A long overdue introduction

My profile information says a bit more about who I am, what I make and where I sell it. But I thought I would introduce myself anyway.

I've been knitting for a little more than a year. It started simply enough. I would join a group of my girlfriends in Michigan who would knit and drink wine, usually on Wednesday nights.

I would just drink wine.

Well, that could only last for so long. Before I knew it, this pastime of my friends' – including Jay, who even spins, dyes and sells yarn from raw fibers, had infected me. That was around Halloween 2006. By Christmas I had "mastered" knitting enough to make a few Christmas presents and a blanket for my nephew's first birthday.

Flash forward roughly a year – and here we are. By the fall of '07 I was back in the groove of knitting and knitting and knitting. It became my meditation in a sense. It calmed me. It centered me (at the risk of sounding like someone who should be listening to Yanni by candlelight with incense burning) and it just plain made me happy to come up with new creations and color combinations and bring them to life.

I knew of Etsy, a Website where anyone who crafts or homemakes things can sell their goods, mostly because of Jay's shop (HERE) so I figured, what the heck. The week after Thanksgiving, with roughly a dozen scarves under my belt ready to sell, I opened my own shop, La Femme Monkita. Click HERE to see it.

With the help of some amazing friends – Brooke to design my banner for the shop, Jesse to tweak it into hang tags and business cards, Jay's experience and guidance, Daniel's Photoshop skills and constant encouragement – La Femme Monkita was off and running.

In the weeks (yes, I can't believe it's only been weeks) since I opened the shop, I've sold roughly a dozen scarves, etc., through the site and I've gotten more than that in custom orders. That's a whole lot of knitting in not very much time...

The good news? I'm still loving every minute of it. I wish I could quit my job and knit all day. My intense reading habit has taken a backseat (it took me about a month to finish my last book, which tipped the scales at only about 300 pages), but I figure it's all worth it. I knit on lunch breaks, during movies, on airplanes and in the passenger seat. I am fortunate to have people in my life who seem to have not yet taken offense (too much anyway) to my habit. I'm just waiting for the intervention.

I'm constantly updating my shop with new items. My latest creation is called a neckwarmer or scarflette, which I've been making complete with vintage buttons that were passed on to me from a collection my great-grandmother and grandmother contributed to throughout their lives.

La Femme's main squeeze, Daniel, wrote a blog about that which is known as a scarflette. You can read it HERE.

And my most recent venture is hand dyeing my own wool, again with the help of Jay at Jennifer Joy Creative world headquarters in Okemos, MI.

So, there you have it. That's where La Femme Monkita came from and is all about.
Again you can check out my shop here:


I plan on regularly updating this blog with photos of each project as it moves along, including the wool dyeing process, custom orders I make and more.

Thanks for checking out La Femme Monkita! Look for more updates soon!

Kirsten