Behind the scenes at The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery

Is there anything happier than a little pile of finished projects?

Today I'm going to share a few behind the scenes personal thoughts and some inner workings of The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery!

Last Fall Ashleigh & I decided to do things a little differently and I wanted to share some business-y stuff with you today! And a lot of it is personal but let's have a real life talk this Friday k?

When we design a pattern, it's now stitched three times before it's available for sale. Yup! Three times! One of us will stitch it using whatever specific floss the pattern calls for, then one of our sample stitchers will use all DMC and one sample stitcher will use all Cosmo.

We started doing this for a few reasons:

Sometimes colors don't convert quite right. Example: we pick a DMC pale pink and we think we've matched the Cosmo pale pink version but when it's stitched up, it doesn't look the same.
Testing the thread quantities. Everyone stitches differently and depending on your method, you could use more or less floss than we do. When we have *big* projects, we want people to only have to purchase supplies once and have those supplies last the entire year.
We have the budget to help two stay at home moms earn a little extra money. We pay them the industry standard, give them all the materials and we let them keep the finished project. In return we have the peace of mind knowing our pattern works well!

When we decided to stitch in addition to hiring people, I was more than happy to let Ashleigh do the majority of the stitching. She's a beautiful cross stitcher. I am *not* the best stitcher. And I'm *really* hard on myself. I overly analyze every single stitch, I'd stress out that I was too slow, I'd compare myself to friends who have been stitching 20 years, etc. But! Partnership doesn't work like that! I felt super guilty because Ashleigh already has a ton of work (she does all of our PDF building, graphics, shop maintenance, etc) and hello, I spend 70% of my day encouraging people to try cross stitching or go from aida to linen. Time for me to BUCK UP!

Sooooo in September/October I started stitching The 12 Days of Christmas with the knowledge that we'd be using my project for all the photos, pattern covers, etc. NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING RIGHT?!

It ended up being a really enjoyable project. I'd get up in the morning, have coffee and listen to podcasts and just STITCH. It became relaxing and I started to learn what works for me and what doesn't. I think this project I fell in love with cross stitch and now it's pretty much all I want to do!

What works:

I love using hand dyed floss. I find it inspiring in the same way I find hand dyed yarn inspiring, it's subtle and it's beautiful to watch each stitch develop. If I had the chance, I'd stitch EVERYTHING using hand dyed floss. But I know not everyone has the budget for it which is why our patterns contain DMC/Cosmo conversions.
I prefer to make each individual stitch, rather than the Danish Method of doing a row of bottom stitches, then coming back and completing the stitch.
Loop start method. It doesn't work for hand dyed floss and some traditional stitchers don't like this method because your causing half of the thread to twist into it self but I really like it.

What doesn't work:

Waste knot method of starting. I somehow never catch my ends.
Stitching on smaller count fabric, I tried 32 and thought I was going blind. This is constantly drama between Ashleigh & I because she LOVES smaller count fabric!
Stitching at night. I just can't, I prefer daytime stitching.
Big blocks of color! I prefer stitching lots of little bits of color.
I haven't found my preferred hoop/frame/stand yet. I love the tight tension of QSnaps but they can hurt my hand after holding them for a while and they do squash my stitches (I stitch loosely). Scroll bars are awesome but mine is a strange size.

So back to business, before we release a pattern, it's been stitched three times which is awesome! From a business stand point, this is a big deal.

Why?

Because before the pattern is even sold, we have a fair amount of money invested into it. Smaller projects we have $200-300 and larger projects like Once Upon a Time we have easily double that.

In terms of business, this where we are different and it's risky. We could very easily post on facebook and ask for sample stitchers in exchange for free patterns, we've done this before and it's totally fine, lots of designers do this and there is nothing wrong with it. At all! We could provide the materials to our stitchers but keep the finished project to use for our photos. We could ask for free thread, fabric and supplies from the shops we work with to keep our costs down. There are a LOT of options that would involve less monetary risk for us but at the end of the day, I want to be the best small business owner I can possibly be. I want to be fair. I worked for many, many, many years for free and you know what? It stunk. So my business = my rules. Are our sample stitchers getting rich? No. But they have a regular income that they use for fun money or dance lessons for their kids or whatever they want. This way there is no question of what we expect from each other!

In addition to sample stitching we have a team of three proofers! These ladies check all the patterns for errors. We have two who proof exclusively larger patterns and one who works just on the smaller patterns. They are paid per PDF. Why do we hire people to proof our patterns? Because when you buy a cross stitch pattern for $19.95, I want to be dang sure you are getting the best we can personally give you for your hard earned money. Ashleigh & I literally look at these charts for 8+ hours per day, mistakes slip by us. And since our charts now come in color + b&w, printer friendly + mobile device friendly, that is a LOT of things that have to line up and keep track of! Do little things still sneak by eight sets of eyeballs? Sure! We are human. But we try really hard to avoid that at all costs!

I still get butterflies in my stomach right before we release a new pattern, what if we missed something! What if no one likes it? "What if" is a line of thought I'm constantly struggling with, especially now that we do have people who depend on us! Ashleigh just bought a house. Chop & I are currently saving for a down payment for a home. We have three shops who carry supplies for the patterns, that's a leap of faith on their part. What if everyone downloads it illegally and we only sell two copies? (this is a major concern 24/7 for all designers. Seriously.) It's a little nerve wracking (ok, very scary sometimes!) but at the end of the day, I realize we are working harder than ever and I truly believe that hard work pays off. We both have become big on taking leaps of faith, celebrating small successes and enjoying what we do. After a particularly trying time, a few facebook friends said "you guys should just design what you LOVE, with materials that make you happy and ignore the rest" and they were absolutely right. I think when you love what you do, it's infectious. I know I personally support small businesses who I watched go from a tiny shop to a legit big deal. I am SO emotionally invested in their success. I've never even met half of these people but watching them achieve their dreams is so incredible. I am a huge small business cheerleader. Sometimes I take a step back and see that we have our cheerleaders too, I can think of five people off the top of my head right now who have bought every pattern we've ever made since the beginning. These are the people who I wish I could hug (I got to do this at Stitches West to two girls!) and say "hey, thanks for believing in us when we kind of had no clue what the heck we were doing but we really wanted to do this". These are the people who I want to look at our patterns and think "dang, I'm proud of you girls!" It's kind of cheesy but it's totally true. Because I know I have friends who when I see their success, I want to squeeze them to bits.

In the past two years, we've grown SO much as small business, as designers and as a partnership. Am I saying we have it 100% figured out or we are the best in the business? No way! I don't think we ever will. We are constantly evolving and learning what works for us. We have a lot of things we are trying and some things work, some don't! Are there days when I want to cry when I see someone taking our hard work and copying it? YES. I wish I could say I'm joking but there is another monthly sampler that is literally a copied & pasted version of ours. NIGHTMARE! But are there days when someone I admire mentions us on their podcast and I do a dance and call Ashleigh screaming with excitement? YES. Do I see someone who's blog I *love* cross stitching one of our patterns and fall out of my chair thinking "how do they even know we exist?!" YES. The excitement typically outweighs the negative because...well, I get excited real easily. We've sold patterns to over 20 countries world wide and I get REALLY excited when I have to google where one is located (Andorra! <3!) Do I sometimes text Ashleigh and say "Did you see so & so's finished project?! omg so cute!" YES. CONSTANTLY.

This little pile of finished projects will hopefully provide some eye candy for you today. I guess the point of this post is just to share with you what we try to do as Pumpkins and maybe inspire you this weekend to try something new or take a leap of faith on something you've been thinking about?! Or maybe make you excited and think about your own personal success! Also, I struggle with sharing and being personal on my blog. I went from being incredibly open/bordering on TMI to sort of becoming a clam. I sometimes think that blogging requires a cape and a monogrammed leotard because being open about your life, goals and how you choose to do things takes courage.

I hope you have a good weekend <3