As you’ll all know from my last post, I have recently launched my very first knitting pattern for sale. Now, this was a bit of a daunting venture. I had knitted a shawl, which I thought was beautiful and on which other people had commented, saying how nice it was. People are usually very nice about things if you tell them you’ve made it – this doesn’t mean that they’d want to make one or that they’d even wear it if you made them one. Spurred on by the fabulous encouragement of Annette (recipient of first shawl) and the lovely Jemima Bicknell (soon to launch her own shawl), however, I bit the bullet and launched, just before I went on holiday to Borneo (blog on that to come soon).
My twitter followers were marvellous and re tweeted like crazy, as well as sending me lovely tweets about the pattern and the shawl.
Within a few hours my shawl was number TWO on the “Hot right now” section on Ravelry (knitters’ community)! I was ecstatic. People were favouriting it and adding it to their queues to knit and then….. they started to buy it!
When people buy, you then get nervous: what if the instructions don’t make sense, or they hate my writing style and put nasty comments on the pattern page…. or what if I’ve got the yarn amounts wrong and no one can finish it with just one skein…. Obviously, this hasn’t happened. I’ve had nothing but lovely comments from everyone. Several have started to knit my shawl and posted lovely pictures of their progress and a couple have finished it! Hurrah – it works! 
As I write, it has been favourited by 454 lovely Ravelry members and put in 124 queues! I’m not naive enough to think that all those who have queued it will actually knit it, because everyone has huge knitting queues and it’s very hard to find the time to knit all the lovely things that you want to. If any of you are reading this though – my shawl is a really quick knit. It’s not just me that says so either – the people who have knitted it have commented about how quick a knit it is. You could knit it as a nice quick project between larger or more complex ones….
It’s now just over 2 weeks since the launch and my wonderful friend, Martine from iMake, has just launched a knitalong of the pattern. I am extremely excited about this. I’ll get to see my pattern being knitted by lots of people in all sorts of different yarns and colours. We are offering a prize for the first finisher and a further prize will be announced on Christmas Eve for my favourite finished shawl. All the details are on the iMake blog: http://imake.gg/2012/11/10/birthday-shawl-knitalong/
Everyone is very welcome to join us and, if you haven’t bought the pattern yet, I’m offering a 15% discount to the KAL participants – so what are you waiting for?
Yay! Join the knitalong! You rock Kate xx
Thank you Martine!! You rock too. xx
Congrats, Kate, it’s lovely!
Thank you so much Pauline!