Shows in 2010 and 2011

Well, it’s official. Handknit Heroes will be at Stitches East again this October, and at Stitches West in Spring 2011. Just giving you a heads up, in case you’re going to be at either show.

Return to Me, My Pretties

One of the saddest parts of my day is opening my email and finding out that we’ve had a return. It pops into my inbox from my mail service with “RTS” as the “address info,” and my heart just goes “oh!” We currently have 7 unclaimed RTS’s for Issue 3 right now. Did your package go astray? If you haven’t received Issue 3 yet, please send a note to support (at) mortaine.com so we can help you out.

On Designing

Over the next 2 weeks, I’m going to share with you the process of designing a basic hat. Now, partly I’m doing this because for Issue 4, I want to publish a few hats (yes, not one but several!) But also, I know how daunting it was for me when I was new to knitting and trying to figure out what I needed to know and do in order to design something new.

So, in the next two weeks, I will be opening up my red notebook and sharing with you some of the process for designing a hat, accounting for gauge, different stitches, and designing for multiple sizes. Hopefully, you will find it useful and informational, and if nothing else, you’ll enjoy watching me try to fit a 5 sts/inch pattern to match 3 sts/inch one.

Shout Outs!

Knitting Knights is a cute new manga-style knitting comic book with kind of a space-alien (in a mangaesque way) theme.

I had a blog article posted last week in Lighting Little Fire’s Midsummer Days Dream blog festival, about traveling with small projects.

And the Crochet Liberation Front gave me a huge honor this week by bestowing the Let My Picot Go award! Thanks, guys! You’re the best!

PS: Sorry this went out with “Untitled 2″ as its creative title– I hit the “Publish” button a little too soon! Whoops!

Within days, our subscribers and pre-ordered shops will be seeing this:

in their mailboxes. Yes, Issue #3 went out into the mail today to all subscribers!

If you don’t receive yours within 2 weeks, please send a note to support at mortaine.com, so we can find out what happened, and take care of it for you.

Issue #3 is at the printers, being printed. I shot a little video so you all could see the kinds of problems we’ve had all throughout the production process. This isn’t the only setback we encountered, of course– it’s just the most recent. But it points up to an attitude we adopted back when we were running late by three months already, with little end in sight: quality over speed. We could have rushed and rushed and not fixed the script problems, or not worked on getting the pattern right, or not fixing the hand diagrams– we even could have said “oh, heck, these dialogue bubbles are only on two pages….”

But we didn’t. I mean, at some point, you have to look at the deadline as it fades into the distance and decide that if you can’t do it on time, at least you can do it right.

So we did. We did it right. It wasn’t fast, but it’s good. I think you’re going to like it.

 

 Issue 3 Sneak Peel: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download