Fallingblog

This week marks the beginning of my big pre-preorder push. What’s a pre-preorder? Well, the book is coming out in December if everything goes well. Preorders will start in September or October, but I also want an idea of how many people might be interested in buying the book in the first print run, so I’m gathering people on a preorder mailing list I’ve created. I figure that the best way to get people to sign up is to get them interested in the patterns.

To that end, I’ll be posting 1 new pattern a week here on my blog, with some info about its story, its name, the yarn, just something that gives it some more depth than “merely” a really interesting double-knit pattern. I’ll be doing it in sequence, from the first in the book to the last, and at the end of the 14 weeks all of the patterns will be visible on Ravelry, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and wherever you share them as well. They won’t be available for purchase, of course, until the preorder period starts.

So why the preorder mailing list? Well, first of all, it helps me gauge interest in the book, rather than just in my work as a whole. Second, it’s going to be the first group of people who hear about the preorder period, and since I plan to ship roughly in order of order receipt, it behooves those who want the book soonest to get on the list. Third, if I manage to get enough people on the list, I’ll sweeten the deal for those people — I haven’t decided how yet. It might be a discount, or free shipping, or a free unreleased pattern, or something I haven’t figured out yet. But it will hopefully bring up the excitement and, frankly, the number of people who actually place orders.

In book-related news, I’ve finished my photoshoots and have begun the last pattern that I had saved until I was sure I had time for it: a new necktie done in Buffalo Wool Co Sexy, a bison/silk laceweight. It’s going well, and I expect to have it finished within a couple of weeks. I will be modeling it myself, for a change. I think it’s going to be called “Twice as Sexy”.

p.s. If you’re just visiting this page, please click here or on the logo above to go back to the main page where you can see the patterns I’ve posted more recently than this post. Thanks!

I had originally hoped to have all of the patterns in the new book finished — or at least knit — by the end of March. This lofty goal was thwarted by my teaching schedule — the last weekend of March (which was also the first weekend of April) was taken up largely by my crazy teaching weekend in Colorado and Tennessee. Now in case you were under the impression that knitting teachers have lots of downtime in which to work on projects between classes … we don’t. Most of the time, I’m anxious about my classes, or exhausted after my classes, or hungry, or just not feeling much like knitting after spending 6-9 hours in a day teaching it. However, I did get everything done about a week later. There is one pattern left to design and knit, and it’s not a huge loss if I don’t get it into the book, but I think it’s a possibility. If I succeed, I will model that one personally.

Speaking of modeling, that’s where we are right now. Due to some faulty but fortuitous scheduling (not on my part) I have 3 weekends in a row before my next major gig at Vogue Knitting Live in Pasadena. Coincidentally, I have 3 models. As luck would have it, each of them has one particular weekend of the next 3 free. So while I can’t double up and save time, at least I have 3 chances to get the perfect shots. This past weekend, I was shooting with a model who is also a super-skilled knitter from one of my knitting groups. She was taken aback (in a good way) when I asked her to model for my upcoming book, and said she’s not really that photogenic. I was determined to prove her wrong. The photo above is far from the best shot I got of her, but it shows off the sample well.

Aside from the model (who will remain nameless, by her choice, for now), you’re probably wondering about this piece she’s wearing. This is the first look at one of the new pieces in the book. I don’t mind showing it now because it’s not really groundbreaking — it’s just a big cowl. It is, however, the only piece I have without a name. The original name is awkward and doesn’t really suit it. Care to weigh in? What would you call it? It’s in Dirty Water Dyeworks Petite Clara.

Next steps: More photoshoots and getting patterns together for tech editing.

In other news

As you may have noticed, my workshop in NYC this past weekend was cancelled due to an unforeseen scheduling conflict on the venue’s part. Lion Brand Yarn Studio has moved my workshops to September 25th. That would have been Stitches Texas except that I wasn’t booked to teach there this year (sorry, Texans).

My next gig is May 13-15 in Pasadena, CA — I’ll be teaching at Vogue Knitting Live there. I’m running 6 of my 7 classes there and there should be space in all of them.

I’ve also just signed a contract with the Big Apple Knitters’ Guild, so if you’d like to take a class with me on July 30th, keep an eye on this space.

Stay tuned — next month we’re going to start a new mailing list for the book and I’ll have some more news for you as we charge forward! Thanks for your interest — and your patience!

As I gear up to head to the first double-header weekend I’ve ever attempted (and probably the last), I feel like I’ve been out of touch with my adoring public for longer than usual. In reality, it’s been a month. But what a month!

I set a deadline for myself to get all of my projects done by the end of March. As such, it’s been an enormously productive month. All of my sample-knitters have returned their pieces. The magnum opus is finished and I’m currently blocking its nearly 8′ wingspan in the guest room. The newly designed Atyria hat is finished and looking fantastic. And the elusive double-knit intarsia hat is on the needles and well on target for finishing before I return from my long weekend. I may even restart the necktie, which I wasn’t sure about including — and which I knew I couldn’t do before my deadline anyway.

But I didn’t really need to. Why the arbitrary deadline again? It was so that I had a chance to take photos of the pieces while we still had snow on the ground here in Boston. But Punxsutawney Phil, that dastardly rodent, saw fit to end Winter early and Spring has sprung. To be fair, I’m not sure Winter ever really arrived. So the model shots will have to be done differently after all. Instead of going for a “winter in nature” thing, I’m going for “weird Boston architectural features” which actually does a fair bit to echo my design aesthetic anyway. The necktie I’ll probably model myself, and without concern about outdoor scenery.

For folks in VT and NYC, I’m going to be making a couple of short appearances here on my own coast before heading back to CA for VKL Pasadena. On April 17th I’ll be visiting White River Yarns for an intro workshop — and on April 24th, I’ll be doing a couple of workshops at Lion Brand Yarn Studio in Manhattan. There’s space in both; check out my calendar for more info.

In the coming month, when I’m not running around and teaching, I’ll be beginning to organize the book itself. I have finished 30-40 pages of text but that’s far from where I need to be. I’m going to need to take model photos, hand photos, and probably some videos. I’ve got writing and layout to do. I’ve got patterns to finish and get tech-edited. I’ve got some techniques to hone and probably a couple of small pieces to re-knit. In short, I’ve still got my work cut out for me, but I’ve got 6 months to do it in. Oh, and did I mention that I’ve finally gone part time at work to cope with all this? I’m officially a 75% FTE, which translates to Mondays and Fridays off, so there’ll be more time to work and more ease of travel.

Thanks for all your support! Stay tuned next month …

I wanted to take this first-sentence opportunity to thank everyone who came out to learn from me at Stitches West earlier this month. According to the Stitches organizers, this was the second-biggest event they’ve thrown to date, and my class numbers definitely reflected that. People seemed by and large happy with the quality of the instruction and I made some other good connections. For those who missed me, I’ll be in CA again in May to teach at Vogue Knitting Live Pasadena. I know it’s not right around the corner but it’s closer than any other show I’ll be doing this year.

March is pretty full of workshops — FiberCamp Boston will mark my return to that event after a year away (I was one of the original organizers but the torch has now been passed and it’s doing better than ever); I’ve got a workshop weekend at Must Love Yarn in Shelburne, VT, and then the final weekend I’ll be beginning my crazy 8-class, 2-show weekend at Interweave Yarn Fest in CO. You can check out all my scheduled dates on my calendar.

This month has not seen a lot of visible progress on the book — I have actually made huge progress on the DK lace shawl I mentioned last month, and am only a couple of (very long) rows from finishing. The finishing, however, will probably mean another week or more of work, then we get to see what it’s like when blocked (if I can even find the room to do so). After talking with my step-stepmother (long story) who is fluent in Welsh, I’ve decided to throw caution to the winds and call it Adenydd after all. The pattern will need to come with a quick tutorial on Welsh pronunciation!

I’ve made some reverse progress on the DK intarsia hat I mentioned last month. The colors were just not as contrast-y as I wanted, and despite how excited I’ve been to work with that yarn I just couldn’t continue. I’ve chosen some new yarn from Yarn Carnival and will be swatching it soon. I hope it won’t require a rewrite of the pattern.

Similarly I’ve made some progress both forward and backward on the Atyria redesign. After combing my stash for sportweight, I found some lovely BFL that I’d picked up last year at The Yarn Company in NYC. I got in touch with the maker (The Woolen Rabbit) and expressed my interest in using her yarn for this pattern; she was initially excited but recently I have not been able to get a response via email or phone. Since I’m on a time crunch, I’ve selected a different BFL heavy-fingering from Seven Sisters Arts that I think will do justice to the pattern. I still hope to use The Woolen Rabbit’s yarn in some other project but honestly I just don’t think the colors I chose have the contrast I need for this pattern. Bigger blocks of color would be fine but the 1×1 color changes just get lost with these 2 colors.

In other news, I’ve had a little setback in a major publicity opportunity I had been keeping under wraps, but we’re not out of the woods yet. More on that when I’m allowed to talk about it. I’ve been in talks with some commercial printers on book printing estimates and timetables, and my current target is to go to press in early November so that I have the books in early December. I’d love to go live at Rhinebeck this year but it’s just cutting it too fine. This means I’ll have books ready to ship for Christmas. It also means that I plan to begin taking preorders in September or so. My mailing-list folks will be the first to learn of that, so if you want to be among those early adopters, please feel free to join my mailing list.

Finally, I wanted to do a shout-out to The Knitting Zone, the US distributor for Hiya Hiya needles. As you may or may not know, I have 3 interchangeable sets of Hiya Hiya bamboo needles that I do most of my work on. I had been having some issues with the tips moving around in their metal fittings, and an unfortunate seam on one of the new cables. I had been looking around at Stitches West to see if it was time to replace my needles with a different brand but I just couldn’t find anything that gave me everything the Hiya Hiya sets could. I checked out ChiaoGoo sets, Addi Clicks, and even the Signatures — but eventually I stumbled across The Knitting Zone’s booth. They saw the issues I was having with my needles and replaced them all, no questions asked. Now I don’t need to replace the sets again and I will (even more) heartily recommend Hiya Hiya for quality interchangeable needles. (I am not being paid to say this — indeed, I have paid them quite a bit over the years!)

At the Craftsy Instructor Summit last weekend, there was much talk about “stories”. You know me from my work, which is really the part of my story that I felt was most interesting — the end, or the twist where it seems to end but keeps going.

I’m open to telling more of my story, but I have to do it in the right way. In a way, everything I’ve done and been and experienced up to now has shaped who I am today, but in a way I am not the same person who did and experienced all those things. It’s hard, even at my relatively young age, to look back and relive those times. Not hard emotionally, although at times it is that, but hard to remember clearly. I think by writing it down I’ll begin to remember more of it, and hopefully my older mind will make some meaning out of it where there may have been mere chance and happenstance before.

At a certain point, we’ll get to the present time, and perhaps I can keep the narrative going but I don’t want to devolve into one of those people who writes everything down as it happens and releases it to the world. You know — a blogger? Or at least, a blogger as they were in the early days of the modern web.

So for now, I’m going to stick to the present — and a bit of the future, since that’s where the Book Countdown is going.

Since my last “real” post, I’ve been a little overwhelmed. Earlier, I had 2 sample knitters bail on me, each of which lost me a month of time on their respective projects. I’m happy to say that one of the projects is complete and back in my hands and the other one is with someone who I’m certain can handle the work given previous work shown. I’ve been working hard on my last few pieces as well, and making good progress.

In the photo above, you can see that the final version of Ferronnerie has been completed. In the end, I decided to keep the color movement the same and have the S-shaped motifs move in a swirl toward the center. Each arm of the swirl (there are 7 in the size shown) ends (or appears to begin) with the elongated rectangle that moves, with its compatriots, into the star shape at the crown. The finishing move I did for the crown is something I have been wanting to try in entrelac for a while — and it turns out that it works really well. I expect I’ll play more with it in the future. The yarn is Quince & Co. Finch.

The second square is a snapshot of a cowl called Yingzao, which takes its name from an unlikely source: a treatise on Chinese architectural standards from the 11th century. As I charted it, the pattern reminded me of a Chinese wooden screen. The pattern is very complex but I’ve come up with an ingenious (if I do say so myself) way of simplifying it for mass consumption. The yarn is Dirty Water Dyeworks Clara. This is done by one of my loyal sample knitters.

The final square is, of course, Hexworth (or possibly Graphene?) from the other side. This piece was also done by one of my sample knitters in Bijou Basin Ranch Tibetan Dream. This scarf was pictured (in different colors) in the very first Book Countdown post.

Still to come

My huge double-knit lace shawl is the one I’m paying the most attention to. It’s called Adenyth (It’d be Adenydd, but nobody would pronounce it right), and it’s likely that it will be finished sooner than expected since, of the 4 levels of repeats I think I will only need 3 to get it as large as I want it, after blocking. If time allows, I may go for bigger and bolder, but I think my time is better spent elsewhere. The yarn is Galler Yarns’ Prime Alpaca Heathers.

I am working on a 6-color double-knit intarsia hat, but I am concerned that I may need to go down a needle size to get the fabric I really want out of it. This is too bad, but I only have a couple of inches done so it’s not the end of the world. It’s called “42 Skidoo”; it originally had a 42-pair repeat, but now that it no longer does I still like the name so I’m going to stick with it.

Finally, I discovered that my Craftsy class‘ patterns revert to my ownership after 2 years. It’s been 3, so the time is ripe for me to redesign Atyria for mass consumption (although over 10,000 people already have it from the class so that may not exactly be the right phrase). I have felt a little awkward about the way it’s charted and explained, and I’d like to see if I can do better. We’ll see.

Upcoming appearances

Just because I was at the Craftsy Instructor Summit doesn’t mean I have another Craftsy class in the works. Sorry. After talking with a bunch of people, I have some interesting ideas, and one of them isn’t even in knitting! But nothing’s been accepted (or honestly, even submitted) yet. Still, I’m teaching all over the country as usual. I just had my first Vogue Knitting Live appearance, which was excellent. I hope to be invited to their other events but nothing’s signed yet. Right now, my next appearance is next Thursday night (Feb 4th) in my own hometown! No, not Cambridge where I live, but Middlebury, VT, where I grew up. The knitting guild in the area has invited me to come and present but mostly to teach an intro workshop to a group of 40-50 people. This is more than twice my usual cap but I’m going to do my best. For those who can’t make it, keep in touch — I’m in talks to visit Vermont again in the near future to do a larger workshop series.

After that, I’ll be flying cross-country to teach at Stitches West — most of my classes there are sold out or nearly so, but if you’re up for some advanced double-knitting there are openings still available.

Then back to the East coast to hang out at FiberCamp Boston on March 12 & 13! I missed it last year due to my own scheduling oversight but this year I will be there. I’ll likely do a tasting workshop for intro to DK, but since the schedule is dynamic nothing’s set in stone yet.

At the end of March and beginning of April, I’m doing the craziest thing I’ve ever tried. I’m teaching two shows in one weekend, one in Colorado and the other in Tennessee. Interweave Yarn Fest scheduled me for Thursday and Friday only, so I’m flying there on Wednesday. On Friday night, I’ll be flying to Nashville to teach at Stitches South on Saturday and Sunday. So if you’re in either area, please think about signing up for workshops! Stitches South in particular could use some love.

Finally (on contract, anyway) on April 24th I’ll be teaching a couple of workshops at the Lion Brand Yarn Studio in NYC. I’ve got the possibility of another gig in NYC later this year so this will be 3 visits to that crazy city in a single year. I hope there’s enough interest to go around!

This has been a massive post. Clearly, I should post more often. But then I wouldn’t be knitting. More next month; stay tuned!

Happy birthday to me … sorry, nothing for free this year. Last year, as you may remember, I ended up giving away over $20,000 in free patterns. I can’t do that every year. As you can probably guess if you’ve been following my blog, this is a post I made much later than its timestamp. It’s here because it looks bad to skip straight from month 12 to month 9, which is actually what happened. I was out of the country for a month, and when I got back it was all holiday prep all the time, not to mention fighting off a cold I caught in Cambodia and dealing with 12 hours of jetlag. I just didn’t have the energy to make a post — and there wasn’t much to show.

What I do have to show is the first completed piece back from one of my sample knitters, the finished textured DK scarf called Hexworth. Or maybe I should call it Graphene. Anyone care to vote? Right now all I have is a low-res photo sent by my sample-knitter while the piece was in progress. I’ll block it and take a better photo soon.

In other news, I’ve locked down a couple of appearances in VT (at the guild in my childhood hometown) and NYC (at Lion Brand Yarn Studio), and I’ve got a second appearance in both places on the near horizon. More news on those, very soon.

I’m on vacation in the tropics. It’s really hot here. I’m not getting nearly as much knitting done as I’d like but then again, I’m on vacation. I’m trying not to think about my responsibilities in the real world but inevitably I think about the fact that when I’m done here I’ll be about a month behind on my knitting projects. I’ve emailed the focus group once, but the question was kind of disjointed and unclear, and I will probably need to clarify it further later. But that’s OK. I’m on vacation.

I wrote this and saved it until I could get the photos dumped down from my camera. Then, predictably, I forgot about it until much later. The piece you can see there on the porch of my cabana about 70 feet above the rocky, mangrove-riddled, cheap side of Railay Beach, is the beginning of the final version of Ferronnerie, which I prototyped back in 2014. When I got back, I ripped a level of diamonds out and chose two other colors instead. You’ll see a snippet of it in Month 9.

That’s all I’ve got to say about this month. More in Month 10 — maybe?