Wow, I cannot believe it is June already!
I’ve been mega busy in May with what I call Deadline Knitting. Deadline Knitting is bittersweet. It’s awesome because it means I have a project (or two) appearing in a magazine sometime in the future. However, it is underlined with huge amounts of stress. This stress is two-fold. First and foremost is the need to knit fast while maintaining high quality (this is going to be in print, archived forever as a testament to my knitting prowess). And second, I am constantly worried that people will not like the design.
When a magazine comes out there is a brief time of first impression judgment. Usually this occurs on an issue level, meaning that often the entire magazine is declared excellent or poor. People say things like, “I didn’t find anything I would want to knit, a terrible issue” or “I loved almost every pattern and am going to knit them all!” Of course there are the in betweens, “Eh, I found one or two things I would like to make.”
The hardest thing about pattern writing is accepting the fact that not everyone is going to fawn over your design. It’s a brave thing to put your work out in public. It’s going to be both praised and ridiculed; you cannot please everyone. The problem with the online community, well, not just online, is that most people feel the need to express the negative, and not necessarily the positive. The negative people can be so strong in fact, that many positive people cower in silence, afraid to voice their opinion in fear of getting cut down.
Anyway, this weekend I finished the knitting portion of my Deadline Knitting and will now do the writing part. I hope to get my projects in the mail tomorrow. And then I have a few months to brace myself for the oncoming storm of online judgment await public praise.
Also something good in May, my good friend Kim gave me an awesome thank you gift! Thank you Kim for the thank you! I already have plans for the yarn 
Yarny Awesomeness
Tags: design
Well, I like your designs.
In most things, the most vocal are those with negative opinions. You hear pundits mention that all the time.
If you’re selling something on Ravelry or etsy or your site, you can get some kind of feedback based on sales. With a magazine, it’s harder. You can always keep track of people who queue it on Ravelry or add it to their projects.
Welcome!
I can’t wait to see your stuff in the Mags and also what you make with the yarn I gave you
And I really understand what you mean about how will people react. I’m very judgmental about what I design. I always feel that it’s not good enough, but I am hoping that as time goes I’ll get better and maybe relax about it, but then again maybe not