Something that's never made sense to me is absence of any shop in Oxford dedicated to yarn, fabrics and fibre crafts. Broad Canvas is good for some other crafty supplies, and Port Meadow has that small yarny bit at the back, but that's it. You have to go all the way down to Abingdon to get fabrics or a good selection of yarn. For such a well-off town, crammed with students and tourists throughout the year, it made no sense.Well, apparently it made no sense to someone else as well, because ta-da!
A good old haberdashery-type shop! Lots of great fabrics with a vintagey-feel and a gorgeous assortment of buttons. (Also, I swear I've passed that exact storefront before and remarked to The Limey that it would make a great yarn shop.)
Jo, the lovely woman who runs Darn It & Stitch, has just a bit of yarn in at the moment, but she's getting more and more. Right now, it's all dk-ish weight yarns in lovely summery fibres: cottons, corn and the like. I stopped in a couple of weeks ago and we chatted and it turns out she's been asked for patterns by lots of people. As it happens, a lot of my free patterns are summer designs knit in dk-ish weight yarns, so I've lent her some of my samples. If you're in or around Oxford, stop by!
I've also been thinking about getting my patterns printed so that they could be sold at LYSs and shops such as Darn It & Stitch, in addition to on-line. So far, it seems like to get them printed and still be able to make any profit off them, I'd need to do print runs of thousands! So I'm still researching this- anyone with any ideas, I'm dying to hear them.
2 comments:
Delighted you have a local yarn shop at last! I've no advice re the pattern printing, my first choice for printing would be somewhere like Snap printing, but it would probably be too expensive.
I don't know anything about the printing business, but could you print your patterns double-sided on a colour laser printer? You could only print and distribute a few at a time (maybe 10 copies) and go from there. Laser printers are relatively cheap (I think I paid £150 for my Konica-Minolta magicolor 2500W a few years ago) and you can print thousand of professional looking pages before running out of ink. Hope that helps! :)
Post a Comment