In the inspiring environment of St. Leonards, I’m moving towards a new chapter of KNITSONIK.
The complex accounts required for trading as a Limited Company are no longer working for me so I’m un-incorporating KNITSONIK LTD and going back to being a sole trader. Before I hang up my director’s hat, I want to reflect a bit on some of what I’ve achieved in the last ten years with my company.
I incorporated KNITSONIK LTD in January 2015. This move was about making a serious job for myself as a professional celebrator of daily life in knitting and sound and followed several years of financial precarity working as a freelance artist and then reaching the end of a year-long post as an early career research fellow. My vision was to create a business that would support me and sustain my practice; one that would enable me to continue making my work without being beholden to the vagaries of academia or arts funding.
In 2014 I’d run a crowdfunding campaign that enabled me to produce the first print-run of 2,000 copies of the KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook (Ravelry link).
My Sourcebook shows you how to turn everyday inspirations into stranded colourwork.
It was one of the earliest crowdfunded knitting books to be produced and I’m still so glad I decided to do it that way. Not seeking a mainstream publisher allowed me to prioritise writing about creative processes and swatching, and to shamelessly celebrate under-appreciated creative contexts like old factories, weeds and roads.
It is those aspects of the book that people seem to love most of all, and I continue to receive messages saying that you love this book and how it’s made you look at daily life with fresh eyes and with fresh hope.
Here is the second print run arriving at our house in January 2015 and my friend Emmylou helping me move it inside.
Alongside distributing my book, between 2015 and 2019 I taught many in-person classes sharing my methods for celebrating everyday life in stranded colourwork at Shetland Wool Week, at Edinburgh Yarn Festival, at Woollinn in Ireland and at Gwlana in Wales. In innumerable KNITSONIK workshops we turned your special precious things into palettes, charts and shading sequences we could knit.
Teaching these classes was something I loved and I am grateful to everyone who has joined me over the years for creative colourwork adventures.
As I taught classes and mailed copies of my Sourcebook out into the world, a joyful global community of makers began coalescing around ideas in the Sourcebook. Folks from everywhere joined in with Tarmac Tuesdays and Yumi (in Japan) and Muriel (in France) initiated a beautiful international online knitted correspondence. I started seeing many needs in my classes that I wanted to try and meet by providing more tools and projects designed to fuel creativity and build confidence. All this laid the groundwork for the KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Playbook (Ravelry link) and its non-identical twin, the KNITSONIK Playbook Colouring Companion.
The Playbook assumes you have explored the creative swatching detailed in the Sourcebook and gives you an exciting set of projects in which to flex your colourwork designer muscles. The Colouring Companion lets you re-colour all the projects from the book to help visualise how they might look worked in totally different shades.
Like the Sourcebook, the Playbook sets out to inspire and enable. It gives you knitting patterns that are frameworks for celebrating daily life in your stitches. Every project in the book gives you what you need to make the design as pictured, or take it in your own creative direction.
Record the bricks and surfaces of your town in a glorious cowl…
…start a #knittedcorrespondence…
…explore scale and proportion in colourwork motifs…
…recolour designs to make them work with your personal colour aesthetic…
…knit bunting that speaks to a shared community context.
The bunting flags published in the book celebrate different pictures of tarmac from across the knitting community…
…but perhaps my favourite use of Liz’s KNITSONIK Bunting pattern is the magnificent Anderson High School bunting co-ordinated by my friend Caroline Simpson. It still hangs in Anderson High School in Shetland today.
No project worked from a KNITSONIK pattern embodies the spirit of the Playbook quite like this one, in which the community of Anderson High School used the blank templates supplied with the book and the whole premise of the pattern to make flags celebrating all the different departments and Shetland’s rich textile heritage. Nancy Hunter updates it each year with a flag celebrating that year’s Wool Week hat.
Between the Sourcebook, the Playbook and the Colouring Companion I have, in the last ten years – shipped 13,000 self-published books out into the world while also continuing to develop new projects, new products and new work (8,000 Sourcebooks, 3,000 Playbooks and 2,000 Colouring Companions).
Shout out to all the fellow small businesses who have stocked my books and helped me with this work!
I am so proud of what I have achieved with the Sourcebook, Playbook and Colouring Companion, and so full of love for all the amazing swatches made in my classes over the past decade. However, it’s become increasingly hard to deal in print books and In 2020 all my in-person teaching work came to a grinding halt when the world went into lockdown.
Brexit has made it more complex for small businesses to ship goods to the EU and caused paper to become more expensive. Postage costs have been creeping ever-upwards, too. When I first started shipping books it cost £7.45 to mail a single copy of the Sourcebook to the USA: today it costs £13.80. Storing books is expensive; I’ve had years when the sales of my books barely covered their storage costs. And today my inbox (yours too?) is full of frightened emails from fellow small-business owners based in the UK who are unsure about how tariffs are going to affect their sales to the US.
We are living in very different times to those ones in which I set up KNITSONIK LTD.
I’ve worked really hard to meet the challenges. When lockdown caused all my teaching work to be cancelled, I founded my online school and taught myself how to create pre-recorded content and deliver workshops via Zoom.
I’ve produced online courses for my own school and for Knit Stars, whose Season 6 includes my online class and cowl pattern, Think Like an Artist (now available to buy as part of a special Wellness Bundle).
My first course – KNITSONIK Bullet Journaling – has had around 1,500 enrolments. I created it to share my messy, kind, creative methods for journaling with the world. I saw a lot of online content about Bullet Journaling that seemed very productivity-focused and perfectionist, and wanted to share the messier, more imperfect, more permissive journaling methods that have helped me. Happily, they seem to help many of you, too.
One of my greatest joys in the last ten years has been hearing from many of you that my journaling methods have brought joy and hope to you during difficult times – or that they have given you a spark of creativity, or inspired you to play more. I can think of nothing I want to do more with my one precious life than to use my creativity for this.
As print books have become more expensive to produce, store and ship, I’ve focused more on digital publishing. KNITSONIK & Friends: Colour to Knit (Ravelry link) builds on the innovations of the Playbook and Colouring Companion in that it incorporates colouring-in as a tool for developing and understanding colours more deeply. This comprehensive book showcases the work of three other designers with each project taking you on a different kind of creative colourwork – and colouring-in – journey. Each project comes with printable colouring-in pages, blank charts and other useful tools to enable you to recolour and reimagine the designs.
In a similar vein, I loved collaborating with my friend Kate Davies on our joint-publication Colour at Work and its accompanying course in my school – Colour at Play.
Colour at Play
A practical online course that shows you how to play with colour
236 students enrolled
Last updated Aug 26th, 2025
KNITSONIK & Friends: Colour to Knit and Colour at Play are both products I wanted to develop after seeing so many students struggling with colour in my classes. They are things I created to build confidence and skill amongst my fellow colourwork adventurers through colouring-in, learning about how other makers think and play with colour, and participating in joyous play and experimentation.
Because although publishing print books and teaching in-person classes are no longer the mainstays of my job, the creative heart remains the same. I remain as committed in 2025 as I was in 2015 to generously sharing ideas; creatively celebrating daily life with what is to hand; and to insisting that there is beauty everywhere – even when all you can see are factories, roads and weeds.
As I figure out next steps, it’s helpful to reflect on all this. To remind myself that all I am trying to do here – all I’ve ever been trying to do – is find an honest way to keep on working as an artist. To make my work, to share it with the world, to be compensated for what I share and create and make.
To remember that this was always about making a serious job for myself as a professional celebrator of daily life who lives to pass on that spirit of creative celebration. As I go through the frankly tortuous process of un-incorporating KNITSONIK LTD I must keep hope alive by imagining that perhaps, without the expenses and administrative burdens of trying to be a corporation and without the ongoing demands of running an online shop, I will have more resources to do exactly that.
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Dearest Fliss
You are an inspiration to us all and I couldn’t be more proud xxx
What a lovely email. Thank you for inspiring me with quotidian color work. I will continue to follow your creative journey and find solidarity with all of us navigating the world.
Thank you Felix for your hard work and inspiration. I feel sure the next step on your journey will continue to bring joy to yourself and many others. Good luck!
Hello Felix,
well firstly I don’t know how to put into words all my thank yous to you. I simply love the Knitsonik universe, all you have put into it, the love, honesty, passion and artistry, and I want you to know that from here in southern Australia I’m thinking of you and sending the warmest thoughts I can at this changing point in your life.
Before reading the other comments, I want to write that I have all the seasons of Knit Stars and have watched all but most of season 2 (I started in season 5 and added all the others over time). There were many, MANY brilliant workshops, yours among them. But if I had to pick just one that has resonated for me over time, it is yours. I am all about color, in making textile art/art quilts, garments, my home, fountain pen ink, paint, all of it. So I think your creative but organized approach gave me a new approach.
Your books (which I ordered before finishing your KS workshop when it debuted) are among my treasures. THANK YOU! And yes–as a traveling art quilt teacher and exhibiting artist, I never ever wanted to do the retail thing because of time. I’m looking forward to whatever you do! CONGRATULATIONS on a brilliant decade, and here’s to more art and color and yarn and wool and international connections (I’m in Maine, northeast of the US) and joy!
Bravo! This is an impressive review of what you have accomplished thus far!
I look forward to seeing what will be next. Knowing how much I have gained from the fruits of your work already, it will be wonderful!
Take the time you need to reset as I am already awaiting announcements of your next steps.
Best wishes!
(Caveat: I may obviously be wrong and read too much of my own experience into this!)
What you have achieved is absolutely impressive and has contributed to making the world a better place for many people, and above all helping us see the world differently!
You describe setting up a business and running it single handedly, being the director and the creator and the office worker and the store clerk and the delivery person all in one. I think it was crucial that you did this when you did, to get the visibility you needed and get your work to reach so many people. But I would also like to believe (which is a way to say I believe but this obviously needs to be true not only for me but also for you) that scaling down now is just as much the right thing to do at the right time, to make more room for the creator.
Because I’m one of the probably many who have only had the chance to be part of your community of teaching and inspiration through online media, I hope and wish and believe that this is where you will continue to be playfully creating!
Congratulations, Felix, on all you have achieved and very best wishes for all that you will achieve, colourfully and playfully, in the future.
I was inspired by a class I took with you at EHF and still use many of your ideas in my messy Bullet Journal.
Thank you for being you, incorporated or not!
You are a bright light and I”M glad you will continue to keep shining. Thank you for keeping me updated on your journey.
Your story is just amazing, Felix. Thank you for posting this glorious look back at everything you’ve achieved. I’ve really enjoyed watching your progress over the years. Your extraordinary creativity, and your joy in the things that many of us fail to notice, are genuinely inspiring. I definitely look at my surroundings differently because of your work. I’ve no doubt you will forge a fascinating new path, one that is really in tune with what we need in these times, and look forward very much to seeing what unfolds.
Wonderful! I loved the Yarnadelic Remixes which wove so many of my interests together into one project…..truly inspirational!
This is surely the start of the next chapter of excellent things to follow. I look forward to following along. I don’t say much but I read and love what you do. Onward!!
Gx
I know the best parts of you will continue, just in some new form. Your creativity, PLAY (most important), generous sharing of what you love and inspiration for us all. Warmest wishes to you for continuing success on your creative journey. Looking forward to seeing what’s next, I’m sure it will be great.
Well, when you look back at all of that isn’t it HUGE as an accomplishment! If you separate the annoying need for compensation that most of us have, and think not about the funds, it is a massive win for you to have done all of that mostly on your own. I need to say one more time how much I have appreciated your Bullet Journal class. The stack of finished leuchtturum 1917s that sit on my shelf are all because of you. I use the back of the book for recipes. One day I was traveling and needed a recipe for a cake that I knew was in the back of one of the books. I called home and asked if someone could pull that journal off the shelf and take a photo of the recipe for me. I think it also introduced them to the journals and I wonder if they took a tour through my life while I was gone. There are 12 of them on the shelf and I am working on #13. I am sure that there are many others who have their own stack on the shelf because of you.
I send along good wishes for the next turn of corner for you and hope that you see something really good for the next chapter. And I hope it includes the sound material that you have been gathering along the way. look ahead, sending hugs too
Félix, you have so very, *very* much to be proud of Not just in what you have tangibly achieved, but all the physical and emotional work that has gone into navigating change during all the years you chronical.
Felix, you are an amazing inspirational woman and I am so lucky to have you as my sister . You have achieved so much over the past 10 years and I am excited for what will be next xxx
Oh, Felix! You are one-of-a-kind. I’m so happy to have been part of your incorporated life and will continue to be part of your unincorporated one. I hope non-corporate frees you to be even more creative than ever. We have to maintain our communities right now, more than ever, and I’m so glad to be part of this one.
Thank you for everything you have done and best wishes for success in this next brave step.
Dear Felix, you have brightened the world and liberated so many knitters from Fear of Color and Fear of Design. Your kind and generous approach to sharing what you love has had a huge impact on knitters worldwide and will continue to do so. Instead of saying So long and thanks for all the fish , I will look forward to hearing about your next chapters.
But seriously, thanks for all the inspiration and encouragement!!!
Dear Felix, I am sure that you will find your way through – with style, humour, colour and élan -as always.
With very best wishes
Pamela
Thanks so much for all the joy and colour you have brought to so many of us. I took a workshop with you at EYF and I learned so much. And had FUN. Bravo and look forward to seeing what you create in the future.
Dear Felix, as always is the case, your wild talent, imagination, brave honesty, and stunning authenticity (I know, sorry, so many adjectives) speak so deeply to me. Congratulations on a remarkable decade of art, creativity, and deeply individual problem-solving.
(In the spirit of the turtle and snail, last week I *finally* watched and listened to your **wonderful** December 2024 Modern Daily Knitting presentation, “Bullet Journaling for the New Year. I appreciate so much all of yourself that you offer.)