Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Upcoming projects

In terms of making things, I've really been focusing on myself lately. To be honest, I'm a little burned out on the business. Sales are slow, and that makes me unmotivated to promote, which is so time consuming. This, in turn, makes sales even slower.

For a while, I took a break from making things just for me. Lately, I've been focusing only on personal stuff, like items for me or gifts for others. I have been doing custom orders only for my business. Obviously, lots of items are for sale, but I haven't been adding to my stock lately. I have had a handful of custom requests lately, and that's nice.

The Brea Bag that I reported on below is coming along nicely. I'm excited for the end results. It's amazing how you look at all the detail and think it will be so hard, but it's really not at all. I guess it might be hard to invent the pattern, but it's not hard to follow it. I think there's a part that's going to confuse me coming up on the gusset, though.
Here's the bag I'm talking about, but it's not the actual one I'm doing. Mine's gray.

Brea bag

I plan to line it and make a fabric strap for it.

Onto the next thing:
I was looking for fashionable knit patterns and found this book called "Runway Knits" by Berta Karapetyan.

Runway Knits

It's full of great patterns, some of which are so finely knit that it seems they'd take a decade. For my first one, I chose this A-Line Jacket, knit from a very bulky yarn on large needles. This should go fairly quickly.

Runway Knits

I love the huge buttons. I chose Burly Spun in light gray, and had to up my needles from a 13 to a 17 to get 2 sts./inch. They recommend Karabella Puffy, but that would run me $130, where this will run me around $60. My yarn isn't as variegated, but I'll have to live with that.

More as I get going!

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