Growing Pains
What’s Happening?
Oh, the ups and downs of running my own business!
First, I should tell you the fun parts. Fun part number one, I got to go with Greg to Tulsa this week when he went there for his side business. He spent his days doing Cool Important Things and I got to come along and do some business stuff of my own, but also just explore a new-to-me town a little bit. It was wonderful to not have to worry about using vacation days or coming back from vacation to a pile of accumulated work!
I visited a yarn shop (and get to call that business!) and enjoyed that on several levels. I love seeing how different shops set up, how they highlight their priorities, and demonstrate what they value and what they want to promote. Each one has its own culture, and it’s fascinating to me to discover what makes each one unique. This one, Get Stitchin’, really loves its independent artists and makers, and has built a strong sense of community among its regular customers. They were getting ready to hold their twice monthly sock knitting club and I was tempted to stay and play! Instead, I had a very leisurely browse and came away with some beautiful yarns by those independent artists.
One of those is a 2-ply worsted weight 100% merino yarn by Cestari Sheep & Wool Co., and I was looking for them specifically after having visited Get Stitchin’s website. Cestari is a small family company that raises merino sheep and cotton and turns it into yarn. As we are now the proud stewards of 3 wee merino sheep and have dreams of turning their wool into skeins of yarn at some point, I really wanted to see (and touch!) Cestari’s wool yarn, and if possible, get a skein to show for the Beast to Blanket class this coming Spring. I was successful, and now I’d like to plan a field trip to Virginia to visit Cestari’s operation.
Other fun parts of the trip included finding Clara Parkes’s book Vanishing Fleece about the wool industry in America in a bookstore (along with some cookbooks I’ve been wanting), and an incident of yarn bombing in the Tulsa Botanic Garden.
What am I learning?
The less fun, but undeniably good-for-me part of running my own business has been coming face-to-face with some of the big gaps in my knowledge and abilities. I can talk about knitting all day long, but unfortunately, it also takes me approximately that long to intuit out a really badly composed image in Canva. Well, that’s not quite true anymore, as after three days of that, I finally clued in to the fact that I wasn’t going to figure it out on my own and it was time to look at tutorials.
Similarly, WordPress has changed a whole bunch of a lot since I was blogging a hundred years ago, and the relearning curve is steep and has potholes on the road. I’ll get there, but the process isn’t pretty, and my new boss and I sometimes have a personality conflict about things like patience and the journey being the real destination, and all that. She’s fine about it with other people, but with me she loses it a bit. Probably enough said about that. She might read this, after all.
What am I Knitting?
This little road trip was a nice opportunity to introduce Greg to road knitting. He’s learning, too, and very patiently. He wondered why I wasn’t bringing the new grandbaby’s blanket along to knit on the ride, and I explained that I didn’t quite have the lace pattern memorized yet, so there’d be a bit too much chart reading for me for that to be good road knitting.
Instead, I brought a skein that I’d purchased at Coast to Coast, one of Erin’s beautiful skeins (Cortinarius–isn’t it dreamy?) and wound that into a ball on the way down.
While in Tulsa, I cast on Tatiana Kulikova’s Stone from 52 Weeks of Socks and got that started on the way back home. It’s a good alternate project with the baby blanket, because the blanket is in a very dark forest green, so when the light starts to go or my eyes get tired, I can switch to this light mocha color and keep knitting.
What are you working on today?
Happy knitting!
Kiersten J
5/16/2024
