Finding Your Voice As a Designer in the Crochet Community | Podcast Episode #116

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Are you ready to start publishing designs?

Listen to this first! Making the decision to start publishing your crochet and knitting patterns may be the best thing you ever did but it’s not always easy. The first step is to find your place within the crochet community – in other words, what uniqueness do you have to share?

Special Guest

In this episode, I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with Rohn Strong, full-time blogger, designer, and instructor. He has been published in magazines and made an appearance on The Knit and Crochet Now TV show. His story is so inspirational. He shares the long and winding journey of how he got to where he is today and the pivotal moment that catapulted his career in the crochet community and world of publishing.

Episode Transcript

Brittany:
Oh boy, this is a good one. Hello there and welcome to episode 116 of the BHooked podcast. I’m your host, Brittany. If you’re brand new here, welcome. It’s a joy to have you here. And I’m just going to say right here at the start, this one is going to knock your socks right off. So just go ahead and pull them up a little bit higher so they don’t go flying off when you hear today’s guest.

I had the absolute pleasure of connecting with one of the most interesting people I think I have ever met. And after talking to him, now he’s the most interesting and inspiring person I have ever met. And I am just so excited to share this conversation with you. I feel very blessed to have been able to record it and release it now for you to hear his message. He has an amazing message and everyone in this community needs to hear it.

So I’ll be joined today by Ron Strong, and we talk a lot about his personal story, about how he got started, how he got to be a full-time blogger, DIYer, he’s been on TV shows, and he’s also a published author. I wanted to tap into that, but what I didn’t realize was how incredible the journey has been, and that’s where we put a lot of focus on. And throughout that process, we talk about how to find yourself, how to find your voice as it relates to us as designers.

Now, if you’re not a crochet designer or a knit designer and you have no desire to be, don’t tune out because there is some really good advice here in today’s episode. Before we get to it though, please do head over to the show notes page for this episode. It’s bhooked.com slash 116. Community is brought up quite a bit in this episode and that’s a great place for you to connect with other listeners of the show to connect with myself. I really love going in and reading your comments and hearing your stories about the episode itself. So you can do that at bhooked.com slash 116. You can also find information on Ron where you can connect with him and the resources that we talk about throughout the episode.

All right, now get ready for this one because it’s going to be good. So Ron, hi, welcome to the show.

Rohn: 2:54
Hey Hey.

Brittany: 2:55
Hey, it is so exciting to have you here. I feel like you’re probably one of the most interesting people I’ve ever had the chance to connect with, and so I can’t wait to dive into your back story, but also just extract the wisdom from you about publishing because I know you’ve done a lot as far as books and magazines go, but also about television which is very intriguing for a lot of us. So take me on the journey what does it look like from your perspective how did you get to be Rohn Strong, you know full-time crafter diy blogger, and author.

Rohn: 3:31
I’ve been designing for a long time, so I always preface by saying it’s a really long story. And there’s a lot of lows and a few highs. And then in the last few years, there’s been a lot of highs and a few lows,

Brittany: 3:50
Yeah.

Rohn: 3:51
Starting a business was something that I always wanted to do. So my mom is a cosmetologist, and she owned her first salon. And I always remember just… being in awe of like owning your own space and not having a boss. And the strength that I saw my mother, she was like the breadwinner for our family. She was out there working every day, 12 to 16 hours a day. And she still does it to this day. Like she thrives on that kind of work. She thrives on being her own boss.

Um, And so I really wanted to be like my mom. And I actually wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write books. I wanted to write mystery novels. That was kind of my big dream. I watched a lot of Murder, She Wrote growing up. And I was obsessed with being Jessica Fletcher and like flying all over the country and doing these book tours and apparently solving murders. Like that was going to be my jam when I grew up.

But in about 2008, I got a job working for a company where I taught– I worked with at-risk youth is the best way to put it. I grew up in Michigan, in northern Michigan, and it was– lot of the smaller towns were very hard hit by drugs uh were very hard hit by kind of some very serious uh negative things and we didn’t want kids being involved in those so we started doing these after-school programs to try to get kids into trying out different things to see that there’s a different way of life.

We were really big into the outdoors in Michigan obviously it snows like eight months out of the year, right? So we would go snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. But I was actually paired with one of my coworkers who wanted to teach kids how to knit and crochet.

Now, I taught myself how to knit when I was really young, about eight years old. My mom was making an afghan for my father, and she gave up. And I picked up the yarn and the hook that she didn’t want. I found it in a box in our basement and I just kept going. And then I bought myself that you can buy. I think you can still buy them. The little kit that says, I can’t believe I taught myself how to crochet.

Brittany: 6:19
Oh, yeah.

Rohn: 6:20
Right.

Brittany: 6:21
I’ve seen those.

Rohn: 6:23
Yes. And I actually used it and taught myself how to crochet. So I in 2008, when I was kind of doing all this, I really wanted to help myself. kids learn how to knit and crochet because I knew that there was a benefit to it. Like we could get these kids to kind of sit down and create something. At the time, I had never taught people how to do it, but I was like, I can totally do this. And that’s the kind of person I am. Even if I don’t know how to do it, I just convince myself that I do know how. Yeah. And then I try to become like a master at it. Right. And it went well. It went well.

And in 2009, I left that job and I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina. I always wanted to live in the South and I had the opportunity to. So I was like, all right, let’s do it. But after a year of being here, I couldn’t find a job. I am a college dropout. I’ve always been very honest about that. I just… things didn’t, when it came to like, I’ve always been really smart and like, I love the education and I love learning and I love teaching, but college was really difficult for me. And so I never finished.

When I came to the South, I live in Raleigh. And like I just said, it’s very heavily focused on the technology industry. And I don’t have that kind of thing. And so, I don’t have that degree. I don’t have that education.

So what I ended up doing was just opening an Etsy shop and selling, of all things, dog toys. I had a dog at the time. And I still do. His name is Chase. He’s all over my social media. He is my constant companion. And I had made a little crochet amigurumi and he loved it. And he never ripped it up. It was weird. He’d rip up every toy, but not that one. And I made a bed, a dog bed out of like three or four strands of yarn held together. And I crocheted it and he slept on it. And I was like, I wonder if there’s a market for this. Yeah. And there was at the time.

So I started Etsy shop. It did really well. I sold quite a few products. I had like three or four wholesale contracts. It was going really well. But I also discovered during that that I hate production. And production was never something that I should do. So I don’t like making the same thing again and again.

Brittany: 9:14
Me too.

Rohn: 9:15
So I was like, oh, I should totally design. And that’s how I started designing. I just got this idea that I was like, if these people are designing and they’re doing this. then I should do this. How do I do this?

Ravelry was there and I knew that it was easy to upload patterns and to start selling patterns, but I didn’t know how to write a pattern. I didn’t know how to do anything. So I just taught myself by looking at what other people were doing.

And at that time, the yarn industry in general, crochet publishing and crochet designing was not as big as it is now, I think. And so it was mostly, it was very heavily knit focused. and i started designing knit patterns and crochet patterns but i think i got really popular doing more crochet stuff because at the time no one not no one i shouldn’t say that but there weren’t a lot of people that were designing.

Mm-hmm.

And she was doing a podcast. Um, and on that podcast, she talked about how she wanted to work with companies. So she got the idea and I don’t, I might totally be butchering it, but this is how I totally remember it. She said something about like, she decided to do an entire book of patterns or like ebook of patterns using one company’s yarn to get that company’s attention or something like that.

And I was like, Oh, that’s what I should do. Yeah. So that’s what I did. I designed a hat book of men’s patterns using, I can’t remember. I think the first book was either Lion Brand or Cascade, Cascade Yarns, one of the two. But that’s what I did to begin with.

And my kind of design career slowly rose all the way to 2015. I had done some work. I published a self-published a book on the history of knitting during World War I and World War II in 2012. I did like a Kickstarter and we got money and we had it published. I did a ton of research. It was probably my proudest moment designing because so much work went into that.

Yeah.

And then in 2015 was when Annie’s, or actually I think it was 2014 maybe, 14, was when Annie’s… The company I work with a lot kind of gave me my first big break.

Brittany: 12:13
Yeah. So, wow, you’ve done a lot more than I even realized.

Rohn: 12:17
Yeah, yeah. People always say that. They’re like, oh, you’ve done all of this? I’m like, yeah, I know. It just took a long time to get to Ron Strong level. It took me a long time to be who I am. So I think it’s like a journey. You work really, really hard to find out who you’re meant to be. But then when you discover who you’re meant to be, you just sit in that. You sit in that space and you allow yourself to bloom into the kind of perfect vision of yourself that’s already been there. It’s just waiting for you to find it. Oh,

Brittany: 12:51
I love that. That is so inspirational to hear, especially for somebody who’s starting out and even for me, somebody who’s been doing it I guess, you know, in comparison to how long you’ve been doing it, not quite that long. So it’s good to know that that’s okay to not feel like you found your zone yet. That eventually, like you said, it’s waiting there for you. I love that.

Now, as far as the TV stuff goes, I’m really curious about that and how that sort of transpired and how that played into… who you are today, because you said that was in 2014. We’re several years past that now. I feel like that probably played a pretty pivotal role in how things look for you today. Yeah,

Rohn: 13:34
I mean, I think it’s not hyperbole to say it was transformational. Working with Annie’s has been probably one of the most important and life-altering things that’s happened to me. I was really, really struggling as a business owner and as a designer. And throughout the years, I have stopped designing and started designing and shifted and changed my name and rebranded all of these things. I kept trying to do anything I could in order to be the person who I thought I should be, right?

And in 2014, I had started, right after I wrote that, uh, first ebook of hat patterns, a magazine in the UK, uh, Inside Crochet, they contacted me and asked me if I would be willing to do a feature in their magazine, if I would design a pattern. And that pattern actually never was published because the magazine changed ownership. Oh, but, but the great thing was I had a track record of great designing up until then. And working with them was, um, it just — it allowed me, they gave me creative freedom. Right. So basically they would say, hey, Ron, we want you to design something for this issue. It’s spring. What do you have in mind? And it allowed me to grow as a designer.

And I feel like a lot of designers don’t get that opportunity nowadays because it’s very much like— You have to work– sorry, my dog is barking.

Brittany: 15:13
Oh, I know how it is.

Rohn: 15:15
You have to work for– you kind of got to– how do I put this? For like magazine publishing or book publishing or anything like that, oftentimes what you have to do is– they give you kind of like a call, a submission call. They have an idea of what they want, what things look like, and you design for that. Inside Crochet never did that.

So in the process of kind of feeling myself and designing new things and just letting my creative juices flow expand, essentially, they allowed me to come up with this great idea for Tunisian crochet. That’s where I’m going with this. And I developed a new way of doing Tunisian crochet color work, in which you would do the Tunisian knit stitch, if anyone’s familiar, and you would change colors very similar to standard knitting color work.

And I developed a way to trap the floats every three to four stitches. And it was this really cool, slightly groundbreaking way of doing Tunisian color work because at the time it was quite restrictive. So I designed this amazing wrap which I think it’s called the Dorothy wrap if I’m not mistaken and I wrote a feature inside of Inside Crochet and then my life changed.

It’s so weird how one design altered everything. I posted it on my personal Facebook page and my friend, Rebecca Velasquez, who is another great crochet designer, she sent it to her friend who was an acquaintance of mine named Ellen Gormley.

Ellen Gormley at the time, which a lot of people know, Ellen is— she wrote a bunch of books on like crochet motifs. She’s a very, very kind of prolific crochet designer. She was the editor of Crochet Magazine at the time. And she was working for Annie’s ‘cause Annie’s owns Crochet Magazine.

And that’s kind of how that started. Right. So a little bit of backstory about how that started. And then they saw the design and it turned out the producer for Annie’s online classes lives 15 minutes away from me. And she was like, let’s meet for coffee and you can show me this technique.

So I was incredibly nervous, like incredibly nervous. I had never, I barely went outside my apartment. I crocheted all day and I had to meet with a producer. It was so crazy. We went and had coffee. It was the day, I’ll never forget it, it was the worst snowstorm I think we’ve had in Raleigh in the last 10 years. And I showed her what to do and she was like, this is amazing.

And within a few weeks, we had contracted an online class. So I started doing online classes with Annie’s pretty quickly in 2014 and then in 2015 I was asked to be on the TV show and that was I think it was season seven if I’m not mistaken and I was asked to be on the show because I had done all this other work with Annie’s. So it just kind of made sense.

And Debra Norville was actually the host that year. And I was incredibly nervous because I love Debra. And I had met her a few times. Sorry, I had watched her a few times on TV. I think maybe we had met. I don’t remember, actually. But that was like the big thing of meeting her. And I was so nervous.

And I was like, I’m going to be on camera with Debra Norville. Like, this is crazy, right? Yeah. I showed up, I had literally no idea what I was doing, but I just, like, just fake it till you make it. Like, that is my… Yeah. Yeah. can say is no and so never be afraid to ask and I ask constantly and I got there I didn’t know what I was doing and there was a great designer her name is Robin Chichula and Robin is kind of just she’s amazing she’s just so amazing and we would laugh constantly but she gave me the best advice for how to do step out how to work on TV, how to do any of that.

And I carry that advice to this day, which it sounds so silly to people that don’t actually do that kind of demonstrations because working for TV is in doing segments on television are incredibly different than teaching like a YouTube video or teaching an online class because you’re doing everything in a very tight nine minutes. Right. So you have nine to 10 minutes to show how to complete an entire ask and.

Brittany: 20:33
And that is really challenging.

Rohn: 20:34
It’s so challenging. It’s one of the most difficult things I think you can do. But the advice that she gave me was like how how to break it down and how to do all these different steps. And I was like, oh, that’s really easy. So I literally pass that advice on to people, to new people that are on new seasons that have never done this before.

Brittany: 20:58
I love that. Now, like you’re a seasoned vet, you can help others who are coming in probably in that same scared frame of mind that you were in. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Rohn: 21:37
Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s, it’s, I always believe that like positivity begets positivity and love begets love. And so the more that the more we are positive and the more we lead with love, the more positivity we get back and the more love we get back.

So if we walk into a situation, like if I had walked into that television show thinking, oh my God, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Right. Like I’m, I’m, I’m going to, I’m going to wreck this. This is going to be awful. This is going to be the worst thing that I probably would have.

Now, looking back, I made some terrible choices on hair. I did not pick the best outfits to wear, and I was sweaty and extremely overweight at the time. But I can judge myself for those things after. At the time, I need to feel the best that I can. I just need to feel the best, and I need to be so kind to myself.

And I think as The number one thing I teach in all of my workshops that I teach and all of the online classes that I teach, I always say you have to be kind to yourself. I think when we’re learning something new, we forget, whether it’s crochet or whether it’s being on television, whatever it is, sometimes we forget the fact that we’re new and we’ve never done that thing before.

And what ends up happening is we’re mean to ourselves. Like, we get really down on ourselves. And if we’re kind to ourselves, it kind of helps us to be kind to others. But it allows us to not kind of judge ourselves so harshly, you know?

Brittany: 23:16
Exactly. And I feel like that’s the prerequisite to any success. It doesn’t matter what you want to do, if you want to be a published author, if you want to be on TV like you are. I feel like it really starts there. It’s all about how you view yourself, because if you don’t believe you can do it, well, there is no chance that you will.

Rohn: 23:34
Exactly, exactly. And it’s, Yeah. Yeah. And I asked everyone in the class, I was like, okay, do we all have a good foundation of crochet? And everyone was like, I don’t know. And I was like, okay. So I thought I was going in blind teaching absolute beginners.

These people were at least confident beginners, if not intermediate crocheters. I was like, you guys are getting this and you’re doing such a great job. Be confident in your new skills and don’t be afraid to say, yeah, I know what I’m doing.

Brittany: 24:25
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. I wonder if it’s the frame of mind that says, I know what I’m doing, but I don’t know if I’m doing it right. And so therefore, I don’t have confidence in myself. Do you see that?

Rohn: 24:42
I do. Yeah. I think that’s one of the big things. It’s just… we often don’t know. I like to do a lot of different crafts and I like to do a lot of different things and dip my toes into different stuff. And I taught myself how to quilt in 2017. And I had no idea if I was doing it right because there’s no one there. And it gave me a brand new appreciation for like learning a new thing.

And it allowed me, like that’s one of the biggest things, pieces of advice I can give to anyone that wants to teach crochet, that wants to do that as a professional job like I do. The biggest thing is teach yourself how to do something new. Put yourself in the shoes of students that have never picked up, you know, a crochet hook or a piece of fabric and a sewing machine, whatever it is, and see how difficult it is.

And then that will teach you how you can reframe your message and how you teach a little bit to accommodate those people and to be more understanding of what it’s like to maybe not know everything and like, not know if you’re doing it right. Yeah, so you just do it wrong enough times and then you realize, oh okay, that’s why I wasn’t doing it that way.

Brittany: 25:59
Yeah, yeah. I don’t know how many times that’s—that’s sort of how I taught myself. I’ve had books but I just couldn’t make the connection between the images and what I needed to do, so I did watch a lot of videos. But what I found was that the videos, there were gaps in the instruction for me personally.

So the way I needed to learn that really wasn’t covered in what I could find. So when I started putting videos out on YouTube, I was doing it for no reason other than to just help the one person out there who was like me that learns the way I do and needed that extra information, those extra steps that—mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm—pointed out that I give too much information, but I mean, that’s really my goal. That’s what I’m here for, to fill in those gaps.

And if you don’t need that, then I might not be the right instructor for you. But for those people who do need that, I’m right there and I understand it because I went through that. So I feel like that’s really important to realize as you’re trying to figure out who you are, what you want to do, in order to identify a need, I feel like it needs to start with yourself, internal. What do you need? And then how can you fill that void for somebody else who might also need that?

Rohn: 27:36
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Brittany: 27:38
I feel like that can be related to designers too. I mean, I know one thing that always comes up is, well, it’s a saturated market. There’s tons and tons of designers out there. There’s blogs everywhere. Why should I even start? Nobody’s going to look at my stuff. Nobody will look at my pattern. Why should I bother?

But I feel like you just need to find your position because there is a place for you. Can you speak to that a little bit? I feel like you have tried so many different things that you have some experience with that.

Rohn: 28:12
Yeah, I think it’s really about finding a unique voice. So if you’re thinking, well, I want to get on and I want to make this thing that I’ve seen this person do, or I’m going to—I like the shape of this garment, so I’m going to do it in a different stitch and think like, it’s going to kind of capture everyone’s attention—that might not work. It might sell a few copies, but it’s not going to sell every copy.

You have to be able to find your position, to find your voice and to find where you fit. And that takes a long time to do for some people. For some people, it happens right off the bat. They know exactly what they need to do, right where they need to go. And I’m totally envious of those people. I have friends that are those people and I’m like, you make me angry because it took me so long.

So I started out doing modern crochet in bright fun colors and then I switched and I was doing vintage knitting like early to late, like 1920s to 1940s kind of vintage knitting. And then I would switch back to like bright, fun crochet. And then I would switch back to vintage knitting. I just didn’t know where I fit. And I didn’t know what kind of story I wanted to tell with my work.

And someone gave me some advice, one of my mentors. Her name is Donna Dracunas. And Donna is… I believe one of the foremost knitwear designers in the industry. And she, um, she wrote this amazing book called Arctic Lace and she writes a monthly or whatever—I think it’s quarterly—column for Nitty, the online free knitting magazine that has to do with like history and knitting and the intersection of both.

So she did the foreword of one of my first books on the history of knitting and, um, one of the pieces of advice she gave me is like, you can’t be both a historical knitwear designer and a modern crochet designer. She was like, you, you have to pick a voice because if you keep trying to do both, you have two completely different markets. Right. And you have two completely different ways of branding yourself.

And she didn’t put it like that, but that’s kind of how I interpreted it. And so like, you have to be mindful of who you are as a person and who you want to be as a designer. So the truth is, and not many people know this, that my online kind of design work, what I design for crochet is just my artistic voice. It’s not who I actually am in my everyday life. Right.

So I am not as bright and colorful. I actually wear like olive drab green almost every day and khaki. And like I have a personal style that is quite, quite rustic, quite kind of you know, turn of the century Americana. Like I love history. But when I’m designing crochet it allows me to tap into something that I didn’t know that was there—that loves bright pink and is super colorful and I can design these amazing sweaters.

But that I’ve been able to kind of craft that voice and it allows me to express my artistic creativity in a very unique and profound way so that as I continue to design, I can continue to allow my voice to lead without having to feel like it needs to be in line with everything else, if that makes sense.

Brittany: 31:54
It does. And that contradicts probably a lot of things that we have ever heard—that to be yourself, to be your own designer, to find your voice and all the figures of speech that are around that. It’s always about… who you are. But I’ve never heard it in the way that you just explained it—that it’s your artistic expression.

I feel like that is really, really interesting and maybe that’s the reason why some people might be caught up and say, well, this is who I am, how I like to dress—maybe I like neutral colors and I like organic things—but they’re not finding traction with designing those things because maybe that’s not how they express artistically. That’s really cool. How did you realize that?

Rohn: 32:43
It took a really long time and it took a lot of self-expression and conversation with myself. One of the biggest things was realizing I struggled for a really long time. I believe that everything everyone does has a purpose. And that we are all kind of put on this earth to make the world a little bit of a better place.

And I struggled with how does crochet let me make the world a better place? And I was like, it doesn’t. There’s no way. Until someone sent me an email. And in that email, they told me that—I think it was, I’ve gotten a lot over the years, but one of the most profound was her mother had cancer. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

This is how I’m expressing my creativity. I am taking all of these colorful, beautiful, kind of bright, amazing things that are inside of me and I’m sharing them with the world. I think as kind of humans and as men in general, like as a male designer, I… young boys are raised to kind of squash that creative side of themselves, the side that loves bright colors and loves colorful prints and wants to do crafty things and all that kind of stuff, right?

And so I was like, oh, I’m going to let that open, and I’m just going to go wherever it takes me, and I’m not going to be afraid. And so in 2017, I started working with the artist Olek. She did a very large crochet banner that honored Nina Simone, in downtown Raleigh and it was part of her project called Love Across the USA and I was just like, this is so amazing.

I crocheted most of Nina’s face. It’s a great banner. You can see it online and it’s wonderful. But it allowed me to express kind of this side of me that I didn’t know was there. And I was like, oh my gosh, you can do amazing things with crochet, right? Like you can be a social activist with crochet, but I can still design colorful, bright sweaters or sweaters that I think my Nana would wanna wear or my mother would wanna wear.

Once I took kind of the constraints of what people said was a traditional brand off of myself and allowed myself to just breathe and to exist in the space that I wanted to exist. Almost, I think people would probably say maybe selfishly, but really it was an act of self-love and self-expression to just say, I’m existing in this space. I’m going to be who I want to be, who I was meant to be. And that’s where I’m going to be.

And once I did all that, once I fit there, I just felt whole. There’s no other way to describe it. I just felt complete. And since then, that was probably 2017, 2018, I also had some really traumatic experiences and life-altering things happen in my personal life that caused me to reevaluate where I was and what I wanted to do and why I love doing what I do.

I’ve never… I’ve never kind of got past the fact that crochet is a business for me. It is my full-time job. It pays my full-time income. I get to travel around the country and teach amazing workshops with people. I get to do some amazing things with crochet.

But once I took the business, aligned it with this creative, artistic self-expression of self-love, like it blossomed into something amazing. And now I feel even more kind of rooted in who I am, where I am and what I do.

Brittany: 36:54
Wow, that is just amazing. An amazing place to be, to be able to look back and say that every single thing you encountered led you to where you are right now.

Rohn: 37:07
Absolutely.

Brittany: 37:08
It’s exciting probably to think about how it’s going to possibly change and develop in the future.

Rohn: 37:14
Yeah. The industry is completely different than what it used to be for me. For, I think for a lot of designers who have been doing this a long time, um, you realize you have to shift and you have to change.

A great example is this whole free pattern market. When I started designing in 2000, seriously designing in about 2012, people were not giving away patterns for free. In fact, if you did, it was often thought of as you were cheapening the craft. You were cheapening what was happening and you were hurting other designers because you were giving away your products for free while they were trying to sell it.

And the market has completely shifted. And I would say the crochet market itself relies extremely heavily on free patterns, right? With ad support and company support paying for those free patterns, completely 180 degree shift. But with that, you have to think, okay, how am I going to stand out even further than I… You know, have before.

How is my voice going to be different than that of these bloggers that have, you know, 30, 40, 50,000 followers? It can be absolutely mind numbing to think that, oh my goodness, I’m never going to be as famous as them or as well known as them. But the truth is that if your voice and your vision is completely unique and you are acting out of self-expression, artistic expression and self-love, it doesn’t matter if you have a thousand followers or 50,000.

The point is you are doing what you want to do, what you love to do. And that’s where your self-worth has to be kind of centered. It can’t be centered in the numbers game. It has to be centered in the act of expressing.

Brittany: 39:05
Exactly. Because I feel like when you lose focus like that, you do that. You lose focus. If you are caught up in the numbers game and comparing and sort of feeling down on yourself because you don’t have X number of followers or page views, you completely lose sight of who you are and your whole purpose for starting this venture.

Rohn: 39:30
Exactly.

Brittany: 39:32
Yes. So this is such a really good conversation. I want to try something a little bit different. I’m going to put you on the spot here. Okay. I have been—well, just this week—doing something different on Instagram stories. Before I prepare for a call like this, I like to ask the audience there if they have any questions for you. So we have a question I would love for you to ask. I think a lot of people have this question. So Mags Crochet wonders, in terms of publishing your own designs, where would you even start?

Rohn: 40:08
That’s a hard one, right? It is. So ideally… I chose a very unique path. I don’t think it’s possible to do that in 2019 where we are and where the industry is right now. So I will kind of speak on, I guess, how I would get started now if Ron were starting in 2019.

I think the biggest thing that you have to do is… You need to have a social presence of some part, because otherwise it’s like screaming in a crowd, like, look at me, look at me, while everyone else is screaming, look at me. No one’s really going to notice you. So the biggest thing to do is to make sure you have a Ravelry account, because that’s, I think, your best bet for getting as a free pattern source and then start a blog. You can start free blogs on Blogspot, on WordPress, whatever it is.

The other thing is just to design something that’s unique. If you’re designing a hat that’s simple, it’s a great pattern, I’m sure, but not a lot of people are going to notice it. Really sit down and think, what is your dream design? Like, if you could design anything, what would be the most amazing thing that you could design and then design that?

And then take that and go out into the crochet world and just say, look at me. And give yourself time. Be incredibly kind to yourself. And… know how to write a pattern. Read pattern books like they’re novels. Buy as many or go to the library and rent them and just flip through them. Get acquainted with how patterns are written. Find your style and think like, if I want to write a really detailed pattern, maybe I’m going to write it this way. If I want it to be very succinct and be like a magazine, it’ll be like this. Try to do that.

And I think the biggest thing is, as I said throughout, I think this entire call is to be extremely kind to yourself and to know that like your first few patterns probably will not sell like you will not sell, you know, more than one or two copies but you know what that’s coffee money so when you go to the coffee shop you don’t look like a weirdo just sitting there all day as you’re writing patterns you can actually buy something like yeah.

I try to always think of the positive. But that’s kind of where I would start. And then think about what you want to do with your career. Do you want to write a book? If you do, why? Why do you want to write a book? Why do you think that your specific voice is needed within the crochet community or within the knitting community or whatever you’re doing? Why does your voice matter? That’s the important part.

And then once you know why, once you kind of know that whole space where you can exist of why this is happening, why you want to do this, then you can move forward. If it’s, well, I want to design because I want people to know my name, I want people to know who I am, I want to be a famous crocheter, then maybe reevaluate and realize that’s going to take a really long time. And that might not be the best motivation.

If you really want to start a business designing crochet, then get into the business side of it. So start designing for magazines. And there’s not a lot of crochet magazines left, but there are a few. Annie’s has a couple. Talk to editors. Email them. Ravelry has a great board kind of in their forums, and it’s called Designers. And within that, companies and individual publishers and stuff like that, they all list things. Their open calls for submissions of what they’re called.

So a yarn company could say, we’re looking for five crochet designs of sweaters using our new yarn. We’re going to pay you $400 for each design, and here’s a mood board of what it should look like. Send us your ideas. And then if they accept it, you stitch it, you write the pattern, you send it back in, you do whatever, you know, the companies, each individual call for submission is separate.

But that’s a good resource as well. Ravelry is, I think, one of the best resources for publishing patterns when you’re first starting out for getting to know different designers and go on those forums, introduce yourself, publish or kind of share your new designs. You can ask for feedback on how things are done, how your patterns are written, all that kind of stuff.

Brittany: 44:49
I think that’s really great advice. And the very pronounced message that we have—sort of like the theme of what we’ve been talking about too—is really to find something that’s really unique. And it feels really difficult to find something unique. Like you said, a lot of times we get really lucky and I feel like I experienced that as a designer myself and that sort of was my tipping point for people to find out more about me and some of my other patterns.

I had just stumbled upon something that I thought was cool and different and unique, and I shared it. And it’s tough to find that again, even as somebody who’s been designing for a while. So I can only imagine how difficult it is to find something completely different. It feels like everything’s already been done.

So what would your advice be on how is it? Is this just something that happens or is it something that’s really intentional?

Rohn: 45:52
Um, I… I think the search for uniqueness can be its own journey in and of itself. And what you have to focus on is like, not necessarily, okay, I’m going to invent a stitch pattern, but maybe like, let’s say you open up a stitch dictionary, which, you know, there’s hundreds of them out there, but you open one of them up and you see a stitch and you’re like, huh, I wonder how this would look in a lightweight linen yarn as a t-shirt. And then you just start experimenting, start swatching and playing.

You need a good kind of, like… track a good knowledge of how to design those kind of things but it’s easy like there are books out there where you can learn there are YouTube videos there are online classes you can take and honestly like you can even ask other designers like I get questions from designers all the time about how do I set this up how do I do this how do I write this and it’s like I will help you as much as I possibly can because it’s all about kind of giving back a little bit.

So don’t struggle too much if you’re not finding something that’s unique. Take a step away and then return back and that idea will come. It’s kind of… It’s no different than… Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That is a little bit different. Maybe you are changing colors every round or you’re using a special color changing yarn and you develop this hat and you’re working these really cool decreases, whatever it is, like it, it might have been done before, but you’re doing it in a way that’s kind of new and exciting.

Now that’s not to say like, go out and look for patterns and try to do them in a new way. I’m just saying like, There are ways of doing things that are unique. There are ways of doing things that you can put your own twist on them. And like a basic double crochet hat that’s done, you know, spiraled in two colors at one point. Like we’ve all done a basic double crochet hat in a spiral.

But once someone added a second color… it turned it into this new, amazing striped swirly hat. That’s really, really cool. You know what I mean? Yeah. I hope that makes sense.

Brittany: 48:29
It totally does. So do you think that it’s important for people to just throw things out there and see what sticks or do they need to be really, really intentional about the patterns that they release?

Rohn: 48:44

I think intention, being intentional about designs is incredibly important. Um, So a great example that I’ve seen lately is that there’s a lot of crochet designers as a whole that are making kind of drop shoulder sweaters. And that’s a design, you know, kind of decision that they’ve made. But I’m very old school and I come from the knitting world where back in the day, like you didn’t do drop shoulder sweaters because everyone did them in the 80s and the 90s and they looked terrible on people. But crochet is very modular, like it forms to the body in a very unique way. And so people can do that. Now, personally, for me, am I going to design that? Absolutely not. But for them, it works. And through their design voice, that is kind of something that they can make, they can express, they can do that. So once you find your designer voice, and once you kind of know what you like, what you don’t like, stay true to that voice. And sometimes, yeah, it does take designing a couple really ugly things in order to find it. I have some ugly designs on Ravelry that I really don’t like and I’m not proud of, but I did them in the search for my voice. Once I found my voice, I was like, cool. now i don’t have to struggle as much i know i’m going to design what i want to design i’m going to kind of focus on what i want to focus on and go from there and sometimes that means like transitioning from crochet to knitting maybe you want to be a knitter now maybe you’re you’re finding more opportunity for expression in knitting. Maybe it’s in weaving or in tabbing. You know what I mean? Like be completely open to allow your designing voice to take you wherever it wants to go. IBrittany: 50:41

completely agree. There’s a saying that says your vibe tracks your tribe.Rohn: 50:46

Yes.Brittany: 50:47

And I believe that wholeheartedly. And I feel like we’re all sort of on this mission, myself included, to find something ourselves and be able to be in that position where we can say, yeah, this is exactly who I am. I’m designing this because this is uniquely me. And I think that’s the ultimate goal, I believe. Not to be somebody who’s famous or to be a published author or something. Those are great goals and great destinations, if you will. But Thank you. Thank you. I do want to give people a chance to connect with you after hearing this episode. I know they will. So where is the best place to find out more about you and what you have going on? Uh,Rohn: 51:53

probably Instagram. That’s like, I’ll be honest, uh, at Ron strong on Instagram is the best place. Um, my website is ronstrong.com and my newsletter is there. I send out my newsletter. I try to do it once a week, but if I’m being honest, it’s like totes sporadic. But I always update everyone with new things that are happening. I release new patterns. I release a quilting pattern every other month for free on my blog and a crochet pattern every other month. I’m writing a book on punch needle right now. So I make sure everyone is updated on everything. So yeah.Brittany: 52:34

Okay, awesome. So I will have links to all of that in the show notes as well as some of the resources we mentioned today. Ron, thank you so much. Seriously, on behalf of all my listeners, this has been one of the most amazing episodes that we’ve had so far. So thank you.Rohn: 52:47

Of course. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.Brittany: 52:51

So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed that chat as much as I did. It was so much fun connecting with Rohn. So Rohn, I know you’re listening. Thank you again. I really do appreciate your openness and your honesty, and I think it will really help those of us who are striving to find ourself and express our artistic side through our craft.

Now, if you would like to connect with Rohn online, once again, Instagram is where he really loves to hang out. I would recommend you follow him there and also check out his website. You can see some of the great things that he has going on. So I will have all of that information in the show notes page for you.

Once again, that link is bhooked.com/116. Just type that right into your browser and you’ll see all the info right there on that page. Well, speaking of Instagram, I’m sure you noticed something I did there towards the end that was a little different than what you’re used to. So I really would love to experiment with this a little bit more and ask your questions to the guests that come on the show through Instagram stories. So be sure to follow me on Instagram. And just keep an eye on my stories.

When I do an interview, a couple hours before I get on the call with these people, I will create a story that asks specifically what your questions are, what you would like to know from that person. So keep an eye on that and you never know, your question might just get asked in that episode.

That’ll do for this week’s episode of the BHooked podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. I really do appreciate it as always. It’s a real pleasure and I look forward to serving you in next week’s episode. Subscribe to the show if you haven’t done so already so you don’t miss that episode. And I will see you there, my friend. Bye-bye.