2014 A Year of Knitting

Another year over and what have you done?

Well, this is my annual year of knitting photo :)

1 sweater, 1 blanket, 1 table runner, 1 pair of gloves, 5 hats, 6 face cloths, 7 cowls, 8 scarves, 8 shawls and 9 pairs of socks,

I started self publishing my own patterns earlier this year and have learnt a lot. A lot of it I didn't want to learn. A new EU directive came into force not long after I started wrt Consumer Rights which meant a lot of stress trying to ensure I was compliant. And then the stress of the new EU VAT regulations that came into being today...

Ravelry have been wonderful in partnering with LoveKnitting to let us divert our EU sales so that nano-businesses like me can continue trading without having to sort out the nightmare of determining customers location, storing data for 10+ years, VAT registering and having to submit quarterly VAT and MOSS returns for very small amounts of money...

At the end of this year I have 20 published patterns - far more than I had imagined I could achieve in 9 months.

I have started my own Ravelry group, Helen Gipson Designs, which was kind of scary but most of the people who I asked have joined, some more have come along and now I have a happy band of testers.

I invested in charting software, StitchMastery, at the end of September which has been worth every penny in producing more professional looking knitting charts although I was kind of fond of my colour coded spreadsheet charts :)

And now I have to decide on how much time I use knitting/designing and how much time to dedicate back to word studying as that was put on the back burner for most of last year.