…and I scored a bit of a fail. Well – sort of. Here is the story behind the samples.
Australian Country Spinners is a yarn manufacturer that produces the Cleckheaton, Patons (Australia) and Panda brands. They also import Rowan into Australia and they now own Shepherd which is a NZ brand.
Last month they advertised a position for a pattern writer. The job involved writing patterns obviously as well as working on the telephone customer help line and some garment finishing. I was asked in for an interview and I had to bring samples. There was a slight problem with this.
For the last two years I’ve knit almost exclusively for other people. Presents for new babies, hats and gloves for birthdays and small items for my LYS. Apart from a few hats, scarves and gloves I didn’t really have anything to bring in. I thought that as the job description included finishing of garments, I’d better have some seaming and traditional construction to show.
The fastest way to this was baby clothes. So I made a couple of items from Debbie Bliss’ “Design It, Knit It – Babies”. I also rounded up some of my own design hats and some items with embroidery and crochet edging. There – that’ll show ’em I can knit.
So I wandered into the interview with all my goodies. We talked about the role and I left having no idea of how it went. I didn’t have a strong feeling that I’d blitzed it or I’d bombed.
The next day I got a call to say I didn’t have the job. They’d had a huge number of applicants and they’d found someone more suitable.
Bummer.
It would have been nice to write patterns all day but it would have been a bit tricky to handle a massive pay cut and changing trains and trams to get to work. So there are always positive things to focus on even when it seems like a negative outcome.
The whole interview process and preparing the samples showed me that I really do knit very well and I can get a lot done when I need to. It also showed me that I can squeeze a lot of knitting in around a full time job.
So the plan going forward is to take advantage of the fact that I don’t have to live off a severely reduced wage and really set myself up for making the most of the time I have outside of work. I’m going to look into getting a really nice camera and a new computer to give my patterns a bit more polish as well as sprucing up the old blog a bit.
I’m also going to make submissions to various magazines. I know that it’s often not the best deal for the designer, but I need to get my name out there. The US magazines are currently calling for Spring 2012 submissions so I’m working on that at the moment.
And lastly I’m designing to a theme. Rather than “ooh that’s a nice yarn, I’ll make something with that”, I’m going to create the concept and then select the yarn to go with it – not the other way around.
So although I didn’t get the outcome I wanted, I did get to refocus my ideas and plan for a more design-driven knitting future.
