It’s not that I have a burning ambition to swap my marketing career to become a full-time knitting designer. I mean, reality check … how likely is it that self publishing a few patterns will create a sufficient income to allow me to do that?

And anyway, I love my job. Really, I do. I wax lyrical about it and no doubt am a little nauseating to be around sometimes. But I really, genuinely, love where I work.

So I’m not planning to quit in favour of a precarious creative career.

But at the same time I do like a challenge. I get sparks of ideas about things I’d like to make, and then my head gets busy working out how I would create a pattern for it. And as I said before, I’ve got nearly as far as publishing some of those ideas. And it seems a shame to have done all that work and then not quite finish the job.

My 2019 knitting design goals

If I manage to do these things, I will be more than happy:

  1. Publish the three patterns that I’ve already spent time working on.
  2. Create and publish three more patterns in 2019. That’s one every other month, which seems realistic.
  3. Sell enough copies to make my costs back (I’ll be spending money to have each pattern professionally tech edited).
  4. Earn enough to take Ashton out to dinner (we love fine dining, but as the parents of three young children it’s something we do extremely rarely).

Pretty modest ambitions I think. Definitely not going to replace my day job, but that’s OK by me 😉

Now I need a plan. I was listening to a newish podcast earlier (Letters from a Hopeful Creative, do check it out) which suggested breaking a goal down into small stages and planning to complete one ‘to do’ every day. I like that idea, and I’m heading off to start a new page in my bullet journal doing exactly that. Because I know from previous experience that otherwise these intentions will still be lurking, unfulfilled in my dreams, a year from now!