A New Hampshire Knitter

In just over two weeks, I'll be vending at the Fiber Marketplace hosted by The Yarn Sellar in York, Maine. This is the... fourth year? that I'll be working this one, and for some reason, I'm really quite nervous about it. I have a large percentage of inventory that just will not sell, and I want to mark them down, but then I feel weird about charging full price on the new inventory. And then I though, well, I can always just sell as sets and mark the clearance ones lower than the new sets, right? But "allowing" my customers to break sets has always been a practice of mine, and accounts for a decent percentage of sales- would that change for the better if I stopped allowing that?

I remember, several years ago, sitting in the basement of my favorite LYS grumbling because I had just messed up the project on my needles... again. I remember throwing the mess of yarn and needles into my bag, trying (and I'm sure failing) to reassure another knitter there that I was sure all my issues with that pattern were user error. That was several years ago, and every time I browsed through my queue on Ravelry, I'd come across this beautiful pattern, I'd sigh, and I'd move on. Last Saturday though, some yarn and needles jumped into my hand, and before I knew it, the shawl was just falling off the needles, growing with every row. I'm not sure what it was. My skills as a knitter haven't improved much since then (in fact, I'm pretty sure it's been years since I've knit any real lace. It's been all hats and cowls and toys while I was spiraling down the craft fair scene.) Maybe it's just timing. Maybe the stars aligned. Maybe I