Reviewing and Teaching

I am normally a very fast reader, but the book I just finished dragged a little bit for me and since it is knitting related I thought I’d give you a quick review.

The Knitgrrl Guide to Professional Knitwear Design (How to Keep Your Knits About You) By Shannon Okey and published by Cooperative Press, a great little indie craft publisher that incidentally is up for a huge grant opportunity and could use your help voting here. You have to log in with Facebook, but totally worth it to support a small-scale craft publisher.

Shannon’s book was awesome and informative up until the point where the Designer Interviews took over about halfway through the book. Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of useful personal experience in the interviews, but there was also a lot of repetitive or common sense info that made it hard to truck through the last hundred pages or so. I have a number of pages market for useful information that I need to reference on the intranet and I’ll probably spend the next few days researching all of these.

One of the main sources of revenue most designer’s site in the book is teaching and yesterday I gave my first private spinning lesson. Well, let me clarify that as my first lesson to someone I’d never met before and for which there was monetary compensation. We met at a coffee shop that was midway between us, a cute little place called Java’s Brewing and they were super nice! They even let us use their downstairs meeting room, I’m thinking future meeting place for a knit group….Brenda...

The lesson went really well and at the end Lauren had a little ball of handspun yarn to be proud of…and hopefully coax her husband into letting her purchase her own wheel. He seems rather obstinate to the idea though. We’ll see.

 

After returning home, I got an email alerting me to a job opening that is right up my alley. I don’t want to jinx it so I won’t say anymore about it until I hear more. So wish me luck!