2019 – What a Year!!

2019 – What a year!! Would you believe that 2019 was the first full year of Sunflower Cottage Crochet?? Sara started it in around November 2018. By January I was helping her to test all of her patterns and brainstorm some of her ideas. It wasn’t long before we became partners in this big adventure.

And what a busy whirlwind of a year it’s been! We have achieved so much! There have been downs (mostly personal ones, but let’s not dwell on those those) and oh, so many highs.

We wanted to share some of our highlights with you …. And trust me there have been so many ?

• Our new website was developed and went live in the Summer. Its amazing how much work was involved with this. We think it looks great.  Raw Technologies did a great job with the branding, styling and creating the site that we envisioned. There are still a few minor tweaks to make to things and these are in the works as I type.

• We opened our Etsy store! We already had a Ravelry and Lovecrafts store. Again, its amazing how much work goes into creating an Etsy store that has the styling and branding of Sunflower Cottage Crochet. Not to mention all of the descriptions, the photos, the behind-the-scenes admin. Of course, with Sara as your partner you can’t just slowly build up an Etsy store – we had to prep every pattern, have all of the descriptions and photos ready and go with a big bang opening. It saved work later,  but boy was that a challenge and a half 😛

• We tried to do a Stitch of the Week post most weeks – a new stitch with a video tutorial and small free pattern to go with it. On the whole it was successful and our fabulous pool of testers were invaluable! For small projects it really was pretty much a full time job LOL.

• There were no less than 50 patterns released and more waiting to just be released in 2020.

The stuff you helped us with!

• We have had over 6000 of our patterns downloaded between Etsy, Ravelry, Lovecrafts and our shop on the blog.

• We were part of this year’s Crochet Cancer Challenge. What an experience that was! This year we chose to support Colon Cancer and you can find out why in our blog post here. Our hat pattern was super successful, and we are so grateful that we could be a part of something so worthwhile and amazing. There were over 60,000 pledges made of hats to be donated to cancer patients and charities before the end of 2019! The crochet community is one of the most welcoming and giving communities I have come across….

• We took part in our first pattern train – that was fun! A group of designers crated a chain or train of shops across our facebook pages and people got to jump between them with chances of winning prizes whilst also being introduced to some new / different designers.

• We finished the year being published in Quick and Easy Crochet – a publication that goes out to both the UK and the US crochet community! It was such a thrill to be approached and we are needless to say chuffed to bits! I am just waiting for our copies arriving …. We can’t wait to see our first magazine contribution in print!

• Our first trademark was registered – the coffee beanie cozy!

The best group on FaceBook

• We started our Facebook Community group. This is where we share our project progress, have a little bit of fun, make new friends, and host our CALs. We use events to call for testers. In return for testing, they get the pattern for free. It is an upbeat group and there are some wonderful people on there!

• We hosted the first CAL with the members of our Community group – the Mixed Toffee Cowl. This was actually the first pattern that I designed, way back in February 2019 just before joining forces officially with Sara at Sunflower. I was quite proud of it then and I still love the textures and colours within it.

Some of our favourite patterns from 2019 – What a Year!!:

Looking forward ….

One of the things that I value most being part of Sunflower Cottage Crochet is the friendship that Sara and I have. Yes, we get frustrated with each other sometimes – we work in two completely different ways, but we also compliment each other very well. We make a great team. I couldn’t imagine doing this with anyone else and I am so grateful that our love of crochet has brought us together in the way that it has. Would you believe that we have never met in person? I am in the UK and Sara in the US. Yet we talk regularly on the phone and communicate daily via messenger. Somehow the distance doesn’t seem so great. Perhaps 2020 will be the year that we get to meet face to face and discuss all things Sunflower over a drink and cake rather than a computer? I do hope so!

2020 is promising to be even busier with more adventures, more collaborations with new designer friends and more fun with our Community group!

There will be new regular features on our blog, some fantastic patterns, and not as many stitch of the weeks which will allow us to work on some bigger designs we have been itching to do for a while. Of course, there will be more CALs for our Community group members and many more patterns for them to get the opportunity to test! We do not underestimate the role that our Community plays within Sunflower Cottage Crochet – and its bigger than they would think!

To keep up with everything that we are doing and be the first to know of new releases, upcoming CALs and events and possibly a competition or two, sign up to our newsletter and join our Community page on Facebook!

I’ll say it again …. 2019 – What a year!! 2020 is going to be awesome!