The Firefly Ruana Collaboration with Furls Crochet

As you may or may not know, my full time job is doing Marketing and Advertising for Furls Crochet. This year we started launching seasonal collections of yarn dyed by some of the lovely indie dyers in the fiber arts community!

For the summer, we had a bunch of fun collaborating with Becky Fetterley of Thistle & Hart, who worked up some super bright and fun colors for this summer’s Paradise Collection!

I was lucky enough to collaborate with Furls to design a new pattern for this launch! So I would like to introduce you to The Firefly Ruana!

This was a super fun project to design, not going to lie part of the fun was how easy it was hahah. It is worked in three different panels (the back and two front) and is comprised of one stitch! The only other thing there is to do is switch your colors!

Anyhoo! This pattern is available with any purchase of Paradise Collection Yarns! I hope you enjoy it!

Wondering where I have disappeared to?

SO, I know I have said this quite a few too many times on this blog haha, but I have been M.I.A for probably the longest I ever have on here, whoops.

As usual that has been for a myriad of reasons not limited to a work hours increase, moving to a different city, and you know just an itsy bitsy world wide pandemic.

So as I attempt to hopefully get back into the swing of things on the blog (which is actually pretty anxiety inducing), here is a little life update about why I have disappeared.

I would be very surprised if I hadn’t mentioned it in past posts, but up until the beginning of this year, we had been living in an apartment on the west side of LA and not to sound overly dramatic, I was pretty miserable.

The whole time we lived there (about 3 years) I kept telling myself that all of my problems were just in my head, and if I just tried to change the way I looked at the situation then things would get better. Unfortunately they never did. Long story short, i’m an overly sensitive person about pretty much everything, and living in not only a busy town, but a tourist town which made it exponentially more busy, my brain was constantly in overdrive.

The noise, the pollution, the population, the lifestyle, was all just way too much. Honestly, with how loud our apartment was, I really don’t think I got a proper nights rest in the whole 3 years. I was physically and mentally drained which made it so hard to ever be productive toward anything which is why the frequency in which I was releasing patterns kept decreasing and eventually just stopped altogether.

NOW, Flash forward to earlier this year and we FINALLY moved and it was/is everything I had been wanting for years. While i was hesitant to move from my hometown for a very long time, the past few years really gave me a reality check that I was not made for a bustling city life.

Now we live in a much less densely populated city in an actual house. I hear more birds than cars, I see more trees than buildings, and it has done wonders for my mental state, not to mention my sleep schedule (going to bed before 3 am is an actual thing now, shocking)

One of the biggest things for me moving into this house was that I now have an office, which let me tell you, has made my productivity sky rocket. It is insane what having a designated work space and not having to navigate everything you do in the kitchen will do for your productivity.

With that productivity meant putting a lot more hours into my full time job which really made any hopes of working on my own project go to the back burner, which honestly has been okay with me.

And then, just as we moved in and I started feeling lighter, happier, and more productive…the pandemic happened. While I feel more adjusted to the quarantine lifestyle than I did in the beginning, those first few months weren’t exactly easy, as I imagine they weren’t for almost anyone.

While I won’t go into too much detail about that time period, suffice to say that I wasn’t exactly in a creative mood after ” It’s just 2 weeks of quarantine” turned into 6 months. Though I did make a few things during this time…

A new maxi dress

A rapunzel wig

A tunisian headband

the chunkiest sweater ever

I suppose it’s not great to say that i’m simply just accustomed to barely leaving the house anymore, but it does beat the anxiety and depression of not being used to it that I felt in the beginning.

With that being said, I have slowly started feeling more productive and more creative again, and I think ready to try giving blogging a try again *fingers crossed I don’t eat my words*.

I don’t know exactly in what capacity I will be posting again, let alone what content I will actually be sharing as my relationship with pattern writing is incredibly strained haha, but for now I am back!