A long overdue progress update

Hello there!

All SORTS of exciting things have been happening behind the scenes at gather HQ (amongst others, a wedding proposal!) and both of us have been flat out with both gather and real life (work and children never seem to cut you a break when you most need it right?!).

But, the website is nearly finished and everything has been sent to print! Within the next few weeks we should have large boxes turning up with all our packaging and patterns! It’s an exciting (and nerve-wracking) time to say the least… We’ve still got testing to do on the site but keep an eye out in the New Year and you should see the results of our hard work!

If you want to keep updated and be among the first to see the new patterns, please do sign up to our newsletter (via the link on the right of this page).

(a sneaky peek...)

A progress update

A huge thank you needs to go to our all our fabulous pattern testers for helping us out! I won't lie, it was slightly terrifying to put our hard work out there for people to judge so we were waiting with bated breath to start getting the feedback. The overall response was fantastic! Really positive, lots of nice things were said about the design, the pattern and the instructions so huge sighs of relief all round. That said, there were a couple of fitting issues that we discovered but the pattern is being tweaked as I write this and we're looking forward to having the finished version by the end of this week!

So what have we been up to in the meantime? We're in the process of building our website which is a HUGE job but extremely exciting! There's a new blog design in the pipeline and we've also designed and lined up printers for our tissue, packaging and instructions. Phew.

The other exciting news is we're thrilled to be working with an amazing illustrator who will be creating the drawings for the patterns - all will be revealed in due course!

It's all go at gather - the downside being that this space has been a bit neglected while we work on the rest but that is all to change soon. So watch this space!

Where have we been?

It's been a rather long time since we've been able to update this space - apologies for our absence!

We're still here, we're still working away! We got our pattern back from the graders back in August and sadly it had to go straight back to be re-graded as there were a couple of issues. Since then we've been busy testing to ensure everything is perfect and all our measurements are ok. We've also been hard at work adding all the detail to the pattern and transforming it into something beautiful. We spent a very enjoyable evening brain storming names (all will be revealed soon!) and have been drawing diagrams and re-working our instructions to be as clear as possible.

Sadly, Gather HQ was burgled a few weeks back and amongst various things taken was the laptop which contained all our precious hard work. Heart breaking. We had backed it up a few months back so all is not lost entirely but certainly the most recent version of the instructions has gone and will have to be rewritten. Luckily we still have the file with the finished pattern otherwise I think we may have both suffered a nervous breakdown! As you can imagine this has been a frustrating time and we are now waiting on the insurance company to decide to pay out so we can purchase a new mac and get back on it!

But we're excited still and raring to go with this pattern - now we're approaching the crazy Christmas season we're not planning on doing any pattern testing until the new year. Keep an eye out if you're interested in doing this, you can check back here or follow us on twitter: @gatherkits

Hoping to be back soon with a couple of Christmas crafty posts. That's all for now!

Slowly but surely...

It's been a while since we updated our progress in this space - not because we haven't been hard at work, simply that we've fallen behind our original time plan and things have taken a lot longer than we originally thought.

When we began this venture, we sat down, planned everything out with a clear time frame and gave ourselves deadlines. This promptly went out of the window as soon as we started!

We had wildly underestimated the time involved in the designing, drafting and testing of our pattern - a process frustrating at times but ultimately one worth taking the time to get right. This, coupled with the fact that neither of us are able to spend as much time as we'd like on our project, meant we found ourselves a little behind where we had wanted to be at this time. A brilliant (and rather steep) learning curve though. I suspect that there are very few small businesses that are started up on time and exactly as planned, I feel it's almost part of the process!

So, where are we now? Well, the very exciting news is that our first pattern is currently at the graders, being magically transformed from a one size set of paper pattern pieces into a digital nest of 6 sizes. We're expecting to receive them at the end of this week and, assuming all is well and correct (a rather large assumption I know!) will be putting the call out for pattern testers next week.