I’ve decided to offer 20% off my patterns on Ravelry and 20% off everything in The Yarn Office to celebrate my upcoming birthday (May 3), Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival (May 7-8), and Mother’s Day (May 8) – just use coupon code HBD2016. This is the first time I’ve offered a discount and I’m hoping it helps spur some sales and then some projects from my patterns.

I managed to post about the sale all over Facebook while leaving out the coupon code. Oops. Facebook doesn’t make it easy to track down your own posts in groups, or if it does, I haven’t found it – editing those four group posts was clunky and slow. I wish FB had something similar to Ravelry where you can see your latest posts in groups.

Sale experiment #2: instead of posting a picture of what I’m selling to Instagram, I hand wrote info about the sale and took a picture of that. Here’s hoping that catches people’s attention and gets them to check the shop out and maybe even buy something.

This week I stumbled on two new sources of inspiration: a thread in the Designers group on Ravelry which has some really interesting designs, many from one knitter who has a really interesting story and fabulous super bulky sweater designs. I’m glad I read all 297 posts in the thread, but if you’re not up for that, you can just browse through the pictures instead, a shortcut I learned while perusing super long threads showing dye and knitting FOs.

The second source of inspiration I found is the Fiber Artists and Yarn Spinners Facebook group, which actually has intelligent people with really interesting posts, unlike many of the other groups I joined to help promote my etsy shop. I know that sounds terrible, but I won’t spend time in a group that’s full of spammy posts or posters who don’t use spellcheck/autocorrect (or both). Also, FB groups aren’t really that easy to use, IMO – posts shift around too much and it’s still difficult to find things even with the Search function. So Fiber Artists and Yarn Spinners is full of actual fiber artists posting about their work, which is fascinating to me.

For a while I followed HandEye magazine‘s Textile section for the same reason: interviews with artists & craftspeople and in-depth looks at their process. And that also reminds me of the PBS series Craft In America, which I’m happy to see is producing new episodes. I may actually rewatch some of it today while I knit (probably the Threads episode); they are fascinating interviews and peeks into artist/craftspeople’s journeys & processes.

I hope you have a fabulous weekend with lots of inspiration!