Around the time this website launched, I realized quite suddenly that I was totally addicted to selling my own patterns and I no longer had the drive (or the time) to knit other peoples’ patterns. This left a few things in the lurch, including:
Leila Raabe’s Peabody (which has only the neckband left to knit and the sleeves to be attached and I really do intend to finish). For that I’m using Madelinetosh DK in Candlewick.
This striped sweater from Vogue Knitting Holiday 2011 which I was working on in Malabrigo worsted in Periwinkle and Brillante…I’m not sure if I’ll wind up finishing it or not. If I come up with a design idea that involves stripes, I may repurpose the yarn…when I saw these two colors, they TOLD me they needed to be together, so together they will stay.
Kirsten Kapur‘s Ulmus in Viola Merino Fingering in “Nut Brown” and “Smudge” that I got at Loop in London last summer. It was another case of yarn romance…these two insisted they needed to be together. Now I’m not sure this type of stripe is right for the yarn and I’m thinking I might design a shawl for the Violas.
Which leads me to my latest internal debate. Shawls sell really well, and that is just a fact. Pennywood has far outsold my other patterns so far and that is because shawls are so popular to knit. I totally get it: they generally take one skein of sock yarn (or, even more fun, one skein each of multiple colors), you don’t have to worry too much about gauge, and you don’t have to sew anything together. You hardly even have to weave in any ends. You can wear them with basically anything, almost year-round. They are the perfect portable project. I would love to design more of them.
The problem is this: when I look on ravelry at all the thousands of shawls people have designed, I don’t feel especially inspired to create my own because I feel satisfied by the selection. There is, on the other hand, a lack of sweaters to suit my taste. I can come up with countless sweaters, dresses, tunics, tank tops and the like that I’d love to wear, but can’t find published patterns for, so that’s what I’ve been designing lately.
So the problem boils down to this: I want to make money and have my patterns go viral, but I want to design what I want, which doesn’t happen to be shawls at the moment.
Maybe I’m just going through a sweater phase or something and a few months from now it’ll be all shawls all the time here in Tobyworld. It’s still frustrating to know that the type of garment that will make you the most money is one that leaves you cold, design-wise.