In Praise Of The Wife

I'm going to take a wee break from pimping myself so that I can pimp my wife instead... Wait. That didn't sound quite how I meant it. Um... Let me explain.

To the right here is a rather artsy picture of my wife that I nabbed from her blog: The Shetland Trader. You see, she has this impressive online life as a knitwear designer. I don't mean your Grammy's reindeer scarf or chunky, ill-fitting sweaters that only get whipped out at Christmas gatherings. Naw, I mean cool stuff. Stuff you want! Granted, she does draw on her Shetland roots, but she then riffs on those traditions and comes up with her own creations. She goes by her maiden name, Gudrun Johnston, by the way. (If you have any of my books you'll note that she's taken all my author photos, too.)

(Photo to the left here is our son, Sage.) What does a knitwear designer do? Well, they don't sit at home knitting socks for sale. (Although socks are popular.) It's more a matter of dreaming up designs, knitting them, writing out patterns for them (which involves a lot of cursing), and then finding ways to publish those patterns, so that other people can buy them and knit the items themselves.

In the space of a year of making the jump to designing, she has been published in knitothennet, The Sanguine Griffin, KnitScene and has something coming out this winter in a new magazine that I shouldn't mention by name yet. She's pretty much been applauded everywhere she's submitted to, and even had folks seeking her out and asking her to send them things. Nothing but love. With all that, she's had to carve out time to publish patterns to her own blog, and those have been popular too.

(Photo to the left here is our daughter, Maya. She knits, too.) She has submitted to Knitty.com, the super-popular online knitwear magazine, twice now. How many times has she been published in Knitty? Twice. Not only that, her design has been on the cover both times. If you click on that link above it'll take you to the summer issue. The first photo you see if of our friend Marnell, looking wonderful in Gudrun's cover-winning design. Pretty cool, huh?

For tons more stuff you could check out her blog. You'll see that she's definitely got Shetland on her mind, but her specialty is taking inspiration from Shetland's knitting traditions and recasting them in completely contemporary, hip and inventive ways. People are responding. She gets more visitors to her blog than I do (um... a lot more - she's had over 1000 visitors in the few hours since Knitty went online), and her network of friends is truly international. Actually, through some of the knitting networking sites she knows that hundreds of people are currently knitting her designs.

Does anyone see a book deal in the near future? (I do.)

And here, by the way, is Marnel in the "Shetland Shorty", the design (and the photo) that scored the cover. Hard to beat...