FO Friday: Refreeze Hat

For once, I had the inspiration, know-how, and materials to make something unique enough to call it my design.  That's right: my very first design!

And it's on Ravelry!  That makes it double official!

Okay, enough with the exclamation points.  You get it: I did something new and I'm proud of the way it turned out.  When I'm being honest with myself, I think things like "Well, anyone could have come up with that pattern," or "You're not really making anything new, you're just combining knowledge that you already had."  It's a simple pattern.  All you need to know is cast on, knit in the round, 1X1 rib, stockinette, K2tog, and how to place beads on stitches with a tiny crochet hook.

That's the hardest part: the beading.  And again, I made it really simple by doing an easy diamond chart that anyone could have written.  But the technique for beading was a little time consuming.  For each of those 224 beads, I had to

1. Pick up a bead with a tiny crochet hook.
2. Slip a stitch from the left-hand needle onto the same crochet hook.
3. Slide the bead down onto both legs of the stitch (with much, much help from the tiny hook).
4. Put the stitch back onto the needle and knit it.

Can you tell I'm a technical writer in my day job?  I love lists.

If you need pictures to go with those steps, you could check out this tutorial from About.com.  The only difference is that she did not knit her stitch after it had a bead on it.  Maybe I did it wrong; maybe it doesn't matter.

I hope you like my pattern.  Try it out, and let me know if there are any mistakes.  

A Handmade Morsel

When I opened my Etsy shop, A Handmade Morsel, I had this wonderfully naive dream of fully supporting my knitting habit with the profits.  Yarn, after all, can be very expensive, and my husband was tired of my large fiber purchases.  I was going to knit, sell the things I knit, and then buy yarn so I could knit some more.  It was the perfect plan!

The problem is that my shop has been open since last April and I've sold exactly 7 hats.  The highlight of my selling career was when a stranger asked me if I could make a custom hat with a bow from some white angora.  Mmmm, angora!

I'm not yet disheartened.  I enjoy looking at my shop stats and seeing that 2 or 20 people have viewed my items in the last week.  I like taking pictures of my hats on a little mannequin head.  She even has a pretty wig.  And for Christmas, I was given a mannequin body to help display scarves and cowls.  I like setting up sales and conversing with potential buyers.  And I love packaging my goods to ship them out.

But I wonder what more I could be doing.  Could my pictures be brighter?  Do I need a larger social media presence?  Am I using colors or materials that customers don't want?  Are the patterns I used too simple or complex to draw a crowd?  Are my prices wrong?

Let's talk about that for a minute.  What is a fair price for hand knitting?  Obviously, the cost of the materials should be included, and that means something made from alpaca yarn is going to be way more expensive than something made from cotton or acrylic.  Some knitters try to estimate how long it took to knit an item and give themselves at least minimum wage.  But I knit for fun and while I'm doing other things (like watching tv), so I don't really keep track of how long it takes.

The rule I generally go with is to charge by the yard (5-8 cents), add the cost of materials, and then look at similar items on Etsy to make sure I'm in the right neighborhood.  I don't want to try and undersell the other merchants; not only would that cut into my profits but it would undervalue knit goods all together.  And I'm not interested in getting the highest price because as a customer that's not what I would buy.

I have a friend who makes and sells unique a line of plushy donuts cats (among other stuffed toys) at Pike's Place Market.  She's put her entire life into this pursuit, all but quit her day job to make her passion a reality.  She's an inspiration, and it gives me hope that one day I'll be able to quit my day job, too, to follow the things that matter most to me.

Until then, I'll keep knitting, writing, and dreaming, knowing that the good I put into the world will come back to me in time.

Silk Worms and Bad Math

Silk.  Pure silk.  You may think of a silk scarf or blouse: smooth, cool, shiny fabric that costs too much and gets ruined by a grease stain.    I'm thinking of unspun silk: shiny but soft, stringy, and still costs too much.

Last weekend, I took a class with the Yarn Harlot called "All About Mawata."  Mawata is a silk hanky made of many layers of stretched silk cocoons.    We learned the entire process of soaking the cocoons, extracting the "passenger" (a dead silk worm), stretching the cocoons over a frame, and drafting from the hankies to make an unspun yarn that we can then knit.  There's a really great site that explains the whole process with pictures and useful hints, but I thoroughly enjoyed the class and think it was worth paying to learn this new skill.  Something about the group setting with a hilarious teacher over an afternoon dedicated solely to crafting made the technique really stand out in my mind as unique, beautiful, and fun.

After the class was done, I did something a little crazy.  I went straight to the Marketplace next door to find ALL the silk hankies.  Credit card in hand, I was ready to fight for all the best colorways.  Silk hankies are something you don't find at big box craft store, and even a lot of local yarn shops don't carry these treasures, so I thought the pressure was on to stock up.

Now, mawata is not measured by the yarn like a lot of yarn, but it's measured by grams or ounces.  We learned that a lovely silk cowl (probably the biggest project you'd want to make from mawata) will take about 40-60 grams of silk.  The first booth I came across that offered mawata was charging $1.20 per gram.  I bought almost 80 grams, enough for two cowls.  Oooh, I was so happy!  But it cost almost $100, my entire budget for the Marketplace.

No big deal, I thought.  I'll just look at the rest of the vendors.  I don't have to buy anything else...

It turned out, all the other booths were selling silk hankies by the ounce.  A single ounce is about 28 grams, so with my dirty, dirty math skills I decided I would need about 1.5 ounces for my cowls.  (Oh, and in my head, I was going to make ALL the silk cowls).  Here's the kicker: every booth that was selling mawata by the ounce charged $10 per half ounce.

Quick and dirty math: 1.5 ounces (42 grams) costs $30.  That's only 71 cents per gram.  My original 80 grams should have only cost $57.

I went ahead and bought a few extra hankies at the lower price, just in case.  My whole haul from the Marketplace at Madrona:

Start Somewhere

A caterpillar once asked, "Who are you?"  I am a daughter, sister, and wife.  Friend and confidante.  Writer.  I'm a pet owner, cook, and sock-folder.  And I'm a knitter.  I wear a lot of hats (most of my own creation), and that's how I like it.

Last weekend, I attended Madrona Fiber Arts Winter Retreat, where I took classes with the famous Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.  She has been my knitting idol for years, and I was giddy at the thought of getting to learn from her in person!  In case you were in any doubt, she is every bit as funny, fabulous, and knit-tastic in person.  Really, she blows me away with her skill.  But she's also genuine.  Authentic.  She's the real deal: a real person who happens to have published several books, can knit at more than 60 stitches per minute, and travels all over North America to share her crafting wisdom.

In the middle of my second class with her, she started lecturing about something that seemed very familiar to me.  She was talking about something that I had already studied and practiced.  That may not sound like such a big deal, but to me it was like the heavens opened up: I knew the things that the Yarn Harlot knew!  She has a couple decades of experience on me, but for a few minutes in that class, I could have been the teacher.  I could have been her.

And it hit me that I want to be!  Okay, not THE Yarn Harlot.  I'm not going to steal her identity, get a perm, or give up on meat.  But I want to write, teach, and live knitting.  Woven through the tapestry of my life, through all the things that I am, is this obsession with fine alpaca yarn, nickel-plated circular needles, stitch markers.  I love project bags, entrelac, and charts.  My relationship with Ravelry is at least co-dependent, if not based entirely on maniacal stalking.

Who am I?  I'm a twenty-something.  And the caterpillar's question left out all the things that I'm still trying to become.  I am a writer and a knitter, and I want to become so much more of both.