New updates to etsy shop!

Well, it's been a nice, long and relaxing weekend. The whole family, myself included, is sick with a wicked cold and so we didn't do a thing but hang out all day in the house. I did a ton of swatching for fall designs and worked on some proposals. I also made some new small stitchmarker sets (4 in each set) that I'm going to set at a lower pricepoint on etsy and see how they do. I love stitchmarkers-they are like pretty knitting jewelry and I do love to see them hanging on WPI's. Look for these to be up on my etsy shop real soon!
All this knitting hasn't made for many FO's though b/c it's mainly swatch-n-see time. I can't believe I'm saying it, but I'm actually looking forward to cutting the t-shirt yarn for daughter's sun cloche. Crazy, right?

All this patterning and swatching has me really thinking about the type of patterns that I write. My friend's mother often says to me, "I don't know how you knit without a pattern. I can knit, but not without a pattern." I don't know, when I first learned to knit, most of my projects were without patterns b/c I learned from a book and bought my yarns from a big-box store, not an LYS (I know, egad!!) Back in those early days, when I look back, those designs were flying off my needles and I couldn't get enough of mixing yarns and seeing what the end project was to look like. In many ways now, I wish I didn't know as much as I do b/c I know now that I can search on Ravelry for different ways to do things or look in my substantial library of books and magazines instead of merely experimenting with yarn to see what happens. Sometimes I feel like all these directions at my fingertips hinder my designs and experimentation. At the same time, though, there are plenty of designers both big-name and independent, that I look to for inspiration. I guess, like all good things, it takes a delicate balance of both to work well.