Skacel Collection, Chuck Wilmesher opens 2015 to share what’s new for the NEW YEAR on the Yarn Thing Podcast with Marly Bird.

Marly first met Chuck in person on a trade show floor. It sounds like they both appreciated the positive vibe of the other!

Chuck Wilmesher grew up in St Louis, got his MMR  moved to Los Angeles after graduate school and worked with Mattel, specifically in marketing toys for boys. He worked with a movie marketing research company. While there he met a fellow who offered to teach him to knit in 2007. He fell in love in fiber!  He says about that time he wondered what he wanted to do when he grew up. He attended a men’s knitting retreat in the Pacific Northwest, met Karin Skacel and kept in touch with her, he later asked if she needed a yarn rep. She didn’t but they kept communicating until he moved to Seattle and started with the company. He is the Director of Product Research and Development, working with the mills that produce product for Skacel and has been with Skacel for four years.

Skacel began with Karin Skacel’s parents. Ingrid brought the Addi Needles to the US from Germany, and really, until then, circular needles had basically been unheard of. Skacel has also offered their own yarn lines, including a wool-free yarn HiKoo, Chuck works to promote the several kinds of yarns in Skacel’s brands as well as the Schoppel Wolle, Zitron, Schulana, Austermann, and Schoeller+Stahl. Because of changes in the industry, it has been increasingly harder to market yarns from other companies, so he really has his work cut out for him, but yet there is fun stuff too like when they get a new baby alpaca from Peru…

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Shannon Okey on the Yarn Thing Podcast with Marly Bird has become the new knitting fan girl experience, I think.

She says she didn’t learn to knit like the rest of us, as a pre-schooler at the knee of a parent or grandparent. (That didn’t happen to me either…) The family is artistic and she learned other things. As an adult and moving to Boston, in boredom went to a yarn store in Cambridge and stated she wanted to knit a cardigan. While she’s working on it ‘got REALLY into knitting’, she started blogging about it as that was the new cool thing to do at that time. Debbie Stoller’s ‘Stitch N Bitch’ book was really taking off at that time and publishers were desperate for the next one, and she wrote a book for ‘tweens (which I think was ‘Knitgrrl: Learn to Knit with 15 Fun and Funky Projects’ published in 2005) and in a short period of time she wrote about a dozen books for many different publishers. What a learning experience that was!

COOPERATIVE PRESS came about after she started looking at the math of a book publication and thought she could do it on her own. She began with The Knitgrrl Guide to Professional Knitwar Design and has 40 publications in it’s repertoire including the recent ‘Kung Fu Knits’ by Elizabeth Green Musselman that we heard about recently when Elizabeth was on during on Podcaster November. (They were mentioned in the chatroom but not by Marly & Shannon, the popular Madame DeFarge books are in that list…. Just check out the list on the Cooperative Press website, the list has some incredibly popular titles you may have heard of lately!)

Shannon says she finds that fiber people are the earlier adopters of technology, in downloading patterns and books, and it’s really driven small business. (She shared the current VAT tax issue that has been a hot topic lately. This blog post by Ysolda Teague was discussed.) Cooperative Press has kept track of digital verses print publications, and looking for ways that customers can save money on purchases, especially the shipping costs, the benefits of ‘Print On-Demand’ ~ especially when a mistake is discovered (‘It happens…’), fixing errata. She sees it as a good thing that the book is available to everyone every where as digital, immediately. Instant gratification is powerful!

She understands that is why pattern sales in Ravelry works. That is also why her magazine Knit Edge is solely digital and she’s considering a craft magazine, knitwear designer trade magazine and on and on. The possibilities are infinite for Shannon Okey and Cooperative Press.

As a side note and JUST FOR FUN! Shannon still does some designing, check out her list in Ravelry. What’s currently ‘On Her Needles’ is her ‘Frozen’ project, of Icelandic Inspired Patterns. She has put out a FREE pattern, and a challenge to DO WHAT YOU WANT with it. This will conclude with voting and prize money.

Another project coming up is Wool Mercantile will offer limited edition runs of specialty fiber things. You can subscribed to that and stay tuned for what’s happening in that.