In 2015, after 15 years of knitting, I decided it was time to start designing my own patterns. I’d been playing around with the idea for a few years, but I had never sat down and actually tried. I viewed it as the last big knitting challenge I had to surmount.
So in January 2015 I purchased a copy of Envisoknit, and sat down and started toying around.
After a few months of trying a few patterns and failing abysmally, my sister came to me and asked for a knitted shawl as her graduation gift. Turned out, that was exactly the kick start I needed to get designing, and my first pattern, Heather June, was completed in June 2015. It took me another few months, but in October of 2015 I finally finished writing up the pattern, and published it for the world to take and knit themselves.
In a two weeks, 1000 people had downloaded my first ever pattern, and I was floored. I imagined that maybe I’d get 50 downloads at most. Not 1000.
The comments I received on it were overwhelming, and not being one to generally get choked up, I found myself almost speechless at the response I was getting.
I’ve officially been bit by the designing bug now – I love the challenge of, essentially, coming up with something completely new out of nothing but a pair of tiny sticks and one long piece of string.
As of this post I have one other pattern almost at completion, and scraps of papers littered around my desk with the beginnings of other designs. Turns out, I absolutely love doing this, even when the math isn’t going my way.