To bundle or not to bundle?

The Coffee Break Cowl

I’ve been mulling over the issue of my older patterns for a while now. Acutely conscious that the downside of using social media to market one’s work means that invariably you actually have to talk about it from time to time (ie mention it in posts, on Instagram, casually drop it into twitter conversations) in order to actually sell anything.

It’s quite un-British and ‘selling posts’ are the thing I struggle with most online. 

As a natural consequence of this I find that I am much more comfortable talking about my newer work as subconsciously or not, I feel that this is of more value to the reader. In reality of course, very few of those who follow me on social media have been following me since the beginning of my designing career. To those stalwart and much appreciated souls who have, however, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

In actual fact, many of those who follow me now probably don’t have a clue about my older body of work - back in the Ravelry days.

It’s for these newer customers that occasionally I overcome my reluctance and schedule a few posts about some of my older patterns - usually those with a seasonal link or something to tie in to current events.

It was after one such post that I received an email which, I have to confess took me back a little. In essence it was someone asking, none too politely, why I felt able to charge for older designs. To paraphrase it was basically “you’ve already done the work and the file is just sitting there, so why do you still charge for it”

Clearly the concept of attempting to make a profit via a semi-passive income is a bit lost on this correspondent - and I’d love to see them argue for a free copy of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ in a bookstore - but it did make me stop and think for a bit.

When I shared this on twitter there were a few well-meaning comments about maybe packaging up older designs into a bundle and selling them at a significant discount in order to generate sales. But the more I thought about it the more I thought that to be honest that was even worse than the ‘just make them free’ argument.

Using this approach starts from the premise that there is something inherently less worthy about older patterns compared to newer ones. But this isn’t fast fashion. People are far less likely to only knit patterns from ‘this season’, unlike with clothing where it’s quite common for retailers to mark down ‘end of season’ ranges. 

In a similar vein, who is to say when a pattern is deemed old? They aren’t published with expiry dates. If someone today stumbles across my website and goes browsing around for patterns - please do feel free by the way - to them, all of the patterns they see there are new. They don’t differentiate, I don’t think, between those added this year compared to those that have been published some years previously. They are all equally novel.

Not only does a pattern bundle devalue the actual patterns themselves but I believe it also devalues the worth of my customers. Those loyal souls who actually choose to get my newsletter, who like and comment on my Instagram posts, who share a tweet or take a photo of their latest Fuss Free festival shawl to share with others.

I hate the phrase ‘target customer’ but these people really are the reason why I have a business at all. They are happy to pay full price for a pattern, but also appreciate a new pattern discount or early bird price on occasion via my newsletter.

Chasing after customers who don’t see that they should have to pay for older patterns, or who can only be enticed to buy them at a considerable reduction is not where I want to spend my valuable time.

On a slightly different tangent I’d be interested in how many patterns from bundles actually make it onto needles. From my own personal experience I know that I have bought bundles in the past that have just been filed and forgotten. I might have knit 1 or 2 of them but the remainder have certainly never seen the light of day.

How about you - do you like or value bundles? I’d love your feedback on this.

If you’d like to be notified of my new pattern releases, newsletters and the occasional cheeky early bird discount you can sign up below. And should I ever do a bundle, you’ll be the first to know :)

What kind of knitter are you?

I don’t know about you but I always used to love those fun quizzes you used to get in girls magazines. You know, the ones that claimed to be able to predict your entire personality type or your perfect lipstick shade from whether you had circled ‘mostly As’.

Even though you knew that you used to try to skew the answers to get the ‘cool girl’ result you wanted, or you retook the test a couple of times to get the ‘right’ answer.

So, just for fun I decided to do a similar one for knitters - because, well, why not.

It will come as no surprise that many of us are ‘Butterflies’ myself included although, these days I definitely tend towards ‘The Planner’ on occasion.

How about you? What category do you fall into

A slow start to September

For me this month is going to be slow and intentional. For pretty much all of my life September has meant back to school/work and a renewed push towards "getting stuff done" before the end of the year.

This year, for the first time I'm not working and I have the luxury of being able to evaluate exactly what I want to do and how I spend my time.

That's a luxury that I really want to slow down and appreciate.

This time next year I'll only have one boy at home as the other will be off to Uni and I guess I'm feeling the need to really appreciate what I have right now, before it all changes again.

I don't want to dive in with a load of "to do's" and lists before I've figured out exactly what I want to achieve in these next few months, or even if I want to actually achieve anything at all?

My need for reflection has been really highlighted with the events of the last few days and the death of the Queen. Whatever your views on monarchy as an institution the Queen has been a solid, tangible presence in all of our lives for a very long time and the transition to having a King is quite an adjustment to the national mindset. For me, along with a great many other people I suspect it has also brought feelings of grief to the fore, memories of losing our own loved ones and for that reason I have been taking a step back from social media - particularly Twitter.

As ever, social media reflects all of societies extremes - both good and bad - and I’m finding it difficult to balance my need for quiet thoughts against the maelstrom of Big Twitter Opinions.

As a pleasant alternative I came across a fabulous hashtag project yesterday (thanks to @sarahrichardssocial on Instagram ). It's called #SlowSeptember and there are a series of daily prompts if you choose to dip in and out of them.

But more than that, it's an invitation to take the foot off the accelerator and pause. To find a little space in your day to do something just for you. To consider something that's important to you.

Or just to sit and do nothing with a brew and a biscuit ☕☕

How are you feeling this September? Full of back to school energy or does Team Slow sound appealing to you too?

Granny Square Love

The finished blanket drying in the sun

I’ve done giant granny square blankets before but this is the first time I have done a traditional granny square, seamed crochet blanket and let me tell you I am smitten, absolutely head over heels smitten with it.

I thought that I would struggle and procrastinate over the sewing up at the end but I was so keen to get it done that I powered through a few sewing and netflix sessions and had a finished blanket in no time.

If it weren’t for the unfeasibly warm weather we have had in the UK during July and August this would have been finished a whole lot sooner, let me tell you.

I’ll put the full details below if you want them but for this I used Stylecraft Special Chunky (144m/157yds per 100g) and a 6mm hook - and my word - chunky yarn works up very quickly doesn’t it.

For each square I did 4 rounds and then finished off with a round of a neutral shade (Parchment). This was also the yarn that I used to seam it all together - just using mattress stitch. I did experiment with using various crochet methods for joining the squares together but in the end I just decided to stick to what I knew best.

Placement: A little too late into proceedings I came across this Permutations blanket idea. I love the idea of sequentially working your way through each possible colour permutation but it would have required a lot more time (and yarn). But I am definitely bookmarking this for a future project. In the end I just tried to keep the colour distribution as even as I could and to fiddle around with the placement of the squares to avoid too much colour clustering. But the idea of a more methodical approach is very appealing - so many potential projects, so little time.

Border: Once I’d sewn the squares into a 5x6 grid I knew that I wanted a border and by happy coincidence I had 2 balls of the neutral Parchment left over. So I just decided to work a (UK) treble stitch all the way round and kept going until I ran out of yarn. This gave me 4 full rounds in total.

I haven’t ruled out the possibility of adding more to it - possible more of the neutral to make a super large border or maybe even tiny, coloured granny squares around the edge. But for me, that’s the beauty of blankets like this. You can make one, live with it for a bit, and then decided to add to it at a later date - if you want.

Or maybe…just start another one :)

Finished size: 5 squares by 6 squares plus a border of (UK) treble crochet - 43” by 38” (a comfortable, small lap-sized blanket)

Colours used: 1 ball of each colour and 4 balls of Parchment

Graphite 1063

Copper 1029

Mocha 1064

Duck egg 1820

Lime 1712

Sage 1725

Teal 1062

Parchment 1218

Summer reading and reflections

My reading choices for the Summer of Books and Yarn challenge

It’s been an odd sort of summer in many ways and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it all. It’s been a time of highs and lows. Some wonderful times spent relaxing as a family, and time spent with other family members. Coupled with a lot of driving around the country and a lot of emotions as we deal with grief and inevitable upheaval that happens when people die.

I’ve been really grateful to have the time to spend with my boys, especially as we are now staring University open days in the face, and I’ve really loved both taking part in and running the Summer of Books and Yarn challenge.

No-one was more surprised than me to find me blitzing my way through all 6 books that I had planned - although losing my knitting whilst on holiday in Greece (it’s a long story and I eventually found it) certainly helped me with my reading target.

It’s been lovely to see all the great feedback in the Everyday Knitter Facebook group as well - it seems that I’m not alone in having a ball with it. And there have been lots of calls to have a repeat challenge, maybe even to make it a seasonal event and I’m definitely putting that on my to do list for the next few months.

There were so many good book titles shared that I promised I would do a little roundup of some of the popular book titles, and true to my word, you can find a list below of the titles that seemed to crop up repeatedly in people’s reading lists and which got good reviews. I haven’t hyperlinked the titles as everyone has their own favourite place where they like to buy or borrow books.

• A thousand ships by Natalie Haynes

• How the light gets in by Louise Penny

• The salt path by Raynor Winn

• City of Friends by Joanna Trollope

• Tidelands by Phillipa Gregory

• The Thursday murder club by Richard Osman

• Everything I never told you by Celeste Ng

• Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

• Where the crawdads sing by Delia Owens

• The miniaturist by Jessie Burton

• River Kings by Cat Jarman (non fiction)

• The midnight library by Matt Haigh

• The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini

• Endeavour by Peter Moore (non fiction)

If you aren’t already a member of the Everyday Knitter Facebook group do please come over and say hi. We are a really friendly bunch, I promise and if you are interested in another reading challenge that will be the best place to follow along with it.

An alternative Temperature Blanket

It seems to be traditional to start a Temperature Blanket in January, at the start of a new year and whilst I can see the obvious attractions of a new year, new blanket approach, when you think about it a summer start has a lot of advantages.

Starting the knitting during the warmer months (in the Northern hemisphere) has the advantage that the blanket is smaller and cooler to work on, saving the longer heavier rows for the colder months, when a pile of wool on your lap is probably a lot more welcome.

I vividly remember that my knitting slowed to a crawl during the 2020 summer as I just couldn’t face working on a large blanket project. Given that I was knitting a corner to corner blanket (with the longest rows during the summer months) this meant I had to do a lot of catch up knitting in autumn to stand a hope of finishing on time.

Starting in the summer would have completely bypassed this and would, with hindsight probably made for a much more relaxing knit.

Depending on your colour preferences and choices you might also want the warmer colours at each end of the blanket, with a cooler ones in the centre. I love my temperature blanket to death and use it a lot, but the few warm colour stripes right across the middle do annoy me slightly. Given the choice again I think I would prefer them confined to the edges.

I’ve blogged about my Temperature Blanket before, but I’ve included the link here in case you want to read up more on it, and maybe induldge in a little blanket planning of your own this summer.

And if you do decide to do a summer start, please do let me know. I’d love to cheer you on from the sidelines.