This is the story of how a pretty little felted bag made its way
from a blog to a photo in Interweave Felt magazine, and then to you!
Once upon a time, a knitter named Amanda made an adorable felted bag
and put photos of it on her blog. She called it the Squatty Sidekick,
because it ended up going everywhere with her, and was small enough to
keep her from overpacking! As happens often in knitting blogdom, other
knitters started asking for the pattern for the Squatty.
Amanda, who works at Interweave, brought her trusty Sidekick bag to
work one day to see if the pattern could be published in an Interweave
publication. Everyone agreed the bag was adorable... but a tough truth
of the publishing world is that we don't have the budgets or the pages
to publish every pattern we love. (One of the hardest jobs I ever had
here was writing rejection letters. People really put their hearts and
souls into their submissions, and it was heart-breaking to try to
explain to designers why we couldn't use their design.) I didn't see
the bag until after it had made the rounds of the other editorial
offices. At this point, Knitting Daily was still in the early planning
stages, and I had just been named its brand-new Editor. The Knitting
Daily team knew we wanted to make our online patterns more searchable
and accessible, but we had not really tackled the idea of new patterns
yet.
When I came into Amanda's office and saw the bag sitting on her
desk, all pink and fuzzy and terribly cute-looking, I believe a tiny
squeal of delight might have escaped my lips (it may have been a rather
loud squeal, actually). I picked up the bag ("grabbed" would no doubt
be more accurate) and, like any sensible knitter, immediately asked
where I could get the pattern. Amanda told me that none of the
publications had room for it. She told me about all the knitters who
had already seen the bag and wanted to knit it.
Being one of the knitters who wanted the pattern, I felt a bit sad that it would not be available.
At that moment, I had a little epiphany. I was Knitting Daily's
editor, editors choose patterns to publish...I could publish Amanda's
bag pattern on Knitting Daily, thereby making lots of knitters very
happy. Wow! (Doesn't get much better than that.) And that is how the
very first Knitting Daily pattern came into being. It wasn't the first
pattern we posted on our site, but it was the first pattern contracted
specifically for Knitting Daily.
So, without further ado: Amanda's Squatty Sidekick. (Ta-da!)
We delayed putting the bag on the website so that Amanda's bag could
have one more adventure: it starred in an Interweave Felt photoshoot as
the model for Sharon Costello's nifty felted buttons. If you have never
tried needle-felting, then a custom-made button for a favorite knitted
project might be just the thing to start out with. Full instructions
for the buttons are included in the Summer 2007 issue of Interweave
Felt magazine.