Revolutions and Returns
Hello, friend.
A month ago, I posted the announcement that I was done. My Secret Wish Knitting was closing down, and for good reasons—mainly, that I didn’t feel capable of continuing to run this business, which took too much time and energy from my primary passions of writing and editing.
Over the last several weeks, I have gone about the process of following through on that. I took all my patterns down off of Etsy and Lovecrafts. I deactivated my pattern sales on Ravelry. I started making other changes to separate my knitting brand from other aspects of my online presence. I started backing up my extensive stitch tutorial pages elsewhere, in case I ever wanted to do anything else with that work.
And then, this week, I had meant to take the final steps of closing down this website and finally shutting the doors for good.
But when the time came, I found I couldn’t do it.
More than that, I realized I didn’t need to.
This cutie is courtesy of Sdf Rahbar @sdfrahbar on Unsplash.
What Got Me Here
My previous concerns were valid. This knitting brand did take up a lot of my time—but that’s because I was spreading the brand too thin, and in places that didn’t serve me. Or, in retrospect, my customers.
Etsy, while an excellent search engine for new customers to find me, is the worst accounting nightmare I’ve ever experienced. And I’ve dealt with a lot of different platforms and retailers, so I have a really solid spectrum of platforms to compare it to. I’ve sold on Etsy for fourteen years, and that entire time, dealing with hundreds of hours of accounting annually for microtransactions that don’t even make sense to pay someone else to enter has been an ongoing drain on my time, energy, and financial resources.
(I have other issues with what Etsy has become, but this was my primary problem with selling there.)
Well, guess what? I’ve now closed my Etsy shop. (It technically still exists, but there are no active listings.) That headache is blissfully, wonderfully gone.
But that doesn’t mean my knitting business has to be.
One of the reasons I built this website last year, besides allowing me to serve my customers in ways my previous setup wouldn’t allow, was exactly because I could automate so many of the processes—the follow-up emails, for one, but mostly, the accounting. But because I thought I still needed to stay open on Etsy to make this profitable, this new website didn’t actually free up any of my time.
And because of that, I also wasn’t able to expend any energy on the things I really want to do to serve my knitting clients better, such as continuing to revise my older patterns to be more accessible, or to publish any new designs that have been languishing in just-need-to-be-written-up limbo for years. I was so drained from simply trying to stay on top of the admin that it left no room for growth or creativity.
If I hadn’t reached a breaking point this year and decided to close everything down, I wouldn’t have realized where the real problem lay.
But now I have. And in taking these steps, I’ve discovered that I can have the best of both worlds—keeping my side hustle hobby business alive, while continuing to fill what I feel is an important niche in the knitting community by working to provide low-vision-accessible, hand-ambiguous patterns and tutorials.
Same photographer, same cutie (I think).
A Mindset Revolution
As I’ve considered what led me to my dramatic conclusions last month (to make sure reversing my decision wasn’t a bad idea), I’ve had another epiphany.
I always want to do everything the very best I can. I’d rather do something correctly, to the best of my ability, and serve my customers in a way that satisfies me as well as you, than take shortcuts to do it fast and sloppy.
Like the slow fashion we create, my entire career has been built on slow growth.
I also have enough business knowledge and savvy to dream up what the best version of any endeavour I undertake might look like… in a perfect world.
The gap between those two things—wanting to create things well, even if it’s slow, and building a product or project into the best version of itself, which requires a lot of development—has been a constant source of frustration and character growth for me over the years.
This week, I realized that part of my frustration with this brand stemmed from not having the time nor energy to devote to bringing about that “perfect version” of it right away. And I kind of went, Well, yeah, Talena. What else did you expect?
To be honest, for me to do all the things I can envision for my knitting clients would require a lot of growth in all of my businesses. The kind of growth that would allow me to have a team and free up my time to focus only on the creative and community-building aspects of my brands.
But I’m not there yet.
Over time, I believe those dreams will be achievable. Eventually, I may be able to host the community events, publish new patterns on a consistent and frequent basis, and become more involved in the knitting community. I just can’t do those things right now.
And, as long as I can be okay with that, and stop trying to pressure myself into being in a place I’m not, then this business could continue to grow slowly, as it always has. I can keep this side business that’s always held a dear place in my heart alive. And my tutorials and knitting designs will remain available for those who want them.
So, that’s my big news. I’m not closing down completely. This website will continue to stay open for as long as it continues to pay for itself.
Back in Action
So, inspired by that burst of enthusiasm, this week I finished revising and republishing one of my most popular designs that had been sitting on the back burner: the Revolution Toque.
I also republished the Revolution bundle that includes both the hat and the mittens at about 25% off.
You can get both in my store:
Thank you for your continued support, friend. By God’s grace, I think I’ve found a path that will allow me to continue to serve you for years to come.
If you’re in the market for a new project, please take a moment to browse my patterns, and be sure to subscribe to my newsletter so you can be notified when I have news to share.
Happy knitting, my friend. Go make some magic!
Talena (The Yarn Mermaid)
There’s a new pattern in the shop. Join me for a tour of some of the key features and some yarny eye candy.