4.07.2016

The Life of a Knitwear Designer

"What did you do today?"

This is a question I get asked a lot.

So, I decided to document what a typical day for me is like. Every day can be a little different - it just depends on deadlines, teaching events and what I feel like working on.

Here's what I did on Tuesday....

I started my day getting up and going to boot camp at 7am. I've found that working out in the morning has been so amazing for me. I'm way more motivated to work, I'm feeling better overall and it's nice to have some interaction with real, live people.
Knitting Like Crazy: The Life of a Knitwear Designer
That was a lot of burpees. Yikes.

When I got home from boot camp, I read blogs and scheduled some social media while eating breakfast (delicious protein smoothie). I caught up on Ravelry forums and messages at this time too.
Knitting Like Crazy: The Life of a Knitwear Designer

After breakfast/blogs/social media-ing, I took a shower and promptly put on my uniform of sweatpants, tank top and hoodie.

At 9:30 am, I'm ready to tackle my actual to do list for the day. I was working on releasing Lokum for Wednesday, so I was getting everything ready for that.

I double checked my pattern yet again. It's already been checked by me and professionally tech edited, but I like to give it one more close look, just to make sure everything is as perfect as it can be. At this point any changes are usually things like changing the size of a photo or something. On rare occasion I'll find a little typo or something isn't italicized.
 Knitting Like Crazy: The Life of a Knitwear DesignerKnitting Like Crazy: The Life of a Knitwear Designer

After that, it was time to design. My next book is due soon and I'm working on the last few designs for it. Of course, I can't reveal too much about the book, but here's an idea of what I did....

I knew what type of thing I needed to design and the yarn I needed to use. Time to hit the stitch dictionaries!
Knitting Like Crazy: The Life of a Knitwear Designer

Knitting Like Crazy: The Life of a Knitwear Designer

Then I did some math, wrote up a quick rough draft of the pattern and made some charts (I use Stitchmastery to make my charts).

Knitting Like Crazy: The Life of a Knitwear Designer
Time to start knitting!

I knit and watched YouTube videos until I got hungry. So I ate lunch.

After lunch I answered emails. I didn't have too many to reply to on Tuesday, so it's mostly deleting the junk email and sorting emails into the proper folders. I typically only look at my email once a day on my computer. My email does go to my iPhone too, so if I see something come in on my phone that needs immediate attention, I'll deal with it, but usually the once a day replying works pretty good.

Then I knit a little bit more.

And then I got tired of knitting.

I knew that one thing I have coming up is that I have to get all my new patterns to Stitch Sprouts next week, who distributes my patterns. So I made myself a little to-do list for that. I also used my knitting break to make an ad for the new Lokum pattern - last week I had reserved a featured pattern ad on Ravelry for May.
Knitting Like Crazy: The Life of a Knitwear Designer

After that it was back to knitting! I knit until it was time to leave to meet up with my knit & crochet group. I continued knitting on my book project there too.

I got back home around 8:30pm and watched the end of the Blackhawks game and knit on the book project some more. I made some serious book knitting progress on Tuesday!

And that was my day. Like I said at the beginning of this mega-post, every day can be a little different. Sometimes I'm prepping for an upcoming teaching event. Some days it's all about working on submissions for magazines. No matter what I'm working on, I'm happy to have a job I absolutely love.


Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...