We've got yarn!

I spent much of yesterday sleeping. I stupidly sent Sydney to school, even though she wasn't well enough, so now she's suffering a bit of a relapse (and we may have ruined our sweet carpool setup in the process by exposing them all to Sydney's old-man hacking cough...). I took her to the doctor this morning and he ruled out mumps and pneumonia - apparently there is a nasty strain of flu going around, which confirms what I suspected we've had. Although I haven't yet developed the chest congestion - I've just been dead tired all week. Perhaps I'm developing sudden-onset narcolepsy. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop since I haven't felt right for days but it could be that I'm just suffering a post-TNNA nervous breakdown!

Now that all the TNNA orders are (pretty much) mailed off, the website is updated and I don't have any immediate deadlines looming, I'm not quite sure what to do with myself. I've been trying to knit a hat out of a single skein of Tilli Tomas Rock Star (which is a gorgeous beaded silk), but it's just not cooperating. First it was too tight. Then it was too short. I'm right on the edge of not having enough yarn to finish, so I keep ripping it out and knitting it just a little bit bigger. I'm about to embark on the third iteration, and if this one doesn't work, it may end up being a scarf instead.

But enough about me...let's finally take a look at the yarn I picked up at TNNA! One of the many benefits of exhibiting at TNNA is that on the last day, when everyone is packing up and not wanting to cart everything home, there's a lot of free yarn to be had (particularly for designers promising pattern support). Here are some samples given to tempt me into designing with them.

First up, I got four balls of Frog Tree (one of my faves - such a great company, and such great yarn) in different weights and fibers:



We've got fingering-weight alpaca and brushed suri, worsted-weight alpaca and chunky alpaca. Yum!

Next is a small sampling of my haul from Lorna's Laces. I could've taken more, too, if only I would've had room - they are so generous!



The multicolor skein is Shepherd Bulky in the Edgewater colorway. The pink skein is their new Green Line DK organic wool. It is so lovely! They've got a Green Line worsted-weight yarn as well. It's not superwash, but boy is it nice!

I got two awesome sock yarn samples, the first from Cascade who's coming out with a new line of sock yarn called Heritage:



Isn't it pretty? I'm going to be working on some exclusive patterns for this yarn over the summer.

I also got a nice little sample of this amazing yarn from Neighborhood Fiber Co, a little outfit based in DC:



Those are just my colors, aren't they? Karida, the color genius behind this line, stopped by to chat on Sunday afternoon after she'd sold out all of her slots (she can only take so many orders since it takes a set amount of time to dye each one). Lucky duck! The yarn is posing nicely on top of my autographed copy of The Secret Language of Knitters by my friend Mary Beth Temple.

I got a couple of samples from other folks stuck down in the half-booth boonies - these two lovely skeins are North American Shetland from Elemental Affects:



She has a ton of lovely colors that just scream colorwork. I also got this gigantic hank of sport-weight, hand-dyed cotton from Caya Colour Yarn, a small outfit in Colorado run by a chicken-owning mommy much like myself (check out the awesome picture of the chick wearing legwarmers on the front page of her website). It is the best-smelling skein of yarn I've ever owned!



I don't know what she put on it, but boy does it smell yummy! I also snagged a gorgeous skein of Pear Tree merino, beautifully colored yarn from the land of Oz, again in my favorite color:



When paging through my most recent catalog, I noticed that I have a definite bias towards orange. I know I tend to gravitate towards purple, so I tried not to design too many purple things. Turns out when I don't use purple, I gravitate towards orange! I'm also in the process of learning which colors photograph well (greens and blues) and which ones not so well (reds and oranges).

We got to talk to lots of yarn companies (and there were plenty we didn't talk to), and there were a few who were particularly open to providing yarn for my pattern line - you'll be seeing lots of future designs using Frog Tree, Malabrigo, Mission Falls, Cascade and of course Lorna's Laces. I know there are more companies who are very supportive of indie designers, but I had to stop there because I only have so much time to design!

Now that this post has totally drained me (maybe I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?), I'm going to wrap it up with the little contest I promised you. Comment on this post and include a) how long you've been reading the blog and b) what things you especially enjoy reading about. I'll draw randomly from all the respondents who ANSWER BOTH QUESTIONS (this is also a test of your reading comprehension and ability to follow directions, you know) on Sunday. The winner will receive a brand spankin' new copy of each of my new Spring/Summer '08 patterns. Time for all you lurkers (and I know you're out there) to come out of hiding!!! And I wanted to thank all of you who bother to read what I come up with on a regular basis (and who managed to read to the bottom of the post). So thank you!

Continuing to learn the hard way...

I'm going to have the phrase "And she never did learn..." engraved on my tombstone. In our last episode, I was eagerly awaiting the last of my tech edits so I could start printing my patterns on my brand new solid-ink printer. I managed to get almost everything, with the exception of a few of my plus-size patterns, formatted, tech edited and generally complete by last Thursday. On Friday, I started to print. The plan was to get all the pattern leaflets printed out on Friday night and Saturday, and then Donna was going to come over on Sunday to help me staple and pack for mailing. Oh, how the best laid plans, they go astray.

Friday night arrives. I'm happily printing away. I get through about 3/4 of my sock patterns when - you guessed it - I run out of ink. I'm not too worried - I figure I'll just run to Staples on Saturday after work and pick up some more. No problem. Except for the fact that Staples doesn't carry solid ink. Neither does Costco, or Office Depot, or any other place that I could find that's open on the weekend. In a panic, I have Bill bring my old laser printer up from the basement figuring I might have enough toner left to print out the most critical patterns. I get through one more sock design before the magenta toner runs out. I've got some discount toner that I'd ordered before the great printer switcheroo, and I plug it in even though it looks a little iffy. I start to print, hoping for the best. Of course the printer hate the cheapo toner. I get 50 pages with ghost images on them. Not good.

At 3:30 Sunday morning, Sydney wakes up with chills, fever and a horrible old man cough that makes her toss her cookies. We decide that Donna is better off not exposing herself to our germs, and I spend the morning trying to figure out how to get my hands on more ink. I finally resign myself to the fact that I'm going to have to wait until the Xerox dealer opens on Monday morning. Monday dawns, Sydney is still miserably sick, and I order my ink. I drag myself to work but get sent home early because I look so awful. I go home and sleep for two hours, get up and start printing again. I get about 3/4 of the way through all the patterns I need to send out and - guess what? - I run out of yellow ink.

I've got a couple of text boxes on my patterns with a pretty light-yellow background. I wasn't thinking that these boxes would eat the ink like they did, forgetting that there were three boxes in total on each pattern, meaning that each pattern had about 3/4 of an entire page area covered in yellow. Yup - that's not going to conserve ink. I changed the remaining patterns so that there was a transparent background in those text boxes, but the damage had been done. Bill and I stayed up until after midnight stapling and stuffing in preparation for a marathon mailing session today. I fell into bed, exhausted, but felt so ooky I couldn't get to sleep for another hour. Needless to say, I was not excited when Owen woke me up at 8 am.

Today has been spent fighting extreme exhaustion and headache while trying desperately to get the promised orders out. I ended up calling in sick to work, which is ironic since I ended up working harder at home than I would've at the shop. At least I wasn't exposing anyone but my family to my germs (and I don't feel sorry for them since they're the ones who exposed me in the first place). I had a fun white-knuckle drive through sleet over to the other side of town to pick up more yellow ink. It was all I could do to stay awake for the drive. Bill was a total champ and packed all the boxes up for me and took them to the post office. I've promoted him to shipping manager for Gardiner Yarn Works. He's thrilled, let me tell you.

To give you an idea of the scale of our operation, here's what the dining room table looked like when I got up this morning:



That's about 1/3 of the patterns that got sent out today. I should've gotten a picture of the boxes! There will be a whole slew of shops carrying my new (and old) patterns as of next week. Yahoo! I'll list them off at some point, but I'm just too exhausted right now. I'm trying to decide if I need a glass of wine or a nap. It's too early to go to bed and too late for a nap not to keep me up all night, so I'm thinking wine.

I'm also planning a fun blog contest for my loyal readers, so stay tuned! I will try not to flake out or keep you waiting for weeks. I want to do something to thank you all for sharing the gruesome details of my oh-so-glamorous life!

It's up!

The Interweave Knits Spring '08 preview is up! You may remember that I was a little disappointed at how my socks in the Winter issue photographed so dark, but both of my designs in this issue look fantastic (although it looks a bit like the shirt is too small for the model). The yarn for the Auburn Camp Shirt is Naturally Dawn and I just loved working with it (although the fine gauge and short deadline just about killed me, since I had to knit socks for the same issue, all during our trip to Minnesota last summer). It is soft, has a delightful drape and is reasonably priced for a silk/wool blend.

I'm still in heavy-duty editing mode but I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Fortunately I have two of the best tech editors ever who are able to turn stuff around for me in the ridiculously short amount of time I'm giving them! My pledge for June is to procrastinate just a tad less...

Adventures in Ink

This past week has been all about ink. I printed out the rest of the catalogs to be sent to Lorna's Laces (did I mention that they're distributing my patterns? Yay!), and in the process went through several more toner cartridges. It's so depressing to watch your profits going up in ink! Serendipitously, a conversation about cost-per-page of self-published patterns started up on Ravelry and the very helpful and experienced Dawn Brocco mentioned her shockingly low cost per page (as compared to mine) with her solid ink printer.

I had no idea what solid ink was, and I didn't look forward to shelling out another $1000 for a new printer, but I knew I had to do something. I found some discount off-brand toner, but it still would run me $80 a cartridge and wouldn't help my cost per page THAT much. I crunched some more numbers, and realized that I could pretty much pay for a new printer with the money I'd save using it to print out the patterns ordered at TNNA. I could bring my cost-per-pattern down nearly $1! I had no idea that the costs varied so dramatically between printers, which is why I didn't do more research back when I first bought my laserjet. Back when I was printing about 30 patterns a month to go with my sock kits, it was more than adequate. But trying to make a go of it selling wholesale, the margins go way down. In order to have money to cover the costs of things like my phone line, the website, advertising, etc., $1 per pattern is going to go a LONG way. My business model might actually be viable now! As much as I love designing, I don't want to be paying to do it...

Enter my new baby, the Xerox Phaser 8560/DN:



I decided to shell out the extra $200 for the duplexing (double-sided printing) feature because it will save me so much time and grief. On my old printer (sans duplexing), I had to print out the odd-numbered pages, then flip everything around and feed them upside-down through the manual feeder tray (since they seemed to get gummed up if I put them back into the paper tray after they'd been printed on one side) 50 sheets at a time. Again, not a big deal when I was printing 30 patterns a month but a BIG deal when I have to print 1000 at a time...

The new printer uses solid ink instead of toner, so all I have to do to load more ink is open the top and drop these little crayon-like blocks into the appropriate slot:



It's really cool. Best of all, no more bulky, wasteful toner cartridges! Here's the size of my old toner (and this ends up being multiplied times 4 because there are four different colors of toner) compared to the size of the packaging for the new solid ink chunks:



Amazing difference, isn't it? (And in case you're wondering, the spots on the carpet are ground-in Play-Doh, which I tell the kids repeatedly to only play with in the kitchen but somehow ends up all over the house anyway...) The toner also comes in a heavy corrugated cardboard box and is covered in bubble-wrap. The amount of waste per cartridge is a bit appalling, but the solid ink makes almost all of that go away. It's very exciting!

I've got some yarn to show off (good new things picked up at TNNA), but that will have to wait for another day. I've got editing to do! I finally got my pattern style guide put together and am going through every pattern with a fine-tooth comb to make sure they're all consistent. I've also got three more plus-size patterns to grade (I'm offering all of my sweater patterns now in two different versions - XS to XL and XXL to 6X), all before the 1st. I'll be announcing some great new shops soon, and for those of you who've signed up for my e-mail newsletter, I will finally be putting one together as soon as I get all the orders out! I really need an assistant (too bad most people aren't willing to be paid in yarn).

Somewhere in the midst of all this chaos, I gave Sydney a haircut. Isn't she adorable? I can't believe she's going to be five in a month!



And now, back to the editing room...

Perspectives on exhibiting at TNNA for the first time...

I've been getting asked about how it went as a first-time exhibitor at TNNA this past weekend, so I thought I'd write a blog post about it for everyone to see. There were many things I could've done better, and many things I feel very good about. All in all, it was an amazing experience and one I'm planning to repeat in June. I'll be buying a full booth space this time, assuming I can design enough fall/winter stuff to fill it up! A half booth was plenty of space for the approximately 20 designs that I have in my line right now.

My only complaint with a half booth is that we were all stuck way down on the end, and it happened to be the opposite end from where most of the yarn was. There was a huge sea of needlepoint between us and the rest of the knitting-related stuff, but we were pretty close to the Unicorn booth so people wandered through as they went to and from the various book signings. Honestly, I was surprised at how many people sought us out because they'd heard about me from some source or other. The fashion show garment and new product areas brought several folks by, and I got quite a few other customers who knew me from Ravelry. I think that now that I've gotten my name out there, bit-by-bit, I'm going to pony up for some more print ads in the big magazines to reinforce my brand before June. I'll have to see if I have any money left over to do so!

Having a booth at TNNA is a big investment. You need to join as a wholesale member, which is around $225 (if I remember correctly). I also took advantage of the myriad of advertising opportunities available, including a business-card-sized ad in the show directory, a spot in the New Products Display area and a yarn group membership. I also paid the fee to have a garment in the fashion show and had miscellaneous materials costs, including a booth banner, lights and other miscellaneous booth set-up equipment. These are things that I'll be able to use for future shows as well. Finally, there's the cost of hotel (by far the biggest expense of the trip), meals and transportation. I used a frequent flyer airline ticket, but because I was worried about timing I took a $70 cab ride from LAX to Long Beach on Thursday when I arrived.

Everyone says that it's a great show if you cover your booth costs the first time, and that it really takes three times exhibiting to be taken seriously. I definitely experienced this - on Friday I was starting to get really worried because we didn't write a single order! We handed out lots of catalogs, though, and got great feedback on the patterns. On Saturday, the day started out with a string of very nice orders (Saturday was by far our best day), and Sunday followed up with several additional orders that put us over the top as far as paying for the booth (although I don't think I covered every single show cost, which I still consider successful due to the fact that I would've attended the show anyway). I got several customers who I think will be great long-term customers and definitely started to build my brand recognition. There's always the fantasy that people will go absolutely crazy for your product and you'll be a runaway success, but sadly this didn't quite happen. However, I'm extremely happy with where we positioned ourselves and I'll definitely be exhibiting again in June.

I got amazing advice from my friend Chris de Longpre of Knitting at Knoon, who was happy to answer every question I ever asked her in great detail. I wouldn't have been nearly as prepared as I was if it wasn't for her. It's so great to have a mentor before you show for the first time. I printed out about 100 catalogs to give out, and have about 25 left over, so that estimate was pretty close (better to have too many than too few). Next time, I'll plan ahead better and order some order forms with carbon on them (this time we wrote out two order forms for each order - one to give as a receipt and one for us to keep track with). I'm also going to be reconsidering my minimums - right now I have it set as a 6-pattern minimum per design, which is fine for bigger stores but not for the little shop in Alaska who has a very limited customer base and just can't sell six of a pattern because there probably aren't six people in her town who will want to all make the same thing! I'm thinking of allowing shops to order 3 per if they order over a set amount. On the one hand, I want shops that are going to take my designs seriously and work to promote them rather than stuffing them in a folder on a dusty shelf somewhere to languish for years. On the other hand, I don't want to put my designs out of reach of the smaller shops. Running your own business is a constant balancing act, and there's nobody to make these decisions for you! Our minimum did turn off one disgruntled shop owner who actually chewed poor Donna out because of it - we decided that I probably don't want a customer like that in the first place!

This is something that you need to be in for the long haul. I've been told by several different sources that you can't expect to make a killing at your first show. It really depends on your business plan and where you want to take your patterns. There are certainly much less labor-intensive ways of selling your designs, but I love having complete control over what I make and how it looks in its final form. Of course I'll still keep designing for others because I value the name recognition that comes along with having a design in Interweave Knits, for instance, but I feel like I'm finally in a place where I can begin to be very choosy about how I spend my limited design time.

I'm fortunate to be in a position where I can exhibit at TNNA. Designing in general brings in such piddly amounts of money, it's hard to build up a base with which to reinvest in your business in the amounts needed to do TNNA. Teaching locally has really helped me, along with my regular trickle of designs for the magazines and various books. I use that stream of cash as a means to an end - investing in equipment, professional memberships, and stuff like that. It's really nice to have a class fee coming in when the design biz is slow, and vice versa. It's impossible to make it in this industry without having your fingers in lots of different pies (unless you're incredibly lucky, have been around forever, or both).

Another great thing about having a booth, which hadn't occurred to me before I did it, is that you attract people who are just wandering by. When you're just roaming the floor at TNNA, sometimes it's hard to run into people (or else you see them when they're talking to someone else, or you just lose your nerve and decide not to approach them). With a booth, they'll often walk by and come over to you. I got to chat with both Clara Parkes and Debbie Stoller as they were meandering down our aisle, looking for new stuff. People can find you in a booth, which isn't always the case when you're just wandering around.

The other really fun thing about this conference, which I think I mentioned in yesterday's post, was just meeting and reconnecting with everyone. I've gotten to the point where I've worked with so many different people, I seem to have connections that cast a pretty wide net. It's great to be able to introduce myself to someone and say "I worked on such-and-such design for your such-and-such book" or something like that. Networking really does make a difference (plus it's so much fun), and I think that the two TNNA shows I attended last year have really made an impact on my business. They're expensive, but it's money well spent. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money, right? I'm finally starting to see a little bit of the payoff of all the money I've invested in my business over the past couple of years. I still have a long way to go (and who knows if it will ever really be profitable), but I feel like I'm heading in the right direction.

Now I've got a ton of work to do to wrap up the loose ends from this show (as in, I need to get all of the patterns ready and mailed out by the end of the month) and I've also got to start thinking about what I want to design to debut in June. I've got several yarn companies lines up for yarn support, and I've got lots of ideas (I just need to figure out when I'm going to implement them). I've also got several thoughts about how to improve the look of my booth next time. It was pretty rudimentary this time around but I got some good ideas from others' booths. The biggest thing will be to have a dress form sent out - it makes such a difference to have at least one garment on an actual body shape instead of just flat on the wall. I might order some more plastic feet, too - we'll see! It's delicate balance between having the ideal display and having a display you can actually get to the show without spending hundreds of dollars shipping it there and back!

Again, thanks to everyone I talked to over the weekend and to all the shops who placed and order and decided to take a chance on something new. I won't let you down! I'll be sending out a newsletter update and getting the new stuff up on the website very soon. Now, however, I need to get some sleep! All that adrenaline is exhausting! I'll fill you in on our delightful dinner with Jess and Casey of Ravelry in another post. For now, I will just say that they are disgustingly sweet, smart, thoughtful and just generally fun to talk to. If you get a chance to hang out with them, take it. I feel really privileged that we were able to get them to ourselves for nearly three hours last night - it was great!

Whew!

Well, I survived my first time exhibiting at TNNA. My mind is still reeling. It was an entirely different experience than walking the floor as an anonymous, unknown designer since not only did I have a booth, but people are starting to recognize my name. Donna (my booth babe) kept saying that before too long, I'll be insufferable. I don't know about that, but I do know that I had a great time and really enjoyed everything (after I managed to get through my stressful events relatively unscathed).

The weekend started off with a bang on Thursday night - I had a sweater in the fashion show which got lots of compliments, and then we headed over to the Hilton (which I thought was only three blocks from the convention center - turns out it was more like three miles!) for the AKD meetup. We had a great crowd, including a bunch of AKD members along with prospects and other movers-and-shakers. I got to reconnect with Cookie A and Janel from the Cat Bordhi retreat.

I was also delighted to chat with Eunny and Kim Werker of Interweave Knits and Interweave Crochet. Jess and Casey of Ravelry stopped by and were instantly surrounded by fans. My Portland friend Larissa also came by with her co-author and hubby Martin - they got to do all kinds of promotion for their upcoming book, Knitalong, which is coming out in February (or April? I can't remember exactly.) All in all, a fun time was had. It was just how I'd wanted it to turn out, so now we're going to plan for another one in June. It's so nice to be able to network with other folks in a positive, casual environment.

I can't even begin to list all the fabulous, wonderful people I met over the weekend, so please forgive me. I met a LOT of folks, from designers and authors, to yarn company people, to shop owners, and they were all fabulous. I got to meet Clara Parkes of Knitter's Review, and she was totally delightful. I got to fawn all over Debbie Stoller when she stopped by my little booth - she was totally delightful as well and really liked my Autumn in Oregon sock pattern (so I gave her a copy - hee hee!). I was very happy to finally meet Pam Allen in person. And my AKD friend and cohort Jennifer Hagan. And Joan Michael-McGowan of Knitting Lingerie Style, who had a booth down at the end of the row. And Mary Beth Temple, who was doing a book signing for her new book The Secret Language of Knitters (lucky me - she brought me my own signed copy!). And Shannon Okey, who is just as delightful in person as she sounds on her blog and her podcast/radio show. And I know there are many others who I've missed but was just as delighted to hook up with.

I also got to reconnect with friends that I don't see too often, like Susan and Jill Wolcott from Y2Knit, Margaret Fisher, Chris de Longpre of Knitting at Knoon, Darlene Hayes from Hand Jive and the wonderful Cat Bordhi.

My head is totally spinning, and I'm going to have lots of work to do when I get home! Now that I've sold all my patterns, I'm going to need to get them printed off and sent out! Now it's time to get ready for our last dinner out - we're going to meet up with the Ravelry folks and have some barbecue. Yummy! Stay tuned for more...after I get home and get a little sleep!

Ah, the joys of publishing

In the continuing saga of Chrissy-madly-prepares-for-TNNA-at-the-last-minute, I've been formatting patterns like crazy over the past few days. Not only am I formatting the new patterns, I'm also going over my old patterns to make sure that everything's nice and consistent. It's very interesting to look at patterns I wrote a couple of years ago - even though design is a creative endeavor, you certainly do improve with practice! My big challenge now is putting together my style guide, which is something I should've done a long time ago. I will be punished by the fact that I'll have to go over all of my patterns yet again when it's done and make sure they all comply.

Normally when you publish a pattern in a magazine, you get general guidelines to follow. Some pubs are more specific than others, and almost all of them have an editor to review your pattern and, in addition to tech editing the math, they'll review the wording, punctuation, capitalization and formatting for consistency. They probably have a couple different people who do this. When you're self-publishing, you get to do all this fun stuff yourself (or enlist kind people to help you out with it, or preferably both!).

Looking over my patterns, it's quite impressive to behold the smorgasboard of variations in little things. For example, do I say "row 1" or "Row 1"? Do I state that "11 sts remain" or simply "11 sts"? Or go for the gold and say "11 sts total remain across all ndls"? Do I say "Weave in ends", or "Weave in all ends", or "Weave in all yarn ends", or "Weave in all yarn ends on WS of work"... Get the picture? The benefit of a style guide is that you can spell all this stuff out so that every pattern says stuff the exact same way. It didn't matter so much when I just had a handful of patterns in a handful of shops, but now that I'm exhibiting at TNNA are have a yarn company distributor (more on that exciting news later), I've got to really step up my game!

Wow - I leave for Long Beach in just two days. I'm trying to keep that panicked feeling in the pit of my stomach at bay, but it's tough! I don't know if I'm more worried about exhibiting, or about all the networking and meeting of new people in the industry that I've set myself up to do. I'm a pretty classic introvert, so stuff like this is really hard on me. Fortunately, I'll be seeing some people I really like and don't get to see very often, so that will make up for some of the discomfort. I'll also have my wing-woman, Donna, to help keep me sane. I am so incredibly glad she'll be there - she's definitely a calming influence!

I don't know if I'll have time to post from the actual show this time, since it seems like every spare minute is booked with some social gathering or other. The previous couple of shows I had plenty of downtime because I didn't have a booth and I didn't know that many people to socialize with. It feels like I've finally arrived - with my AKD position along with my pattern line and print work in Interweave over the past year, people are starting to recognize my name, I think, and things are starting to happen. I just hope I'm ready!

On a final note - Staples has just introduced an awesome line of 100% recycled printing paper. They had a 100% recycled copy paper before that I was using for all my patterns, but their new paper is thicker and brighter, and I just love it. If you purchase paper at all, please buy some. I want them to keep it on the market!!!

Livin' La Vida Loca

So, it's nearly 11:00, my left eye is nearly swelled shut for some unknown reason, and Owen's little musical potty is going totally nuts. It won't stop playing. I'm about to throw it out the back door.

Today has been a nutty day. I'm at the point where I've gotten enough done with regard to TNNA that I'm just left milling aimlessly around the house, unable to finish up that final 10%. On top of that, I've been working madly on my duties as the Membership Services chair for AKD (the association of knitwear designers). I've been organizing a casual meetup at TNNA next Thursday (it's at the Hilton lobby bar after the fashion show, if there are any TNNA-attending designers reading this and you haven't yet heard about it since I feel like I'm blabbing about it EVERYWHERE), and it has happily grown to slightly frightening proportions.

On the one hand, my dream is for this to be a regular event at TNNA, since there isn't really any open social event for designers to just hang out and network. Ideally, it would be one of the events of the show. I'm hoping it will be crazy fun, and I've been e-mailing lots of personal invitations to designers and other design-related folks that I've worked with on various projects. So far I've been met with very positive response, which is quite exciting. On the other hand, I'm worried that it might be too successful and we'll be obviously unprepared for the huge deluge of people. Or maybe nobody shows up (or worse, one of the "big name" designers who we've invited will show up, expecting a big event, and the rest will blow it off, proving to that one "big name" designer that we're a bunch of chumps). I always hate this part of planning a party - worrying that nobody will show.

Ahh...silence from the potty! I don't know what gets into that thing sometimes - I swear it's possessed.

I've got a schematic to do for the Donna Druchunas book I'm contributing to. I've got one final detail to add to that sweater before I mail it off (it has to go out tomorrow). I need to get my gazillion catalogs (finally printed - CORRECTLY this time) stapled and mailed off to LA so that I don't have to drag them on the plane with me. I need to get all the new designs posted to the website and put into the online wholesale ordering system so that shops can access them after they see my fabulous designs at TNNA (or on my website) and flood me with orders. I've got two or three episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 to watch before my Tivo records over them. When's a girl supposed to get any sleep?

One final word about AKD, since the blog seems to be the only place I haven't been talking obsessively about it for the past couple days - for those of you who are designers or aspire to be, I'd love to encourage you to join us. AKD just elected a brand new board of directors (of which I'm a member) and we're gearing up to really change the organization and make it a driving force in the industry. Annie Modesitt has written some excellent blog posts over the past couple weeks about this business of knitwear design, valuing our work, negotiating fair deals for ourselves, etc. These are the sorts of things we're thinking about addressing, but we need your help. This is a great time to help shape the future of AKD and determine whether or not there will be a go-to group available for designers (like the Writer's Guild, or the Graphic Artists' Guild). Right now, it often seems like we're all working in our own little corners and while there are some groups out there, there isn't one cohesive voice willing to stand up for us little guys.

I can answer any questions you might have about AKD. If you're an established designer, you can join by submitting your resume and six tearsheets from published designs. If you're a new designer, you can join as an associate by submitting a swatch and written pattern. Best of all, you can request a mentor to help you navigate those first couple of years in the industry. This is what I did, and it really helped get me to where I am today.

And now I'm off to staple!

What not to do.

I just put together my new pattern catalog in preparation for TNNA. Last night, I fired up the printer and printed out three batches of 100. The catalogs are six pages, three sheets front and back.

Lessons learned the hard way:
1 - Do not print out 300 catalogs and staple them together without proofreading them carefully first. It doesn't matter how long you've looked at them on the computer screen, or how good you think your typing skills are. It's quite a sinking feeling when you're stapling together catalog #275 and you realize that you misspelled a prominent magazine's name. On the front cover of your catalog. Right next to the blurb about how you handle errata.

2 - Color is pretty, but it's good to remember that it has to come from somewhere. It only occurred to me on the drive home, in the rain, after a mad just-before-closing dash to Staples to get more printer toner, that perhaps the reason why I'm eating through yellow toner like there's no tomorrow is because I decided that it would be nice to have all of my pattern blurbs nicely framed in dark green with a light yellow background (similar to how my pattern pages are formatted). It makes sense that the yellow would get used up faster when 60% of each page is covered in yellow. Ironically, I don't even particularly like yellow.

3 - Once the typo is discovered, don't continue to blindly print, collate and staple, telling yourself that a blatant typo on the front cover of your catalog isn't a big deal - it's more important to not waste those 900 sheets of paper and a couple hundred bucks' worth of ink. People will understand and appreciate your deep commitment to the environment rather than thinking you're a designer who's supposedly offering error-free patterns but can't even get the frigging front page of her pattern catalog right...

4 - When you're at Staples, picking up toner, make sure that you get replacement cartridges for all colors - not just yellow. Don't tell yourself that you'll make it through the rest of your printing because you're taking the yellow backgrounds out, and you're sure the black cartridge will last for a few more days since it's supposed to yield 6000 pages and you're only planning to print out another 2700. Never mind that the status bar shows that it's only got 1/3 left.

Our recycle bin will be full this week! And now I've got to run to Staples to buy a black toner cartridge. Cripes.