Knitwear Design - Commercial Viability

I can't imagine that even some of the most prolific designers make very much money selling their knitwear designs.

My Personal Experience
Since having offered some of my designs for sale on The Knitting Vault, I have been surprised by a few things:

1. Folks purchased way more patterns than I expected (especially the Koigu Cross Stitch Scarf.jpg pattern)

2. What I considered to be my best design (the Passing Lane Pullover), hasn't done very well in sales. I'm thinking that either:

a. It's not as good as I thought
b. Folks don't think it's worth $5.50 for the pattern
c. The pictures don't do it justice



3. Despite being probably one of the biggest sellers of patterns on The Knitting Vault, I could NEVER give up my day job to do this solely.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone else with designing experience, especially if you market your designs on Fredda's site.

Fiber Friends
I got the opportunity to meet the spinner guy in Upstate New York and he is nothing short of wonderful. In addition to being a very nice guy (think perfect Southern Gentleman with an urban edge), he's also incredibly knowledgeable in the area of spinning, specifically Icelandic wool.

I was fascinated the entire time, but I also realize that most humans would have preferred chewing off their own arms rather than be with us as we gabbed about fiber.

If anyone has Knit Lit 2, you can read his story, as he's published in there.

Current Knitting
I should be at about row 30 on this last row of color blocks, but due to multiple errors and re-knitting, I'm only at row 18.

I'm so irked with this project at the moment, that I wouldn't even consider giving it the satisfaction of taking its picture.

New Blog Read
As you can see from my blog buttons, I don't read a lot of other blogs, and very seldom do I get the opportunity to read blogs other than the ones I have links for. The other day I was reading Jean Miles blog, and I was highly perplexed as to why I had never added her blog to my daily reads list before.

She is now a regular read for me.

Her knitting is amazing, although her most recent project really pisses me off for a couple of reasons. Firstly, she just finished picking up some ungodly number stitches for her current lace shawl...that's just unnatural, although I still thought I'd love to do this shawl. Second, the pattern, available through Heirloom Knits, was only sold in limited quantities (250) and they're all sold out.



I have decided that I will buy the Heirloom Knitting book, since it also seems to have amazing designs, and one day I'd like to knit like Jean.

Readers' Comments/Questions
Duffy notes, "Beautiful quilt top, Joe. Do I understand you right, it's your first?"

In actuality, I had tried quilting a while ago. Inspired by Kaffe and Liza's orginal quilt book (Glorious Patchwork), I bought a bunch of crappy fabric, and started to make a boring quilt top. Since I was hand-piecing, and it wasn't turning out at all as I had hoped, I quickly lost interest. The experience with this project was nothing like the first.