Hello loves!

Well, aside from the headline, I guess I accidentally took the summer off 🫣 I say “off”; I’ve been busy with plenty of other things (at least the garden is looking lovely), but I certainly haven’t quite finished everything I set out to by September!

That included building the new website, which, if you follow me on social media, you’ll know has pretty much consumed me over the last few weeks.

In my defence, summer happened, and I’m glad about it!

Naturally, the arrival of Mr Darcy in June also meant I gained a new full-time supervisor, knitting assistant and completely unqualified yarn entangler… but he’s healed a little bit of my heart that he didn’t break and has been the BEST distraction!

I also started reading again! I treated myself to a new Kindle, and I’m working my way through Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire series — it’s like slipping on an old pair of well-loved slippers at the end of a long day.

We had lots of family visiting, I spent an obscene amount of time in the garden, and I now have a greenhouse! Which is obviously a perfectly reasonable explanation for why the enormous business to-do list I had at the beginning of summer remained… largely a to-do list. I’ve really taken the time to smell the flowers and watch the bees; they’re still out there now, busy as ever, doing what pollinators do.

And actually? I don’t really regret it. How could i?

Sometimes you need a season that isn’t about productivity

When you work for yourself, there’s always something you could be doing.

There’s another pattern to write, another sample to knit, photographs to take, emails to answer, products to list, social media content to make, and apparently, if you’re me, an entire bloody website to rebuild and a yarn range to launch.

There’s no real end point where somebody comes along and says, “Excellent work, Karysha. That’s everything finished. You can go and sit in the garden now.”

Which, quite frankly, is just rude.

So this summer I seem to have done things slightly backwards. I did quite a lot of the sitting in the garden first and left Future Karysha to deal with the consequences.

And now it’s autumn.

Hello, consequences.

So… about that website

Audacious Ewe has grown and changed a lot over the years, and I’d reached the point where I wanted a website that actually reflected what the business is now, and, importantly, where I want it to go next.

What started as “I’ll just sort the website out” has therefore turned into one of those projects where you move one thing and discover seventeen other things underneath it.

I’ve been rebuilding pages, setting up the shop, sorting payments and postage, rewriting product listings, updating old pattern information, photographing yarn, building resources and generally disappearing down WordPress rabbit holes I didn’t know existed.

There have been moments of genuine triumph.

There have also been moments where changing one tiny thing has somehow broken something on mobile that I wasn’t even touching.

Balance.

But it is finally starting to feel like Audacious Ewe rather than simply somewhere on the internet that happens to sell my things.

And I LOVE that.

More than just a shop

One of the things I really wanted from the new site was somewhere useful to come back to, even when you’re not necessarily looking to buy anything.

I’ve already started building the Resources section, including my Yarn Usage Calculator, and I’ve got plenty more planned, calculators, tutorials and all those little bits of knitting information that I find myself explaining over and over again. If you have any ideas or requests, just let me know!

Basically, if I’ve ever thought, “There really should be an easier way to work this out,” there’s a reasonable chance I’m going to try to build something for it.

There’s also the blog, obviously, because apparently I’ve decided what I really needed alongside designing patterns, dyeing yarn and rebuilding a website was another place to talk.

You’re welcome.

And then there’s the yarn…

This is the part I’m particularly excited about. is there a touch of imposter syndrome here? Absolutely!

Hand-dyed yarn is becoming a much bigger part of Audacious Ewe, and I’ve been working behind the scenes on the yarn bases, colours and all the other bits that need to come together before I can do it properly.

I’d love to say, “done is better than perfect”, and I’m trying; I really am.

But at the same time, I don’t want to throw a handful of skeins onto the website just so I can say the yarn shop is open. I want it to feel considered and properly Audacious Ewe when it arrives.

So that’s coming.

And there are patterns coming too, because despite all evidence presented by my summer productivity levels, I have actually still been knitting. 😂

Turns out I might have needed the summer off

It’s very easy when you run your own business to measure a month by what you launched, sold, posted or ticked off a list.

By that measure, my summer wasn’t exactly spectacular.

But I spent time with my family. I grew things. I made my garden somewhere I absolutely love being, for the first time in the three years since we’ve lived here. I got my greenhouse, not that i’ve done anything with it yet 🙈. I knitted when I wanted to knit rather than because something needed to become content.

And then, when I was ready, I came back to Audacious Ewe with about six million ideas and apparently decided to implement all of them simultaneously.

So perhaps it wasn’t such a terrible business strategy after all.

(Don’t quote me on that.)

What’s next?

Autumn always feels much more like the beginning of the year to me than January does.

Maybe it’s being a knitter. The first hint of cooler weather arrives and suddenly I’m mentally surrounded by wool, hats, scarves and approximately 47 projects I absolutely need to cast on immediately.

We’ve already had the release of the Forest Echo Beanie, of course, and the December Scarf is coming next. I have to say, I’m particularly proud of some of the website integrations I’ve been working on for that one — more on those soon! And I’ve got several more designs sitting in draft, because apparently having one thing on the go at a time isn’t something I’m interested in.

So that’s where I am now.

The website is taking shape. The pattern shop is filling up. The yarn is coming. There are new designs on my needles and in testing, more resources are planned, and I’ve got lots of ideas I’m ridiculously excited to share with you.

My accidentally long summer holiday is officially over.

Probably.

No promises if the greenhouse needs me. 😂

Karysha x