TOUGH FLUFF

It's a friday Fluff-fest y'all!

Friday night. End of February. Pandemic life. Ravelry in tatters. Sounds like a good time to publish a new pattern, right? Well, it couldn't get worse.

Honestly, I love this hat. I've knit seven of them, so far. It lends itself to nearly limitless fluffy yarn and finished size combinations. AND I expect it to tank hard on Ravelry. I hope to be proved wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.

Why? Because everything I designed last year tanked on Ravelry. Something fundamentally changed on the backend of their platform, resulting in a small business nightmare for not-Andrea-Mowry and not-Stephen-West indie designers, like myself. It's been rough. And Ravelry completely fails to acknowledge it. I tried to regain some creative control by upgrading this site--to the tune of several hundred dollars. To date, I've sold one pattern. Let that sink in.

In a year with no markets (no hat sales), and no job (as a non-essential contractor at a hospital I've been 'laid off' since March 2020), the virtual collapse of Ravelry was both unexpected and devastating. Why couldn't they just have left well enough alone? 

Hmmm. I'm on a rant. 

Bottom line: Sometimes you just have to be tough, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, even when it feels like your world is crumbling. Especially when it feels like your world is crumbling. I started to design Tough Fluff more than a year ago, before the pandemic was even a thing, back when I thought Ravelry was just being "glitchy". I kept waiting for the perfect time to release it. But now, with winter almost over, Ravelry and IG becoming increasingly useless, and COVID fatigue feeling painfully REAL, I figured What have I got to lose?

​You can't move forward if you remain anchored in the past.

And so, in the spirit of moving forward, and of staying tough (and fun and fluffy!) no matter what, I give you Tough Fluff. I hope you like it. I know I do :)