Welcome to Golden Pine Creations

As the introductory post for this website, I thought I should take a little bit of time and introduce myself, and the purpose of this blog.

First, I’ve put off creating my own website for the exact reason that I was not interested in writing a blog. I tried it once, a long time ago (totally unrelated to knitting and crocheting), and to put it mildly it was a total flop. What it basically boiled down to was I didn’t like posting every week, or even every month. I had a new baby, life was busy, and a blog just wasn’t even on my radar.

So why even have a blog? It’s not actually a required part of any website, and definitely not needed to sell patterns. I nearly didn’t include a blog–but then I figured it was a good place to talk a little bit about my design process. It’s probably the same for many designers, but many of my patterns go through multiple iterations before getting to a point I actually like them. And, having studied engineering at college, I really like knowing the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything.

Now, just a smidge about me. I grew up in the southwest of the United States–dry, desert regions that were lucky to get a few inches of rain a year. A good, hard thunderstorm is my favorite weather; if you’re familiar with the monsoon season in Arizona and New Mexico, that’s seriously some of the best weather ever. I grew up basically inhaling salsa and green chile, and I firmly believe that fastest way to get over a cold is to eat chips with spicy, burn your socks off, salsa. Also, the best breakfast in the world is a X-mas breakfast burrito with sausage.

I went to school, studied mechanical engineering, got married, and then proceeded to follow my husband to his home state of Idaho. Idaho is not a desert (okay, technically it is if you’re going by the actual definition of ‘desert’, but it’s not my type of desert). It’s cold here. The morning I’m writing this, the low I saw on my car was -10 F, and literally everything had frost on it. There is no green chile here. There are no wonderful, hole in the wall burrito shacks. There is, instead, snow for around five months of the year, mud and freezing rain until June, and then the most glorious summer anyone has every witnessed. And then it freezes again in September. And I love all of it.

Golden Pine Creations started not too long after we moved to Idaho. I initially tried selling my hand-knit and hand-crocheted items on Etsy–not much luck. Which, really, was a blessing in disguise as I quickly found out that making the same item over and over again got boring fast. I liked doing new things! A couple of SILs and I had babies around the same time, and I was having so much fun designing new baby blankets. Winter hit, and I discovered we didn’t own enough beanies. So knitted hats it was. One thing led to another, and I began selling my patterns. Now you can find them not just on Etsy, but Ravelry, Love Crafts, and a few on Knit Picks as well.

I’m pretty much a one woman show, aside from the technical editing. I design the pattern, knit/crochet the sample, and photograph the item. And I sometimes (grudgingly) even model. Because of this, I don’t get a lot of patterns out per year–I’m lucky to get five. I’ve had a goal of someday having 100 patterns to my name, but at the current rate my youngest will be graduating college before that happens. I’m okay with that though. Life is meant to be enjoyed, and that oftentimes means things don’t always go according to plan.

So since you’re here, browse around a bit, leave your thoughts if you want, and most of all have a wonderful day!

Camilyn