know, but word of mouth is still the best way to reach people. I know most/many of you who read this blog already have all the books of mine you’re likely to need. Don’t forget about the upcoming gifting holidays, though!
For those of you who reacted to the news that my prices would soon be dropping by buying books at full price, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. For those who still want to do something like that, you’re welcome to drop me a tip at Ko-fi or join my Patreon.
Thank you for your continued support, and stay tuned — I have one more surprise coming up soon while I still have an e-commerce site at my disposal.
I posted this to my Patreon patrons a couple of weeks ago; now it’s time to widen the audience.
I have been struggling for two years to decide how to write this – what to say, how much context to give, etc. I am trying to strike a balance between making sure people understand what I feel I need to do, and why I have come to these decisions.
I dearly wish I had been more forthcoming with my feelings over the past decade or so, but that simply isn’t who I am. I don’t want to burden people with my issues; I don’t want to be seen as a complainer. So I keep moving, if not always at the same pace. Had I offered more context over time, the rest of this might not have come as so much of a surprise.
As you probably know, Fallingblox Designs has been on hold for the past two years or so, due in large part to circumstances beyond my control which have been claiming my time, leaving me little time for knitting (or, more to the point, knitting-work – which is not quite the same thing, as you will come to understand shortly). These two years have given me some perspective, and a chance to rethink the future of Fallingblox Designs.
Certainly, once my circumstances allowed, I could have committed to simply starting back in where I left off – starting up my virtual workshops again, applying to teach at venues around the country, posting frequently on social media, doing my best to increase sales of my books and patterns, updating my website, engaging with my Patreon followers, sending regular email newsletters, doing the promised work on my newest patterns, maybe even starting in on a new book. Critical readers will, however, notice what is missing in all of that: actually designing and knitting new stuff.
Here’s the bottom line: Fallingblox Designs has recently been much less about knitting, and more about knitting-work – all the stuff that goes along with running this creative small business. This has been a trend that started when I began my first book, and as I have gained more clout in the knitting world, it has only increased. At its peak, I began to think that I might actually be able to make Fallingblox Designs my full-time job. A lot of my decisions since that time have been in service of that end goal, even as I wrestled with the likely consequences of such a change.
In order for Fallingblox Designs to possibly become a full-time job, it had to be making money. And at its peak, it was – in fact, it was making about as much as I was making at my university job, before taxes. Because it was possible (under a particular set of circumstances) for knitting to make money, I fooled myself into thinking it was a viable long-term path. So I began to evaluate the changes I was making based on profitability. I tied my definition of success to the amount of money I was bringing in. And over time, I lost my way – trying to make sure I was getting paid adequately (whatever that means) for the work I was doing. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, what it means for a sole-proprietor is a lot of extra work outside of the core creative stuff without which there would be nothing to support.
Had I actually pulled the trigger and quit my university job, I would have been so screwed when everything changed. XRX (one of my largest single sources of income each year) imploded, we lost our home and my wife lost her well-paying corporate job, all within the span of a couple of years. It is fortunate I was able to fall back on my university job to get health insurance (and my church for a home and second part-time job) – but those events threw into stark relief the flimsy assumptions I was making in my pursuit of a full-time creative small-business career. My income collapsed and the cushion it was relying on was no longer there – and I began to see the folly of this pursuit.
Now, after I’ve had some years to process the reality of the situation, it’s become clear that I need to change some things. These decisions don’t come lightly. What I am now pursuing is a way to return to a simpler process, similar to the way things worked when I was just starting out, perhaps even before I wrote my first book.
Without further ado, here’s what’s about to happen:
I will be doing a “fire sale” of my physical books and patterns. I will drop their prices to the lowest I can afford, and make sure people understand that this will be their last chance to buy my physical media. I will not be printing more – the digital copies will of course always be available. I have already stopped restocking the Amazon listings. I will no longer pursue a third physical book nor will any subsequent printings be done of my first two.
I will be releasing all of my video workshops for free on Vimeo initially, and then YouTube. I may choose to re-shoot some of them to ensure the best quality content and remove any legal issues with the public release of content using other people’s likenesses and voices (as these are all recorded from live workshops at the moment). As I have time, I will film new instructional content and also release it in the same way.
I will be simplifying my website to remove the workshop portals (everyone who currently has access will be given links to the new content, so my claims that workshops purchased will be available for life will still be honored) and all e-commerce; all sales of digital work will be through other sites.
I will close my social media accounts for Fallingblox Designs, something I have toyed with but never followed through on. People will be encouraged to follow my blog, sign up for my mailing list or join my Patreon.
I will re-examine the tiers on Patreon as some of the perks will no longer be applicable.
This will not all happen at once – steps 2 and 3 in particular will be very time-consuming in and of themselves, and the scope of both may change as I grapple with the reality of executing them. One way or another, please stay tuned to my blog and/or email list for the most recent updates.
What’s left after all that?
Well, without the pressure of physical media to ship, video workshops to promote and teach, a complex website to update, or social media to keep active so the algorithm doesn’t forget me, I will hopefully have time to get back to the act of creating new and interesting patterns and techniques – on my own time and schedule. People will have unfettered access to the video workshops to learn the techniques, and can still buy my digital books for the patterns and/or non-video technique instructions. Those who want to support my endeavors to expand the reach of double-knitting will be encouraged to join my Patreon or tip me at my Ko-Fi page.
I will still be available to teach virtually and in-person as requested, but I fully expect my release of workshop content for free will diminish interest in live workshops – but who knows? The additional exposure could well increase interest. We’ll see.
To all those creators who can manage to juggle all of this, keep creating, and remain nominally sane, more power to you. That just isn’t me and never really has been. I hope I won’t come to regret these changes, as they will be very difficult to undo – but at my age, I doubt very much that I will regret making less work for myself and rekindling my love for the act of creation. If you’re in the same boat, wherever you are in your journey, I highly recommend you be honest with yourself as early in your process as you can be; it will save you grief later.
There’s a lot more to this story – and I may choose to share some more of the personal details on my Patreon later.
We are back in our condo! This should be a joyous occasion, but the cost (in financial as well as emotional/personal terms) of getting here has been overwhelming, and will continue to be so. More on that below for those who are interested.
Workshops on the horizon
As you may have noticed, I’m not actively applying to teach workshops right now, due to overwork in other facets of my life, but I am always grateful to be on people’s radar and sometimes that means people seek me out to teach at their events. I’ve got a few of these coming up in the second half of this year, and wanted to remind you of them in case you’d like to join. Without further ado:
(Virtual Knitting Live) Nov 14, 10am-12pm: Introduction to Double-knitting (link pending)
The Yarnover workshops are in jeopardy — if they don’t meet their minimum enrollment by the end of this month, they’ll be cancelled. So please tell your friends in the area to come check them out.
Want me to come teach at your local event? Get in touch!
What else is up?
I know there are those who are waiting with bated breath to know when I will be returning to knitting in a more active way. If you’re one of those people, thank you for remembering me even when the social media algorithms have forgotten me and it feels like much of the knitting world has moved on. My intention was to put my knitting life on hold for a year while I closed out another chapter of my life, but things don’t always go to plan. While we are back in our rebuilt condo, I am still working as a Maintenance Manager for the Meeting House, our erstwhile home and workplace. The reason for this is long and complicated, but the effect of it is that I have no way of moving on beyond that position. I simply don’t have the time yet to dedicate to my knitting work again.
The plan right now is that my replacement will be in place by September. And while I’d love to have had time to plan for a grand announcement, I think it is going to take me some time beyond that to decide what to do next and actually enact it. So, charitably, expect to hear what Fallingblox Designs will be doing next in early 2026. Thank you for your patience until then. I really miss the knitting life and hope I can muster the energy to return to it properly soon.
So what’s going on with the condo?
Thanks for asking. This seems to be the first thing many people ask, and we hear the mounting frustration every time. Rest assured that nobody is more frustrated about how long this has taken than we are; we appreciate that this saga has overshadowed our lives for the past 5 years and would have broken lesser couples. But we’re strong, resourceful, and unwilling to let life have its way with us, and we are now in the home stretch. We will be closing on or before the 25th (so, about 2 weeks from now). When that’s done, we’re going to need to regroup and figure out how much belt-tightening will be necessary to maintain our bare necessities. We’ve been crunching numbers and doing our best to foresee our coming financial situation, but I’m sure we’re missing something and we’re going to be operating with a much less robust cushion than we have had in the past.
When this is all over, I promise I’ll tell the whole story. I just didn’t want to jinx it by talking about it in great detail before everything is resolved. Suffice it to say, we’ve done the best we could but many things were out of our control. We’ve been lucky, we’ve been strategic, and we’ve still managed to lose due to stuff we couldn’t control or had no way of knowing about. But in the end, we’ve got a roof over our heads, and a very nice one, and that’s immediately what’s most important.
That said, if you want to toss us a little something, every little bit helps; you can use my tip jar at Ko-Fi.
This is just a quick note to let you know about workshops coming up in 2025. I’ve been asked to teach virtually at Vogue’s Virtual Knitting Live event later this month, and in-person at Yarnover in Minneapolis in October. Details below:
As I mentioned in the previous post, I will also be in Port Townsend, WA from April 3-6, teaching for the BazaarGirls Retreat, but it’s currently sold out.
I am not currently applying for more teaching gigs but I do respond to requests, so if you’re a guild or show representative looking for innovative double-knitting classes, feel free to reach out.
In other news
Our condo building now has power and a certificate of occupancy, but we still can’t move in until two units still owned by the Trust are sold. Until that happens, we won’t even know how much we owe — and the longer it takes, the more gets added to our eventual bill. In this time of extreme economic uncertainty, after 5 years of doing everything we could to get back to our home, the end in sight may well be one where we can’t afford to move back in, and have to sell and move elsewhere. If you know anyone who might be interested in moving to Cambridge (one of the bluest cities in the bluest state) and wants a passive-house condo to live in or rent out, ask them to visit https://www.213harvard.com/.
We have only two and a half months left in our current place. Due to some crossed wires, the Meeting hired a replacement Maintenance Manager without verifying that our dates were still as we expected them to be last September. So if we cannot move into our new place by the end of May (and this is looking increasingly likely to be the case), we will be moving in with my wife’s mom for a while. While this is not ideal, it’s better than being homeless. However, those who are waiting for me to restart designing or virtual teaching will need to wait a while longer. Once this job is done, we’re going to be in packing and moving mode (aka “space madness”), then will need to focus on whatever is coming next. There will likely be a time when I won’t even be able to fulfill book shipments, and I may turn off ordering on my website at that point.
A lot is changing. I will do my best to keep you updated. Please stay tuned, and thank you for your continued interest.
Life is a journey. Each of us follows a path from birth to death. Due to the nature of linear time, we can’t go back and change choices we’ve made or things that happened to us – we just have to move forward, even through life’s unexpected twists and turns. It’s these twists and turns that shape who we become as a person.
I’ve certainly had my share of twists and turns over the past several years. And while I am still processing a lot of it (and its eventual effect on my creative career), I can’t simply stay away from knitting entirely even if much of my work is on hold.
So even though I’m not applying to shows right now, some shows know of me and reached out to schedule my workshops. Red Alder, a show I’ve worked a number of times, scheduled me to teach Double-knitting Short Rows, a workshop I have taught virtually but do not yet have a pattern to show off. So while traveling to DFW Fiber Fest, I decided to take the sample swatch from the workshop and extrapolate it into a pattern. While I was there, I started thinking about how to make it into an even better pattern, and the concept for this KAL solidified.
Plot Twist is a double-knitted scarf where short-row wedges continually change the direction of the path, based on rolls of an 8-sided die. Depending on the numbers you roll, you may end up with a relatively straightforward path, or one that ends up traveling in a more convoluted way. But because the path never takes more than a 180-degree turn, it never doubles back on itself.
Unlike other KALs, I’m actually going to be working up my final version during the KAL period, so what you see in the photo is just a prototype. When I’m done with my scarf, I’ll take photos and release a final version of the pattern, after which point I will post it to other places such as Payhip and LoveCrafts.
One thing to add to the FAQ posted on Ravelry that wouldn’t make sense if I posted it there:
I don’t have a Ravelry account. Why is the KAL only on Ravelry?
Ravelry allows me to update patterns and sends those updates to people who previously purchased the pattern. Since this is not the final version of the pattern, there will be an update later. Ravelry makes this easy to do; other platforms don’t. So the KAL version will be on Ravelry only, while the final version (when it comes out) will be on other digital platforms as well.
What’s next?
Well, as it happens, this past week the Red Alder workshop listings went live, so I can now announce my workshop lineup for Red Alder in February of 2025 (all times in Tacoma, WA local time):
I will also be teaching at the Bazaar Girls retreat in Port Townsend, WA in April, but (as I understand it) that retreat is already sold out!
No really, what’s next?
Oh, you mean for Fallingblox Designs in general? Well, I did say that I’d be putting everything on hold until the end of this year, but not everything goes completely to plan. We are approaching the end of the year, and while our condo building is 90-95% built, the power company is still dragging its feet and we don’t expect to have power (which would allow us to finally get a certificate of occupancy from the city) before the end of this month; without that, we can’t sell the three units that we need to sell before we can move in.
On top of that, my supervisor at the Meeting House (where I live and work as the Maintenance Manager) has left on 6 months of maternity leave. Given the uncertainty, we’ve decided to stay at the Meeting House until my supervisor returns in March, and we’ll officially leave by April 1. At that point, my life will simplify somewhat (I hope) and I’ll be able to make some decisions on next steps for Fallingblox Designs. Until then, please have patience with me. I will update you as I am able.
It’s been more than 6 months since my last update. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’re curious what’s going on.
Workshops
Despite putting a hold on my virtual workshops (you can still get recordings of the ones I already taught), I am still teaching in-person workshops, although far fewer than before the pandemic. I’ve got a few coming up in 2025 that I’ll announce later, but I also want to let you know that I will be teaching at DFW Fiber Fest in Irving, TX this September. Here are the workshops I’ll be doing; all still have room if you’re interested and planning on attending (the links go to my workshop pages for more info on the workshops; to register, visit DFWFF’s schedule page):
Stay tuned for more live workshops as they’re confirmed. What about the virtual ones? Well, as I’ve mentioned, I’m unable to make time to teach more of those until my housing situation stabilizes. At the moment, we’re expecting to move later this year, but nothing is final yet. Here’s the new building as it was about a month ago. There’s still a lot to do inside, but there’s progress. More updates as I have them.
What else?
It’s easy for me to get discouraged right now. I have to remind myself that I am on a break from knitting for the most part, but it is disheartening to see my knitting income drop so precipitously. The social media landscape has become more and more hostile to artists, and it simply isn’t possible for most of us to do everything we need to do to be “seen”. I have a lot of evergreen content — books and patterns and workshop recordings — which people could buy if they knew about them. But I don’t have time to remind the world of my existence several times a week (nor the money to hire someone else to do it), so the algorithm forgets about me.
Unfortunately, the further I go without an active social media presence, the harder it is to imagine how I will start again. At the moment, the only thing I can imagine is that I’ll need to go back to how I did things before the pandemic, perhaps even before the books. It’s likely the books won’t get reprinted when I run out of them (but digital versions will always be available). I’ll still teach when people book me to teach. I’ll make patterns occasionally. I’ll post here and on Ravelry when I have time or content to post. I’ll most likely go back to my IT job full-time. I’ll have to be grateful for whatever small income my knitting makes, but I can’t afford to rely on it anymore.
All of this is up in the air; with changing circumstances in the next several months, I may be able to imagine a different way forward. Fallingblox Designs isn’t going to go away, but it might get a lot smaller. These past couple of years have really reminded me how much I’ve sacrificed to become who I am today in the knitting world. I really want to tell the whole story of how it’s really been for me over the past 20 years, but it’s probably not something most people really want to read or even think about.
Better late than never — I was trying to avoid the “named days” like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc, since everyone is inundated by emails on those days and my little notification would likely be lost. Then I lost track of time and here we are, merely 2 weeks from Christmas.
But just because I’m late doesn’t mean the info’s no good — in fact, Christmas may be the thing on a lot of people’s minds right now, but there are countless other gifting occasions throughout the year. I just wanted to offer some ideas in case you have giftees who have expressed interest in double-knitting.
Books and patterns
People frequently like to give physical goods, and my books are indeed physical. However, if digital is also important, buying physical books or patterns from my website gets you (or your giftee) a free digital download — and I’ll even sign the book if you like. You can get my two main books on Amazon, of course, but while you might be able to get fast and free shipping, you can’t get the free digital download or a signed copy that way (also, I don’t really make money on Amazon sales; I have books there because it’s foolish not to put my books where people will actually look for them.
As I do every year, from Black Friday through the end of the year, I’ve removed Media Mail from my shipment options. This means shipping is more expensive, but it’s also less likely to be stolen or lost, as the post office takes better care of Priority Mail packages. It also means that your package is more likely to arrive before Christmas.
Digital books and patterns
For digital stuff, Ravelry has its own gifting process. You can buy one of my ebooks or patterns and send it to your Ravelry user (or non-Ravelry user) of choice as a gift.
Workshops & Recordings
Because virtual workshops and recordings hosted on my site use a user-specific access process, it’s harder to gift these to other people. I’d recommend you consider getting a gift card in the appropriate amount (see below for more on gift cards), and add a note to your giftee with your intention for their use of the card. Of course, it’ll be up to them and they might even choose a different workshop or recording (or book or pattern, since gift cards can be used anywhere on my site).
Gift cards
If you don’t know what to get, there’s always a gift card. I’ve made sure my gift cards are as robust as any you’ll find in higher-end shops. You can choose any amount you like (you’re not limited to a set of pre-ordained options), and redemption is as simple as applying a code during checkout. Your giftee can even store the gift card in their account for later use (right in their account dashboard) so they don’t forget about it. If a gift card isn’t used in full, the remaining balance is stored in a giftee’s account for next time they buy something, or if your giftee chooses to check out as a guest, the same code will work the next time for the remainder.
Remember, small businesses like mine are the best thing to support when you’re gifting — for big companies, your money is a drop in the bucket and most goes to the pockets of people who really don’t need more money. For small businesses, every dollar helps us justify continuing to put out more creative stuff.
Thanks for your interest in double-knitting and Happy Holidays!
