This week, Felicia speaks with Jen Lucas, a knitwear designer who has been knitting since 2004 and designing since 2008. Her designs have been published in several knitting magazines, including Interweave Knits, Knitscene, and Love of Knitting. In fact, you can find all of Jen’s nearly 200 knitwear designs on Ravelry. She is the author of two very popular books, called Sock Yarn Shawls and Sock Yarn Shawls II. And as well, she is releasing a NEW book, called Stunning Stitches, which will be available in May 2017.
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On transitioning into a full-time knitwear design career: “If you want it bad enough, you’ll figure out a way to make it work, even over 5 years or 10 years… you can get there eventually, for sure.” — Jen Lucas
Felicia talks with Jen about her prolific knitwear design career and how she has been able to be so productive and successful with her work. Jen’s attitude towards hard work, organization, and focus is so very inspiring and I hope you will join us for this conversation!
In this episode, we talk about:
- 2:30 How the “Golden Girls” got Jen to start knitting
- 4:30 Jen (like Angela Tong) mentions how Stephanie Japel’s class on learning to design shawls sparked her design career
- 5:45 How Jen made the leap from her “day job” to becoming a full-time knitwear designer
- 9:30 Talking about Jen’s incredible rate of design productivity and her tips for productivity
- 11:45 Planning her design projects with her Hobonichi planner and Kanban board
- 16:15 Preventing creative burnout
- 20:00 Stunning Stitches Book
- 24:00 Jen’s experience of authoring knitwear pattern books, after publishing five books successfully
- 25:45 Jen’s view of the future of knitting
Links and Things
Here’s where to find Jen:
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/
JenLucasDesigns - Instagram: www.instagram.com/
jenlucasdesigns - Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/
jenlucasdesigns - Twitter: www.twitter.com/knitlikecrazy
- Ravelry: www.ravelry.com/designers/jen–
lucas
Stunning Stitches Book Giveaway
Jen has generously offered one listener a copy of her brand new book, Stunning Stitches. To give as many listeners as possible a chance to enter, we will keep this giveaway open until the end of April and then draw a winner after that date. Simply enter your info below and we’ll enter you in the giveaway and also subscribe you to our SweetGeorgia updates, so you won’t miss a thing.
The SweetGeorgia Show // podcast announcement, end of Season 2 is coming…
Just a reminder that we will be tying up season 2 of The SweetGeorgia Show podcast next week! The last episode will be a Q&A episode to close out our Season 2 run.
During the podcast hiatus, Felicia will be working on a big project. It’s a little early to go into too much detail, but it’s about colour, craft, and education. If you are interested in being one of the first to hear about what we launch when we launch it, vague as it might be, I invite you to enter your email address below for me. I’ll let you know details when I have them.
If you are interested in having a say about what I make next, I absolutely would welcome your thoughts and feedback! You can let me know through a quick survey at: https://bit.ly/sgyshow. In fact, if you complete that survey, you will receive a coupon code that you can use on our SweetGeorgia online shop to get $5 off anything you like.
Thanks for Listening!
Thank you so much for joining me this episode! If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your fellow knitting friends. And if you like what I’m doing here, please leave a rating and review on iTunes for the show. I read each and every email and bit of feedback, whether it’s on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, so I welcome your comments.
Thank you so much to Jen for joining me this episode. Until next time!
Music Credits:
The Young and Beautiful – by Ivory Hours
Fallin’ – by Jetty Rae (on Noise Trade)