A thrill a minute....

I love creating new patterns.  It still blows my mind that I can draw something on paper, figure out how to turn it into a 3D garment and put it on an actual human and have it fit.  It is awesome every. single. time.

Second to that thrill is the thrill of seeing the finished projects other people make from my patterns.  I love to see new project pages go up on Ravelry or Craftsy, and I even occasionally google my pattern names to see if I can find any blog posts about them.  (Yes, I'm a dork, and yes, I do occasionally find blog posts that people have written about using one of my patterns.) 

The third thing that thrills me is clicking through my orders and seeing where my patterns are going.  Whether it's someone in my own state ("That person only lives 20 miles from here!") or from the other side of the world ("I can't believe someone in Indonesia is going to make a sock monkey hat!") it always fascinates me to see where the orders are coming from. 

By far, Trappings and Trinkets customers hail from the US, Canada and Scandinavia.  But I've also gotten a significant amount of orders from people in Australia, Iceland, England, Italy and Germany.  [Let me just insert here that, as a monolingual person, I am in awe of people who speak English as a second language and still buy my patterns. You amaze me.] 

I probably got the biggest "Wow" out of the order I received from an island near Antarctica, followed closely by Indonesia & Croatia - those places all seem very exotic to a Midwestern girl like me!  A while back, when I started noticing a significant number of orders coming from outside North America, I thought it would be fun to get a map and mark it to show where the orders were coming from.  I thought it would be a fun way to talk about geography with my kids, and, let's face it, it was a way for me to see my thrills in black & white!  I haven't done the map thing yet, but maybe I'll pull it out as an activity to do with the kids sometime this summer. 

I am convinced that one day I'll be going along my merry way someplace on this Earth, maybe close to home, maybe on a vacation, and I'll spy someone wearing something I recognize as having been made from one of my patterns.  I wonder if I will say anything to the person or if I will just smile to myself and know that I would one day get this last thrill on my list....