new year, new patterns in the shop

Happy New Year to you and massive best wishes for a fabulous 2016.

This year is going to be the best ever, I can feel it in my bones. I've started off on a high, even with Mercury in retrograde (that Mercury is a bitch yo!), getting through a huge to-do list that consisted mainly of writing up patterns, tidying up patterns, reviewing patterns and uploading them to Etsy.

Pattern designing is properly great fun, the best job in the world for sure, but I always thought the designing would be the hard bit. Nope. Writing up the patterns and doing all the little fiddly bits like measurements and tension is the hard bit, but only because I just want to be crocheting, like all the time. Who can be bothered with trying to figure out what my atrocious notes mean, or the random numbers scribbled across the page, I'm so lame at being spoddy. The struggle is real folks.

But I'm not complaining, I love my job, I love that I am now a fully fledged crochet designer with proper successes and horrible failures under her belt. The best bit is the confidence it's given me. I feel able to experiment with lots of different colours, yarns and stitches and my sketchbook is chock full of new design ideas for 2016 already. Yahoo!

But there were a couple of designs from last year that I didn't get round to finishing and this is my favourite, the Margot skirt. Designed for Betsy, I wanted something stretchy and easy to wear for her, plus I wanted super colour-blocking, because, erm, colour-blocking. Love. It.

This skirt is really easy to make, uses a gorgeous staggered shell stitch that I keep going back to, I've got a baby blanket design using this stitch also, and looks pretty as a picture on a pixie princess. Margot comes in sizes 2-3 yrs, 3-4 yrs and 5-6 yrs but is easy to customise for any size and yes I'm totally going to make one for myself, for reals.

I've got lots of teaching gigs coming up this year including a very special 'Cake and Crochet' session with my cousin. We decided to put the two best c words to good use and teach people to crochet whilst eating lots of delicious cake - what could be better. If you're interested in learning to crochet with us just drop me a line and I'll get back to you as soon as I can, our first session is on Monday 8th February in Downe, Kent.

That's all folks. Remember to wear rainbows at every opportunity.