An Interview About A Domain Purchase

Yesterday I gave an interview to a journalist about the recent knitting (dot) com situation - basically two tech guys bought the knitting dot com domain and, like so many entries into the knitting marketplace before them, they had appeared to have much confidence and done very little research. But they had dropped 80K on a domain and that was newsworthy.

You can read the article here. I’m cited briefly as a Scottish designer, writer, and knitter. I find that pretty amusing.

Actually, I wasn't sure if I should respond to the journalist request, but I decided to go ahead. Here’s my brief interview.

The journalist was called Chris and he sent me the following questions.

1) What do you make of the knitting dot com situation? 2) What does it tell us about the knitting (and business bro community)? 3) You mentioned that knitters often overlook the realities of the situation - what do you mean? 4) What should the knitting dot com bros do? 5) What, if anything, do you think needs to change about the knitting community?

Here are my answers:

1) What do you make of the knitting dot com situation?

1. I have worked in the crafts industry for over a decade (many roles; both big companies and micro-businesses), and I've honestly seen a lot of these situations: someone comes in thinking they are going to make a quick buck out of an industry they haven't researched properly. These people usually exit quickly.

What I saw with the knitting dot com situation is that they arrived at an interesting time. The crafts industry (particularly the knitting industry) is under pressure re. scarcity of raw materials, rising costs, and supply problems. Dropping 80K on a domain name just after relatively big and well-established players in the market have had to fold struck me as .. optimistic.

(Actually, adjust that to "wildly optimistic")

2) What does it tell us about the knitting (and business bro community)?

2. Listen, I applaud anyone who's trying to make it work in the craft industry - and particularly the knitting industry (which I'll focus on for the rest of this chat - we'll leave out other crafts). It's a tough marketplace where specialist knowledge is required, margins can be tight, and brand loyalty can be fickle. It's kind of immaterial that it is specifically *knitting* - it might as well have been fly-fishing or guitar-building - but I think the idea that the industry is dominated by women might have played into the amount of research done?

Chris: Do you think it's salvageable as a business proposition?

Well, more research is needed. Also hiring people with actual industry experience to consult. No, that's not my own pitch here!

3) You mentioned that knitters often overlook the realities of the situation - what do you mean?

3. In my experience, most knitters equate the knitting industry with people visible on social media - the micro-businesses: the indie dyers, the designers, and the lifestyle brands. Very few people expect big brands to be run by non-knitters. But it is an industry and many of the top positions are inhabited by yer regular business men (who do rely on specialist knowledge).

Many knitters have also been surprised by supply problems (products unavailable, dye formulae changing due to .. yes .. supply probs which means changes to products etc) and rising consumer prices.

4) What should the knitting dot com bros do?

4. Honestly, start over and make some smart hires. The launch of their product (whether the dot com itself OR their process in overhauling it .. even the actual product is confused) was .. not good. Hire deep, think smart research hard and invest in more than just a domain. They are also looking at a comms issue which I'd encourage them to address.

5) What, if anything, do you think needs to change about the knitting community?

There are definite discussions to be had regarding the intersections between the big commercial ventures and the micro-businesses, and also how we as an industry react to supply problems, structural inequality, and so forth.

I could have given Chris a long essay about all the ways the knitting industry is set to change, but that is the sort of knowledge that us consultants are being paid good money to write.

The issue goes deeper, of course, than “two tech bros enter the marketplace, call their future customers grannies with blogs, and then try to do damage control.” It relates to the viability of businesses within the industry and how prepared businesses (of any size) are in relation to challenges. Being prepared means Knowing Stuff, and with such a specialised product such as yarn (which has dye lots - something that impacts on stock levels, buying, costing, and packaging) you need to have a huge amount of specialised staff ready to rise to those challenges as well as actual space.

I have seen a lot of companies and brands fall at that hurdle. The average life span of a knitting business is roughly three (3) years.

I don’t think it’s a bad time to enter the market, actually. The knitting industry is in decline with many well-established players and partners having to shut shop. But it is one of those industries where you need to have the right people on your team, you need to understand your customers, and you need to have your authentic story ready to tell.

And that’s the very opposite of what we saw last week. Yet again. I wish the guys good luck and I hope they bounce back with a solid business idea they are willing to see through.

Making Landscapes

Dorothea the Sheep, in a field outside Lyngby, Denmark

I miss walking through landscapes. I miss seeing sheep dotted on hillsides, a reminder of where our wool comes from. I miss making memories by buying yarn on my travels. I miss meeting fellow knitters and coming away with inspiration. 

Instead I make things at home and dream through my hands as they manipulates stitches and yarn. 

So, I have an announcement because I know I am not the only one feeling like this. 

Please join me for a series of conversations and workshops that I'll be hosting via Zoom over the next few months. I want to connect you with those hillsides, with those landscapes, those people. I call these Making Connections and I hope you can make it (no pun intended!). 

The first conversation will take place on November 19, 2020 at 6pm GMT. I've invited author and knitter Esther Rutter to join me in a conversation about creating imaginative spaces and travelling through woolly landscapes. 

I am sure you all know Esther Rutter already. She is the author of This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain's Knitted History. Her book tells the story of the knitted heritage of the British Isles and is full of fascinating histories of communities whose lives were shaped by wool. From the mill workers of the Border countries, to the English market towns built on profits of the wool trade, tradition and innovation have always intermingled in knitwear industries.

Esther and I share a fascination with how we engage with landscapes and how much knitting is shaped by both our inner and outer landscapes. How many of us end up buying yarn and patterns to remind us of specific places and times — and when we wear our makes, we are reminded of where we were when we made them. 

You can buy a ticket to the In Conversation With Esther Rutter: Making Landscapes via EventBrite. Tickets are £6 each.

The view from the headquarters of Alafoss Yarn Company just outside Mosfellsbær, Iceland.

The second announcement is one that I know many of you have been requesting for a very long time. I'm going to teach a series of workshops online, starting with my signature Knitting the Landscape class. Moreover, I am going to run these workshops, so they are available/suitable to several time-zones. 

Knitting the Landscape is a workshop with a difference. You don't have any homework and it does not centre upon a specific skill. Taking cues from psychogeography, a method for exploring everyday landscapes, this workshop asks: what is the fabric of your own everyday life? Together we will investigate what knitting means to you and how knitting can be used a creative exploration tool. From fields and mountains to concrete high-rises, Knitting the Landscape is a way to connect with not just places you have been but also knitting itself. 

It's a class that means a great deal to me, and I am so excited that I can finally offer to people regardless of geography! That in itself gives a certain sense of frisson to me! We'll be talking map-making, cartography, and geography .. but without the actual constraints of where we live!

So far I am offering this class twice: 

Saturday, November 21, 2020 at 10am GMT/ 11am CET/ 9pm AEDT

Saturday, December 5, 2020 at 9pm GMT/10pm CET/ 2pm PDT/5pm EDT

Knitting the Landscape is suitable for beginner knitters and up: if you can cast on, knit, purl and cast off, you can do this class! Materials: grab a heap of scraps and some suitable needles. You also need pen/paper and an open mind.

Due to the nature of this class, tickets are very limited and are priced at £45 each

A sheepy landscape..

I am incredibly excited about connecting with everybody despite the constraints we all live under at the moment. I am also very excited to bring you conversations with people who are truly inspirational in the way they approach making and crafts.

Writing Inclusive Knitting Patterns

The knitting community has been talking inclusivity since the beginning of 2019. Not only is it a long overdue discussion of how to make everybody — and every body — welcome in the community, but it also shows no signs of slowing down. I want to write a bit about how pattern writers can be more thoughtful in their work , how to think about inclusivity on the page, and how to avoid pitfalls when putting together a knitting pattern. I have taught technical writing at university, I mentor budding designers, I run courses on pattern writing, and I have worked both as a technical and a copy editor in the knitting industry for close to ten years.

First, an overview of what this blog post is not going to do:

• It is not going to talk about design aspects such as size inclusivity.

• It is not going to address visual aspects such as pattern photos or social media images.

• I am not going to talk about knitting patterns and pattern writing from a knitter point-of-view — this is squarely aimed at people who write patterns and want to think about broader societal implication of their work.

Let’s go.

The first rule of any technical writing is that you are not writing for yourself. This rule is usually used to highlight that we assume that everybody knows the same things as us. This leads to writers leaving out a lot of things assumed to be “common knowledge” and use shorthand instructions for things that might need to be explained in detail. A good example of this is something I came across the other day:

"If number of sts is not conducive to 2 x 2 ribbing +2, increase or decrease evenly across last row to get desired st count."

This was a free pattern on Ravelry promoted as a perfect beginner’s project, yet it is not written with a beginner in mind. This sort of knitting instruction is aimed at people who have a lot of knitting knowledge. There are no stitch counts, no mention of where to increase, and definitely no mention of which increase to use. Moreover, 2 x 2 ribbing is never explained anywhere in the text, and the phrase “ 2 x 2 ribbing + 2” is indecipherable unless you have worked several projects and feel confident working out your own stitch counts.

It’s pretty bad, in other words.

Any decent knitting pattern writer knows to think about their audience and tailor their writing for the perceived skill set of that particular audience. Knitting pattern writers need to think about skill levels as a baseline for any pattern they produce because, say it with me, we are not writing for ourselves.

Luckily there is a wealth of skill level guides out there: Vogue Knitting, KnittingGuru, SpruceCrafts etc that will help pattern writers figure out which skill level they are writing for and thus what kind of instructions they should be writing.

So, once we have established we are not writing for ourselves we should extend that thought to think about inclusivity.

"If number of sts is not conducive to 2 x 2 ribbing +2, increase or decrease evenly across last row to get desired st count."

There is something wrong here — apart from the lack of stitch counts, the lack of explanation of what “2 x 2 ribbing” means and so forth. Can you see what it is?

Using a word like conducive functions as a barrier. It is very formal and academic and it is a word that demands a very firm and specialised grasp of English. Conducive excludes people who are English language learners, people with a limited vocabulary (some teenagers, for instance), and people without a higher education. For some people, seeing a sociolinguistic prestige word such as conducive will be enough to provoke anxiety and an inability to continue with the project. It will make them feel inadequate and excluded.

If you want to promote inclusivity, make sure to use accessible language in your patterns. Think about how knitting patterns in English are used extensively by non-native speakers of English. How can you accommodate them?

Let us rewrite the example above (leaving out the fact that the pattern writer should have worked out stitch counts that work with the suggested rib):

If you do not get a stitch count that is divisible with 4 +2, increase or decrease evenly across the last row.

This is still not great. Let’s try again.

If you do not have a stitch count that works with 4 +2, adjust the number of stitches on the last row by increasing or decreasing evenly.

I still don’t like this, but we’ve avoided formal language. I’ve also used a direct form — “if you do not ..” — to lend a friendly air to instructions that are anything but friendly to the end user. (I would normally not use you in a pattern, but then again I would also provide stitch counts that work with a specified ribbing pattern!).

Your job as a pattern writer should be to ensure that the end user feels safe in your hands and relaxed that their project will turn out alright. Your language usage is part of that social contract.

Cultural inclusivity. How can you make a knitting pattern feel more relevant to someone? Knitting is a global hobby, so write for a global audience.

A very easy thing would be to include both US and metric sizes and measurements in your instructions. Using a US size 6 needle? Make sure to specify it’s the same as a size 4mm. Does the yarn run 440 metres per skein? Make sure to include the 400 yds. Do you use words like “sport-weight” or “4-ply” — think about how different knitting cultures have different ways of thinking about yarn weights and help your end user make an informed decision.

Remember that clothes sizes differ from country to country. Europe has a size 40 that is roughly equivalent to a UK size 12, a US size 10, an Australian size 14, and a Japanese size 13. So, include as many measurements as you can in the pattern to help your end user select the right size.

In terms of yarn, give as many details as you can to help your end user select a suitable substitute if they live somewhere where your chosen yarn is unavailable or if they are economically unable to afford the yarn you have used. While the knitting world is global, the availability of yarn is still highly dependent upon where the end user lives. They should feel confident and happy using a different yarn to you.

Some notes on romance text and cultural assumptions:

• Avoid value-loaded comments like “this hat would look best in cashmere or merino” — that has less to do with pattern instructions and more to do with wider societal pressure to regard certain fibres as “luxurious”. If you are recommending a particular fibre, make sure to explain why it is important from a technical point of view rather than a socio-economic one.

• I’m not a fan of prescriptive phrases like “blue for a beautiful baby boy” or “pink for a princess girl” — to me, these phrases feel very exclusionary and limiting the appeal of a pattern. A more thoughtful text would read: “a beautiful baby blanket for the little treasure in your life”. This ensures the pattern caters to boys, girls, and parents who prefer a more gender-neutral option. Instead of limiting the pattern’s appeal, careful phrasing makes for a much wider audience. And, honestly, I don’t get the resistance to that.

• Avoid loaded descriptors such as “skin-coloured” (whose skin colour?) and pattern names that are culturally insensitive (Irish Car Bomb is forever my golden standard of Woah, Don’t Do That ).

Again: you are not writing for yourself. Make sure you think beyond yourself and your circle of knitter friends.

There are other things to discuss: the different pattern writing conventions you find across the globe, socio-economic barriers such as the need for an iPad and WiFi to access tutorials (and the technical ability to work these tools), technical assumptions such as “work German short-rows here” and “join in the rnd to work Magic Loop”, and so forth.

My advice to you would be this: 1) you are not writing for yourself and 2) read as many different knitting patterns as you possibly can.

Knitting is a beautiful thing and it does not judge. Make sure your own pattern writing follows suit.

(PS. These days I am writing over on Patreon rather than blogging. Inclusivity in knitting patterns is just a discussion I felt needed to be thrown wider).

On Designing Knitting Patterns

The other week I gave a talk to the Kirkmichael’s Women’s Group about my life in knitting (it is a good life and one that I am happy to have, even if the path there was one of slings and arrows). The talk went well and I received some excellent questions. I’d like to share one of them with you.

How do you design patterns?

I design two types of patterns, essentially. I design for others, and I design for myself.

The first kind of pattern is a response to somebody else’s idea, product or moodboard — “seaside rendezvous: pastel colours, shells, beach, ice cream; summery garments and accessories perfect for wearing on holiday” — or maybe I have been asked to design a pattern for a new yarn. I like these sort of challenges because they push me outside my comfort zone. To use my seaside rendezvous example, I do not typically work with pastel hues and I will need to study the moodboard images hard before I know what atmosphere my design’s supposed to evoke. Spending time on Pinterest and Google Images is literally part of my job description!

The second kind of pattern is much more labour-intensive than you might expect. I tend to start with a story, and I need to figure out how to translate the story in my head into something on the needles, and eventually a wearable piece. A good example of this is my Rubrication shawl from This Thing of Paper. I knew I wanted a big, red shawl named after the practise of adding red lettering to books. I also knew I wanted to design something which would function as a metaphor for writing and creating. Eventually I created a pattern in which the stitches are reminiscent of quills and nibs and ink dripping down the leaf of a page (yes, I included leaves too). Working out how to interpret my story is a process full of swatching, of writing, and figuring out how to distill the core idea.

But how do I design the patterns?

Ah, the technical aspect! I teach design classes and this is what I tell my students: you need to have an idea and you also need to know how that idea works mathematically.

I do a lot of swatching and I have a few boxes just devoted to yarn for swatching as I need to have a lot of bases covered: 4ply handdyed, worsted-weight woolly yarn, mohair lace yarn, Shetland-style yarn in various colours .. Once I have my idea sketched, I’ll find a suitable yarn and work a swatch (at least 6” by 6”). Sometimes I like the resulting swatch, other times I have to knit a lot of swatches.

Once I like the swatch and I’ve blocked it, I start by working out the gauge. Depending upon the type of pattern I’m writing I might need to plug numbers into a spreadsheet (hello, garment designing) or I know roughly what kind of base numbers I’m working with (hello, shawl construction and increase ratio).

I always, always calculate and write the pattern before I start knitting, because I don’t want to waste time knitting up something which won’t work late in the knitting process. An example of this would be a bottom-up sweater where the stitch numbers don’t work with the yoke design. As a knitter, you will be able to fudge away those extra 7 stitches. As a designer, I need to know the right numbers.

Designing one-off patterns for myself is not something I do very often, but somehow I ended up doing just that last month. It felt like a combination of responding to a yarn pattern request and designing something because I had something stuck in my head.

The Hillhead hat pattern was a frivolous, unplanned pattern (I plan my pattern releases somewhat obsessively) that somehow wormed its way into the world. I had stuffed three balls of yarn into my suitcase while I was travelling and was doodling in my notebook. When I was a child, my gran knitted me a much-loved colourwork sweater and I was trying to recreate the stitch pattern.

The end result of all this unplanned activity was a hat. I put the work-in-progress on IG, worrying that I had knitted myself into a dead-end. Instead the kind comments encouraged me to continue and it was a design process much unlike anyone I’ve experienced before. I did not try to tell a story (apart from trying to remember a stitch pattern from my childhood) and most of the knitting was done whilst travelling with very little preparation beforehand.

On a slightly funny note (or maybe it speaks to the year I’ve had), this morning I found a folder with a collection’s worth of already-written and -charted patterns that I had forgotten all about! I will need to sift through the designs and see which ones are viable, then figure out where the ‘gaps’ in the collection are before designing into those gaps. But that sets me up for 2019 and all the things ahead.

Anyway, I hope that answered a few questions about my design processes and how my design brain works. I’m not as prolific as some designers, but I do work hard at getting you some nice things to knit!

Making Some Changes: Teaching

Later this week I will be updating the workshop & events page with all the details about what's ahead. It's already been announced that I'm teaching at EYF next month, but I'm also teaching at two other events this spring/summer. Dublin's Woollinn has a fantastic line-up and I cannot wait to visit Ireland for the first time. I'll also be at Yarningham for the first time alongside some of my favourite people.

I will be announcing more details (including the marvellous LYSs I'm visiting this spring),  but I want to expand a bit on some decisions we've made at Casa Bookish.

Since 2014 I have been a full-time knitting designer and teacher - and it is a lot of work. I spend a lot of time on the road, I could do admin as a full-time job (and have now hired Penny to help out), I design, I write, I edit, I learn about spreadsheet functions and tax regulations, and occasionally I even knit.

I also have a chronic health condition.

My work is flexible enough to allow for days when my condition flares up, but I do have to factor in extra time to do some things (like photo shoots). And  when I get back to work, I have such a workload that I push myself to get through the things that have piled up. And then I have a flare up etc. 

Sitting down at the photo shoot.

Over the last two months, I have had some major conversations with my assistant Penny and my partner/photographer David. I have to make some changes or both my creativity and my health will suffer. We have concluded that while I love to teach, teaching takes up so much of my time and energy (prep, travel, teaching, travel, recovery) that we need to be very smart about how much I do.

Going forward, you will see me more often at festivals and doing LYS residencies than at one-off classes. I am so appreciative of all the LYS owners and organisers who have all stepped up in support. Thank you thank you thank you! Everybody has been so kind and understanding - this is why the knitting community is so special. 

(As always, if you are a festival organiser or a LYS owner, we'd love to hear from you. We have precious few slots available for the rest of the year - but do get in touch. I've also begun taking the first few bookings for 2019). 

If you are a knitter, I hope you understand why I am not just popping by your LYS every two weeks or so. Please take advantage of when I am teaching at a nearby festival or teaching at a LYS - it will most likely be a while until I will be back. I also know it can be frustrating if everything's already booked by the time you hear about my class - but I'd still love to say hello to you (and please understand if I need to sit down while talking to you). 

Teaching is so magical: I love seeing you flourish and take on new challenges. Thank you for letting me be a tiny part of your making life. Let's make this work together.