Once Upon a Time...

 Once upon a time I heard about this crazy thing people were doing called blogging. I found some about knitters and read them. I got caught up in the excitement and remembered the good ole days when I had a web site for my machine knitting business. I missed the Internet so took the plunge. Writing about the Boys, knitting and my folks I found a very small group of readers. For a few years I averaged 2-15 people a day. Not many but then, I wasn't the Yarn Harlot so what could I expect.

Then I started to think about the good ole days (that tends to get me in trouble) when I wrote patterns and wrote for a few machine knitting magazines and decided to give writing some of my basic patterns for people a try. One pattern that was put up on the blog was "Rust Goes Green". A simple rectangular crocheted market bag that caught on. People started downloading it - a lot. I decided to put it on Ravelry so I could keep track of how many downloads and to date there's been over 2,000 downloads.

I've put a few other patterns on Ravelry as free downloads and each one has had their own success. Somewhere along the way I was playing with reversible cables and came up with a fairly simple scarf that was totally reversible cables. I like the scarf but never got around to finishing it so for fun I posted it with basic how to's instead of a full pattern. Well, that's when things got weird.

You've probably seen the websites that list patterns by category. My Which Way is Up Cable scarf has been listed by several of these sites. One even listed it as one of the top 5 scarves. This has amused me because, really, it's not even a real pattern. It's kind of a - this is what I did, here's what I'd do next time, go try your own thing - kind of pattern. People like it. Maybe I should really write it up but then I think - why bother. People are doing just fine the way it is.

Statcounter is something you can put on your blog to see how many people stop by, where they're from, what page they land on, etc. That's how I know I used to get 2-15 people. Here's a shot of the last couple weeks. Do you see that tall column? That's saying almost 1,000 people came to visit the blog that day. The other days are 100-over 300. This has been going on for a few months and they are almost all landing on the scarf post.

If this type of community was around 15-20 years ago when I had my knitting/sewing shop maybe I would have been able to stay in business.


Whatever is going on right now, I'm happy people seem to like the patterns I've been putting out there. I have several other designs in process and hope to have them available soon. I've been working on several accessories using different techniques. There a lace scarf and fingerless gloves in Malabrigo; garter stitch hat and mittens, and some other accessory sets. I've also come up with a technique for cable mittens that I haven't seen anywhere before. The testers say it works for them so I'll be writing that up as so as I come up with a hat to go with it.



Speaking of knitting - a while back I bought a ball of Flying Saucer yarn is fun bold colors. I finished the socks but never got around to posting a picture. So - a little late but here's the socks from this yarn.




 
The yarn is dyed with 2 strands together so the socks will come out fairly close to matching. The socks in the picture look different only because you're seeing the 2 different sides. If I had them both facing the same direction they'd look similar. The pattern is just a basic one I did to give a bit of texture without losing the color. It's 10 rows of k-p texture and 10 rows plain. Next time I'd probably just do plain.