Welcome to Designs by Emily – a website dedicated to patterns for knit picture dishcloths. Here you will find both free patterns and patterns available for purchase. My patterns cost $1.49 each and are available for immediate download as a pdf file. Payments are made securely through PayPal.
A complete list of patterns can be found by clicking on the Products Page link on the top menu. Or you may browse through the various categories of patterns listed along the left side menu. Please do not hesitate to fill out the Contact Me form if you have any questions.
Thank you for visiting my site and I hope you enjoy my patterns!
~Emily
The newly designed site has been up and running for a week now and I have to say that I’m so pleased with how things are working out. The new shopping cart is working well and I haven’t had any complaints yet!
I’ve been hard at work designing a big pile of new patterns. I have had a pile of designs that have been in half finished states for a long time. Some of them have been nearly finished for over a year! One of them has been half test knitted and still on the needles for that long. I don’t even know where it is. I’ve spent the week sorting them out, getting them all into some state of organization and then realized I had quite a large pile of designs that were nearly done. I might need to call on some test knitters soon!
I’ve also been spending a significant amount of time working to redesign the Dishcloth Calendar website. I not only contributed a pattern to this year’s Calendar, but I help out Janet by maintaining the website. I love this new shopping cart that I’m using on my website that I want to switch over the Calendar website as well. And at the same time I’m trying to design a funky new look for it too. We’ll see what I can come up with. If you haven’t checked out the Dishcloth Calendar, you might want to head over to the site and take a peek. It’s a wonderful collection of dishcloth patterns. We’re already beginning to think about the calendar for next year!
Check out the Sale! category for the patterns currently on sale. I’ve marked several patterns down from their usual price of $1.49 to a bargain price of $0.99. Get them while you can before the price goes back up!
Since we’ve had so much snow lately where I am, I wanted to look forward to Spring. I’ve put a selection of Spring related patterns on sale. I picked some flower patterns and some of my favorite Springy patterns to help banish these Winter blues.
In designing news, now that I’ve gotten the website up and running and all the bugs worked out (fingers crossed!), I can get back to designing new patterns. I’m currently working on a series of music related patterns. First up will be a series of music notes, followed by a series of musical instruments. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on any new patterns and I’m really enjoying it. I hope you’ll like them once they come out.
Welcome to the new Designs by Emily!
I have been working on making many changes to the site for the past week or so. You will find all of my patterns here; they have been re-categorized and tagged to make them easier to find. I also have a slightly different web address: both designs-by-emily.com and designsbyemily.com will work now.
One of the biggest changes is that my blog now shows up on the front page. This way I can make announcements and show off new patterns and customers won’t have to go digging for that information. Other new features to the shopping cart are the ability to put items on sale and a more streamlined checkout process. The download page keeps a record of all your downloads and how many times you have left available to download.
I’m very pleased with the changes to the site and I hope you will be too!
The Designs for Emily website is down for maintenance today, Sunday February 14th. I hope to have the site back up and running later this afternoon or evening. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please check back later to check out the new and improved Designs by Emily!
I’m in the last bits of getting the website ready to be redesigned. What you see on the blog here is how the entire site will soon look.
I’ve gotten all the data entry done and the shopping cart is all set up. I just need to do a few final tests and then comes the scary part.
I’m going to migrate all the WordPress files out of the sub-directory they currently are in and into the root directory. The website and shopping cart will be run entirely by WordPress.
I just hope that in the process of uninstalling/reinstalling/moving files I don’t completely crash the site. I have a feeling that this will be the temporary outcome. I’ll be crossing all my fingers and toes when I actually do it because I really, really do not want to set this whole thing up again. And I do not know how it all will work even if I have backed up every file and database.
Ugh. I’m getting squeamish just thinking about it.
If anyone has clicked on my blog link in the last couple of days you’ve seen some big changes going on. I’m very pleased to report that the redesign is going extremely well.
I’ve been hung up for the last day or so in fixing up the “free” page where I have all the patterns available for free downloads, but I’ve gotten that completely straightened out. I’m using a great plugin called download monitor. It took me a day or so to figure out that I needed it, but once I found it, I was able to set up all the downloads in no time at all. Setting up the table on that page was a bit of a nightmare though, even though I was just copying the code from the other page.
I think I have the bones of the site set up and now I just have to spend some time on data entry. That shouldn’t take overly long. It’s just tedious. I’ve reclassified and recategorized many of the patterns to make them easier to find. The monthly system made sense before when I was releasing new patterns all the time and sticking to monthly themes. But now I’ve gotten most of the seasonal themes covered, and the new patterns I’m designing do not fit into that system. This new way will be much better.
I hope that in just another few days (or a week at most) I’ll have the whole site switched over. I’m so excited!
You may have noticed that my blog has suddenly gotten a new look.
It’s not a mistake. I’m going to attempt a massive makeover of the entire Designs by Emily website. The first step will be getting the blog portion set up.
You will (I hope) begin to see a shopping cart set up in the blog. My goal is to integrate the entire shopping cart and blog into one site. Unfortunately, because of the way the site is set up, and because I am an amateur at web design (I barely know what I’m doing LOL), this whole thing will have to be done live. So if you keep checking back, you’ll get to see the changes to the site as they happen.
I do love the new look though! I hope you do too!
I am very excited to announce that the newest Dishcloth Calendar has been released for sale today!!
Every year for the last several years, Janet Nogle has gathered together patterns from dishcloth designers and has put together a wonderful calendar devoted mostly to dishcloths, and including other patterns for the home.
I was very pleased to contribute a pattern to this year’s calendar. The pattern is called Diamond Panels Dishcloth and it is a bit different than anything else that I have designed before. Here is a photo of it:
As you can see, I did not take this photo! Anyone who knows my work, knows that I just slap the cloths on the scanner. Janet is a complete wonder when it comes to photographing dishcloths and she did a fabulous job making my cloth look very fancy indeed!
This cloth is a little lacy, but simple. It just has k2tog, SSK, and yo for the lace stitches. So long as you are careful with your counting, you’ll be able to do it. It also has a simple crochet border.
The 2010 Dishcloth Calendar is called Gifts from the Heart…Back to Basics. It is available for purchase from this site: www.dishclothcalendar.com. You can purchase a digital copy to download for $16, or a printed copy to be mailed to you for $18 plus $5 shipping.
The calendar has an incredible number of patterns this year. Many of the patterns are contained in sets, which will be perfect for gift giving. The Dishcloth Calendar this year also contains many patterns for the home besides dishcloths. There are sets with placemats and potholders, soap sacks, baby bibs and even a doggie/kitty bed! So, head on over to www.dishclothcalendar.com and check it out!
Well, not a lot of knitting, that’s for sure!
But, it’s been on my mind. And I do want to do another Challenge. But before I do a challenge, I really, really need to get the Free patterns/KALs squared away for the next several months. I think I will not start the Challenge until at least February. Things have been a bit crazier than usual around here and I remember how demanding the last Challenge was. I certainly cannot take that on if I’m not completely ready to focus on it! First, I need to focus on the regular stuff like Free Patterns!!
That’s where I need some help. I have a nice idea to add a pattern for December (I know it will be late, but better late than never) and I need some ideas for the next few months. I like to have my Free patterns try to keep with a monthly theme. For example I’ve been trying to think of something for January that will be sort of Wintery that I haven’t done already, but between my boys being sick and the bad weather knocking my head down every few days I haven’t felt very creative. Any ideas?
Leave me some comments and help me come up with some ideas for the year for free patterns. I always feel like I’m playing ‘catch up’ with them and would love to get them planned and out of the way before I try to do anything else. February will also be tricky because I have tons of heart related patterns and I’ve already tried unsuccessfully to do a groundhog. I’m running out of ideas to keep the patterns to a monthly theme. They may just have to start being random pictures which I suppose will be fine, but a bit….random!
In other chatty news, I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. I had a great knitting related Christmas. Between my hubby and my mother I am now outfitted with some very cool new needles and gadgets and lots and lots of miscellaneous knitting notions.
My hubby got me the Harmony interchangeable needle set from Knitpicks that I’ve been drooling over for a while. i can’t wait to try them out. I actually haven’t done any knitting since Christmas! My mom got me a ball winder and a scale. I spent an entire afternoon winding up all the half knit balls of yarn I could find and weighing them. I found 39 half balls of dishcloth yarn that had knit one dishcloth out of and then left lying around at the bottom of my knitting basket. I rewound them all and refastened the label so everything is nice and neat. I’ll be able to get another dishcloth out of each one of those, so I’m all set for a while. Plus all the new balls of dishcloth yarn that I keep buying because I’m never sure of what I have. Because I use small needles (size 5 or 6) and because my cloths are on the smaller side (cast on 37 stitches) I can very easily get two cloths out of each regular 2.5 oz ball.
Did anyone else get cool knitting stuff over the holidays?
I’ll post again in a few days about my progress with planning for the KALs/Free Patterns for the next few months.