it's not work if you love what you do

A while back I had dinner with some close family friends, who also happen to be successful entrepreneurs. At the time my husband L. and I were thinking about opening a craft brewery. In the course of our discussion our friends gave us this gem of advice- do something from which you never want to retire. Unfortunately the brewery didn’t work out, but the advice from our dinner wasn’t lost. After ruminating on those words I came to the realization that work felt a lot like work (counting down the years to retirement) and had started to creep into my personal life. Time for a plan...

My relationship with knitting started in college. Initially I found it difficult and a bit frustrating and eventually I put down my needles. A few years later I saw my assistant knitting and asked her to show me her method. I still wasn’t getting it. If you can believe this I actually taught myself to knit back and forth using both my left and right hand to pick stitches. This method resulted in no purling, but did create one row of knit stitches followed by a row of twisted stitches. It wasn’t until I went to Germany that it was brought to my attention that I was knitting incorrectly. Through broken English and German an older woman showed me that I needed to pass the needle back to my left hand after finishing a row. Eureka!

Enter Youtube, or a knitter’s best friend. After I learned the correct way to knit my knitting took on a life of its own. I wanted to learn different methods of casting on, cabling, knitting in the round, and a world of other things. After purchasing a few books and not being able to make heads or tails of the pictures drawn in them, the media specialist part of my brain kicked in and I searched on youtube. Wow. Everything you could ever want to learn about knitting you can find there. Try it. 

Back to the plan. Because I can’t yet afford retail space, but want to work towards my goal of opening my own yarn shop, I decided to start my website, worldknit & handspun. While it’s been an incredible amount of work to create my website, dye yarn and roving, spin yarn, design patterns, and knit everything myself, it hasn’t felt like work and I do love to do it!