Follow Friday | September 19

I am wearing this sweater today, but I was incredibly late getting out of the house so I don't have a current photo, but I did want to show you the sweater because it gives me an excellent segue into today's Follow.

The sweater is Telluride Aran by Amy Herzog which I took the liberty of knitting in the round and modifying because I find her armscyes, as written, aren't a good match to my body; however, with these slight mods, this sweater turned out to be one of my best fitting sweaters and the inspiration to do many, MANY more cabled sweaters this winter. The yarn, however, is what we're going to concentrate on today. It's Pebble Worsted by Black Trillium Fibres and I discovered the brand through Happy Knits, which is, by the way, one of the nicest online shops out there (they also exist in person, but in Oregon where I do not live). The colorway is Moon Shadow and it is a perfect navy. I say "a" perfect navy, not "the" perfect navy because I have learned during my search for navy perfection that there can be more than one. If the perfection of the color was not enough (and it is), the perfection of how the yarn knits up would quell any dissenters. I am heartily in love with it and don't understand why I only have one additional SQ lurking in stash (and it shouldn't be lurking because I want it to be a sweater now, it just has to wait its turn in my increasingly traffic jammed queue of projects).

While this is a small platform from which I can bloviate, I do want to call out Melanie on one thing in particular that I find sadly non-universal in our little crafting world: I placed a custom order for my second SQ and Melanie charged me a deposit. Let me repeat that: a deposit. Not the full amount of money on the trust that someone with whom I had not done business before would make good, but a deposit that meant if something went awry, neither of us would be screwed in the process (or, if you're a glass half empty kinda person, both of us would be a little screwed). Melanie conducts her business in a way that pretty much GUARANTEES repeat business. It certainly will guarantee mine (and I may have just stumbled onto something I want to design and immediately knew I wanted to do it in Pebble Worsted, so I do smell an order coming shortly). I have been a small business owner and I understand that margins can be very very very tight. That sucks. What sucks more is expecting your customers to float you money. No real businesses do that. If you pre-ordered an iPhone6, Apple didn't charge you on the day you ordered it; Apple charged you on the day it shipped you your phone. Which, by the way, is the law. Anything else is a ponzi scheme because you're floating a business money it will likely use to fulfill someone else's order. That might work for Social Security, but it doesn't fly in commerce. Even those late-night TV ads for the Ab Smasher or the Mega Chopper Xtreme don't charge your card when you order. So Melanie's stock went up tremendously in the instant she didn't ask for money for a product not ready to ship. I'd like to see everyone else in the industry adopt this practice, and I have started to tailor my shopping habits to supporting those who are operating within the letter and spirit of the law.