After 14 years of crocheting, finally this year I decided to take a leap of faith to become a crochet pattern designer! Yeay to me!
You might be like me; thinking that your crochet skills is not commendable enough to be a crochet pattern designer. Or you think that you are not original and creative enough to publish a pattern. But you are inspired with other pattern designer’s work. You’ve been following them for years. Or you may be thinking the process of designing and putting them in pdf is such a sweat and lots of work is required.
I used to think like that for the past 10 years.
Until the end of 2022, such thinking went away for these 3 reasons!
1. I want to create passive income streams – but there’s a catch
I had experienced of burning out and fell out of love when I had an intense year of selling finished item. I even open a few crochet booths before the COVID 19 struck. I was happy to bring in money but after that, I didn’t crochet anything for a year. I was tired doing bulk orders alone and not to mention spending a lot of unnecessary time to entertain customers for custom made order. My works are often underpaid too. This is called as active income – your income is directly correlated to your time crocheting.
When I burnt out and stop crocheting, my life lost its spark. I have no creative outlet and I felt miserable. That’s when I know, being creative is so important to me, at least to keep me sane at all time.
Learning from that experience made me realise on the importance of passive income. Publishing crochet patterns could be one of them, where you put the effort once and money will be coming at any time. But here’s the catch – even though it is passive, tying creative work with any kind of income can be daunting, especially for a first time crochet designer. My experience on active income still apply to the passive income concept. I am fear that the fun of creating things will be taken away again when I started to tie money to creativity. Hence, deciding to write crochet patterns solely for passive income reason is not pleasing me.
If your thinking is just to have passive income by creating crochet pattern, think again. Think of other reasons that feed your creative soul. Just think, what if one day people stop searching crochet in google? what if one day people stop buying crochet patterns and crochet kits? Be gentle to your creative soul. See money as the resultant, not the main reason you doing crochet pattern.
With that, here are another reasons that anchor my decision to be a crochet pattern designer!
2. Show Your Work – a mantra stole from Show Your Work’s author, Austin Kleon
Austin Kleon’s trilogy book about creativity kicks my creative gut to show my work often rather than hoarding my idea and work to myself.
His second book, Show Your Work highlights the importance of an artist to show the process of an artwork, inviting other people to your workspace. When internet was born, showing works nowadays has been easier as we are not bound with geography anymore.
Designing crochet pattern is definitely a way to show my work. Publish one crochet patterns in blog, etsy or ravelry in one time. They may be seen by someone who is interested in your designs.
I highly recommended Show Your Work and the rest of Austin’s book, Steal Like an Artist and Keep Going to artists.
3. Diversify my form of creativity
So I’m just like you. Thinking how wonderful my world if I spend my time crocheting 24/7. Finishing from one project to one another. Sell one crochet item to the other product. Exploring thousand types of stitch patterns.
But do you and I REALLY want to crochet ALL THE TIME?
Here I wanted to remind you; it’s awful to have back pain after hours of sitting on the couch crocheting a scarf. It’s painful to have the scratched at the index finger, and the others fingers are cramped. Not to mention the tired eyes to count and find the wrong stitch and the pain on the neck.
To maintain the creative juice without sacrificing my back and neck, I was looking to diversify my form of creativity other than crocheting; such as designing patterns, editing photos video, writing a blog post, dancing, maybe sometimes doing flower arrangement and do paper craft.
Plus, whenever I started to feel bored or have no motivation to complete a project, I can jump from one creative form to one another to keep myself creatively productive
Final thoughts.
After all, being creative is not to feel restricted, right? We are the free spirits. There are so much things to explore with the creative gift. Just take it at one step at a time.
Do you have any other opinions? Feel free to share in the comments below 😀