First anniversary

I celebrated the first anniversary of Skein Queen by completely forgetting about it until midnight! I'd just had a lovely email from a potential customer who said she'd found me courtesy of Yarn Harlot - I was completely flabbergasted by that! The Yarn Harlot mentioned my yarn! I wonder where? A memorable moment to mark year one.

So, onto the yarn competition. A photo of the prize - one skein of Plushness in Blue Champagne.


Thank you to everyone who entered. The correct answer was I can do full press-ups (well, only five or maybe eight at the max, but I can still do them.) But I would've accepted sprinting too.

This is from the overweight wheezy child who always came pretty much last at school (except in the sack race :) - I am so impressed with myself that I can give strapping rugby players in their twenties a run for their money at Circuits every week! (You were wondering what I was going to give strapping young rugby players there, weren't you!) However, my age is starting to show. I've wrecked my Achilles tendons yet again, didn't sleep all night and could bearly put weight on them this morning.

I haven't selected the winner yet - as noone (except Lazyhill, explanation below) came up with the right answer, all the names are in a hat and I'm going to take it along to school to get a glamorous assistant to pick a name at random and will post later as to who the lucky winner is.

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that a certain Lazyhill came up with the answer:
"Press-ups and possibly sprinting", but as she is my friend and cheated, then she is disqualified. But she knows she has some lilac roving on the way and at least I got her to comment, at last! Even if she did add "playing the Dr Who theme on your bottom trumpet," as if she hadn't done enough damage!

If only I could belly dance, play the piano or do the splits. I did once do flamenco dancing classes for a couple of years and I certainly need to learn to say no more often. I can read upside down but that's not a recently acquired skill and my absolute favourite suggestion is synesthesia.

Well, good luck to everyone and I'll let you know the winner later on.

Just thinking about the night I started SQ. I'd spent a couple of months trawling the Internet looking for the perfect yarn base. Hadn't completely intended on dyeing to sell but was intrigued by Etsy, it was pretty easy to set up a shop and I don't think any other Etsy sellers were carrying cashmere/silk at the time. I listed a few skeins of cashmere/silk thinking they'd sit there for months, but was so elated when I woke up in the morning and someone from the States (I'll never forget her) had bought the first skein.

When we were away on holiday in August, my family gave me the www.skeinqueen.co.uk domain for my birthday and my next target was 50 sales by Christmas - I think it reached around 200 by then.

In April I dropped some hours at work to devote more time to SQ and I still don't have nearly enough hours in the day to accomplish all I'd like to - I think I've turned down eight or nine wholesale orders now.

In May, the Squee! Sock Clubs were launched and sold out in just over 24 hours. Thank you to everyone who joined.

Ultimately, it's been a fantastic year - the best bit has been meeting you lot and being able to work creatively. How lucky am I!