Has it really been that long?

I got a lovely message a few weeks ago from someone who told me she’d found a book that totally reminded her of me and my patterns, and she really really wanted to tell me about it.  At least she did, right up until she realized it was actually my book (it was the first Knitter’s Curiosity Cabinet book).

Now this is awesome and hilarious (and she said she was totally fine with me talking about it).  But it also served as a good reminder that the first Knitter’s Curiosity Cabinet book came out a long time ago (summer of 2012)!  A lot of you are new since then (hi, so glad you found me!).  So I thought today instead of bringing back out an old pattern like I usually do on the third Tuesday of the month, I’d take a moment and talk about that book and maybe show off some of my favorite pieces in it.

I figured I’d also take the chance to make all the patterns from that book available individually (they’re usually only available as the whole book because I’m a meanie and things to come in sets) and to put both the paper book and the electronic book on sale for 25% off.  You don’t need a code, the prices are changed already.  They’ll be that way through the end of the month.

So this was my first self published book.  The one I did with a publisher hadn’t gone the way I wanted it to, and I had decided I would either do the next book on my own, or never do another book.

I was scared more or less to death.  Publishing a book is a very expensive and very public thing.  I have a hideously active imagination.  I came up with any number of excitingly terrifying ways it could all go wrong.

But it didn’t.  It all went astonishingly well.  Better than I ever expected.

It had as weird a theme as any knitting book I’ve ever seen (old botanical illustrations? really? you expect people to put up with that?).

I named my patterns after the plants that inspired them (which meant scientific names, which meant they are hard to pronounce and even harder to spell).

I went with half socks and half, well, other things I liked to knit (for absolutely no reason other than it’s what I felt like designing).

And it worked.  You trusted me enough to put up with my shenanigans and let me indulge my inner weird kid.  If you hadn’t, I probably would have gone and hidden under a rock and waited to die.  At the very least I wouldn’t be about to send my ninth book off to the printer.

So thank you.  I’m still more than a little amazed I get to do this as my job (I can even mostly keep a straight face when people ask me what I do…that took a few years of practice).  I’m having a tremendous amount of fun doing this, and I promise to keep putting out books (and odd books at that) as long as you guys still want them!