About Heart to Hand
Heart to Hand is the name of my small business venture(s). Currently, I am making and selling hand knit, one-of-a-kind shawls and purses. I could call them "fantasy." I could call them "bohemian," I could call them "hippie," but mostly I just call them "what I do." Wearable art. There is a possibility that, down the line, I'll develop other items for sale, perhaps not all of them knitted. Stay tuned for further developments.
How Heart to Hand came to be...
My grandmother taught me to knit when I was a little girl. I gave up knitting when my second child woke up at about four months of age. After a break of twenty-some years, I took up the knitting needles again. At first I made scarves. Then I began making shawls. I decided to work my way through the color spectrum. I used all kinds of yarn, and loved playing with the colors and textures. I had found a medium that allowed me to mix colors without making "mud" – you know, when all the colors blend together into a nondescript brown. I made shawls for all my friends. Eventually, I had given one to everyone I knew, but I still wanted to keep making them. The house was filling up. Something had to be done. I had to start selling them if I wanted to keep making them. Thus, Heart to Hand was born.
History so far...
I started taking the occasional knitting workshop, mostly sponsored by the wonderful, and now sadly defunct, Lahara Gallery in Barnesville, MD. After one of the classes, I shyly asked the two owners if they might be interested in any of my shawls. At that time my entire inventory consisted of 11 shawls. They took all 11 to display, and my first sales were from that gallery.
Meanwhile, my neighborhood citizens association sponsored an art fair featuring the work of various local artists and artisans. There I met a woman who made scarves similar to, but at the same time quite different from, my shawls. We struck up a conversation and she introduced me to a local handcrafters guild that helped its members prepare for and participate in local craft fairs. Eventually, I joined, juried, and began to participate myself.
After several craft fairs over the years, I discovered that my shawls really weren't selling well except during the winter months – late October at the earliest. Since there were only a limited number of appropriate venues during that timeframe, I began looking for another kind of venue. That's when I discovered Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade goods. To make a long story short, after a lot of hesitating, hemming and hawing, I finally opened up a shop on Etsy in August 2012.
You will see that while I say that my business is called "Heart to Hand", my Etsy shop is called "Heart Hand Designs". That's because I wasn't able to use "Heart to Hand" on Etsy, so I chose the most similar name available.
