Sibley Sweater Launch

My husband - as a survivor of the Boston Rock scene in the 70’s and 80’s (what he calls the big time small time) understands the knit design scene in record business terms. Knitters have their huge celebrities, their yeoman performers, and their small local talents. Designers “launch” or “drop” new patterns with similar buildups, and popular Instagrammers “play” their patterns and hook more “listeners” in. The Hot Right Now page on Ravelry is exactly like the Billboard Chart, tracking the rise and fall of popularity and fortunes. There’s even an index on Ravelry of designers in general: you can click a few buttons and find a current ranking of our very own pantheon of designers occupying the knitting firmament. The similarity in vocabulary between the music and knitting biz has been a way I’ve been able to relate to my husband’s past and he can relate to mine.

So this week, as I was going to “launch” a new pattern, he was passing through the kitchen just at the moment when I hit the “publish” button and he high-fived me when I said as much. There was no champagne or paparazzi, but there was his sweet smile of understanding. Ah, love.

The Sibley Sweater is one pattern in particular that I took a lot of care in developing because of the technical challenges in making it user friendly. I’ve been teasing it for the last six months and I’ve shown the finished samples to friends, while others have knit pieces of the instructions to work out The Kinks. This one pattern has felt like a grand opus in spite of its apparent graphic simplicity.

So I’m hoping big things for this one and I’d love to see it do well. It’s always a vulnerable thing to ask people to invest their time and money in something I designed. I know the patterns that I am attracted to myself tend to be off the general path. I like what I like and I’ve not been driven to “be popular”, but this one I think might be a good pop song, as it were. That would certainly be fun.

Anyway. If you care to, give it “a listen”. My husband would understand what I mean if I could tell him that I charted.