Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Coming into Home Stretch

I've been working like mad (with only a little procrastination knitting here and there) on my new patterns for the Foxy Knits Trunk Show at Alamitos Bay this Friday and Saturday. There are:

Footless Socks and Fingerless Gloves
Ruffled Gauntlets

I only have 2 patterns left to finish up, and then I need to put together some more bead paks. This is the one I completed yesterday.



It is a collection of Cozies for i-pods and Nanos. I also wrote directions for turning the i-pod cozies into i-glass cozies. Most of the styles are crocheted, but I wanted to create one for knitters, too. I had originally intended this one to be included:



But after writing all the other patterns, I realized that the directions for this one would have to include directions for modular knitting, in case the customer had never done it before, and even at the most minimum verbage, the directions would take a couple of pages. I only had half a page left. So it was back to the drawing boards. I needed a design that would be easy to write but had a lot of pizzazz. I came up with this:



It was so much fun to knit that I also came up with a Nano:



And got some other ideas from this one, that are not about this collection. Can't wait to work them up.

My new ideas always overwhelm my enthusiasm for my old ones. Sometimes I long for the set-up I had when I had my store. I had a workroom of skilled craftsmen who would take my half-finished projects or sometimes just sketches and specs and complete them, leaving me free to move onto the next and the next.

What I also had was a huge monthly nut - rent, payroll, insurance, and taxes. I had personality conflicts among staff, equipment breakdown, exacting and sometimes outrageous demands of clients, constant need for advertising and promotion, and the necessity to compromise in order to meet said monthly nut.

So all in all, the frustrations of my slow output are less than the frustrations of expansive output. I am on my own time clock, have virtually no overhead, and prioritize according to my heart not my bank account.