Working out Kinks and Fingering Yarn

Submissions: Post Your Work on the Blog

Submissions

If you’re a blind or visually impaired yarn crafter with a pattern or tutorial to share, we’d love to hear from you. We’re interested in all things yarn oriented: dying, crocheting, knitting, looming, spinning, weaving, and anything else you can come up with. Our only real criteria are that the pattern or tutorial be your original work and that the writing be clear enough for our readers to follow. After all, there’s no point in having a map if it doesn’t get you where you want to go.

For pattern submissions, make sure to include all of the following:
• Craft – This sounds obvious, but tell us whether the instructions are for dying or spinning.
• Description – tell us what the finished item looks like. Use the names of stitches or techniques with some additional detail (e.g., a two-triangle shawl with vine leaf lace forming stylized grape leaves in the triangles, a few stitches of garter down the spine, and an edging that forms large lacy scallops).
• Materials – You don’t have to be specific about brand, but tell us whether the yarn is medium or sport or how many pegs are in the loom. Remember you want readers to have a successful experience, so you want to give them enough information to duplicate your results.
• Gauge or measurements – Tell us how many stitches to the inch or centimeter or how wide the sweater is across the bust. Think of other things to measure for your craft: the number of tbsp of a specific color per quart of water, the amount of roving, the length of the loom.
• Sections and rows – Divide the pattern into rows. It’s often also helpful to divide into sections, such as cuff, heel, foot, and toe for a sock or collar, body, and sleeves for a sweater.
• Finishing and care – Tell us the usual things about weaving in ends and sewing on buttons, but also tell us other details that may be important, like whether we should line a purse or brush a felted item.

For tutorial submissions, make sure to include all of the following:
• Craft – This sounds obvious, but tell us whether the instructions are for dying or spinning.
• Use – Explain why someone would want to learn this skill or when it might come in handy.
• Steps or stages – Divide the tutorial into steps or stages that seem natural to the process or to the explanation. If the tutorial describes a number of different but related processes (e.g., different ways to use beads), be sure to clearly let readers know you’re now talking about something else.
• Details – Provide specific information about what to do, when, and how in cases where detailed explanations may be helpful. Many techniques are simple to execute, but hard to explain, so books and websites use pictures and diagrams to get the point across. Your words need to be clear enough to make the pictures unnecessary.

We’re also open to submissions of other types. If you have an article on some aspect of your craft, a product review, or a review of a craft related book, which is available in an accessible format, send us a proposal.

We’d also love to have more pictures on our blog. If you’ve made one of the patterns that doesn’t have a picture, take a picture of it, and we’ll put it up. Include notes about any changes or a brief statement about your experience with the pattern or the finished item.

We’re happy to post your work. We will probably do a little copy editing to smooth grammar and usage issues and to improve clarity for the reader, so don’t hesitate if you feel nervous about your writing.

To submit patterns, tutorials, articles, reviews, or photographs, email them to us at FingeringYarn@gmail.com.