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What is the 30 Day Sweater?

The 30 Day Sweater is an organizational framework that breaks down the process of knitting a sweater into 30 simple steps. We help knitters get over their fear of tackling a sweater and guide them through designing and knitting a custom fit, seamless top-down, raglan sweater.

We like the top-down raglan construction because of it’s versatility, and through our framework, knitters can choose from a buffet of options that include different collars, button bands, cuffs, and stitch patterns to incorporate into their design.

We then lay out a plan for knitting that custom designed sweater in 30 days with helpful tips and tricks along the way.

What Is The 30 Day Sweater Challenge?

This October we are planning a massive, nation wide knit-a-long we’re calling the 30 Day Sweater challenge.

We want to inspire 5,000 knitters to create a custom fit sweater that reflects their personality.

Using the 30 Day Sweater framework, we believe it’s possible for thousands of knitters to finally have a sweater that fits them perfectly.

What Resources Will Be Available to Participants?

The Sweater Planning Guide

To help with the challenge, we’ve put together a free sweater planning guide which will include yardage estimates for different sweater sizes, a silhouette / body type worksheet, tools and materials list, and a fiber comparison chart.

We also want to include your best tips about knitting sweaters. We’ll include as many useful and unique tips as we can fit from bloggers, designers, and podcasters like you, complete with a photo and link to your twitter and website.

This guide will also include a coupon participants can take to participating local yarn stores to get a discount on their sweater yarn.
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The Book

We’ve taken the 30 Day Sweater framework and turned it into a comprehensive book.

This book consists of a sweater planning guide, design worksheets, and the 30 day plan, as well as an appendix with finishing options and stitch patterns.

We also have developed a deluxe version of the book which contains a line of patterns to offer inspiration and limit choices for the indecisive.
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The Course

In addition to the book, we’ve taken things even further with The 30 Day Sweater Online Educational Course.

This online course uses video tutorials, detailed photos, interactive chats, and a forum to help knitters with every aspect of working through their custom fit sweater. We have downloadable worksheets, as well as calculators that will take a participants measurements and do all the math for their sweater.

We’ll also have a resource section where knitters can learn how to incorporate different pocket styles, button bands, collars, or even steeking to incorporate into their sweaters. All with video explanations to help them along.
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Sweaters made using the 30 Day Sweater Course

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How Do I Get Involved?

There are three ways to get involved with this event, the promotional tour and the 30 Day Challenge KAL and the 30 Day Sweater Design Competition.
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The Tour

Starting in September, we’re launching what we hope will be the largest online promotional tour the knitting world has ever seen.

This won’t be the regular old “hey review our book and tell your followers how awesome it is” type of tour.

We want to create incredibly useful content tailored to your audience with you. We want to cover topics that relate to sweater knitting in a way that is meaningful to your users. This can be through articles, tutorials, interviews, videos, or podcasts.

In fact we have put together a list of almost 100 topics that we can pull from so we can make sure the content is relevant to your followers.

Here are a few examples:

Useful Topical Articles

1. Top-Down Vs. Bottom-Up: Which Sweater is Better For Beginners?
2. Why Haven’t You Knit A Seamless Sweater Yet?
3. 5 Common Sweater Knitting Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

Interview Topics

1. The Antonio Sweater: Knitwear Designer Lacie Lynnae’s Process for Creating a Custom Fit Sweater
2. New Stitch a Day: How Creator Johnny Vasquez Got 25,000 YouTube Followers with His iPhone
3. The 30 Day Sweater: Designers Johnny Vasquez and Lacie Lynnae want to help you knit a sweater in 30 days

Tutorial Articles

1. 3 Easy Cast Ons You May Not Have Heard Of (and How to Do Them)
2. Top-Down Raglan Increases Compared (with Video)
3. 5 Tools Knitwear Designers Use to Plan Their Next Pattern

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With your approval, we can provide a complete guest post, fully formatted with photos and/or videos, so you don’t have to do anything but give your readers/listeners/viewers some really useful and interesting content.

We’ll also include a link to the Sweater Planning Guide in each post as a free gift to your users.
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The 30 Day Challenge Knit-A-Long

After the promotional tour in September, we’ll begin the 30 Day Sweater Challenge Knit-a-Long.

We encourage tour participants to join us in the challenge and lead your audience by giving updates on your progress through social media, blog posts, and/or mentioning it in your podcast (if you have one).

We ask that participants do at least these things at minimum during the 30 Day challenge:

2 social media posts a week on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and/or Instagram
1 blog post a week (if you don’t blog, then a small update in each podcast episode that airs in October)
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The 30 Day Sweater Design Competition

Because the 30 Day Sweater framework allows people to design their own custom sweater, there will potentially be hundreds if not thousands of new sweater designs created during the challenge.

We want to give people an opportunity to be recognized for their hard work, so during the month of November will be holding a design competition, where participants can submit their 30 Day Sweater creations to be voted upon by their peers.

The top 12 most popular patterns will be collected into a new book we’ll be producing in the 30 Day Sweater series, to be published in the fall of 2014.

We’ll also be giving out some great prizes to the winners including a $1000 cash prize for the most popular pattern.

Other confirmed prizes include:

$200 Gift Card to Stitch Sprouts design services*

Design featured at the Stitches West Expo Fashion Show AND a Stitches The Works package for any 1 Stitches Expo in 2014

*does not include pattern distribution

All of our media partners (that’s you), will be eligible to participate in the design competition.
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Great! But What’s In It For Me?

A lot!

Increased Exposure for Your Brand

We want to help promote you throughout the tour and the challenge, so we’ll be sharing any content you produce about the 30 Day Sweater through our social media channels.

Your best sweater knitting tips will be included in our free Sweater Planning Guide which will be downloaded by thousands of knitters nationwide, positioning you as an expert and linking back to your website and twitter profile.

In addition, we’ll be doing an hour long, daily morning show every Monday – Friday throughout the 30 Day Challenge. We want to motivate participants by highlighting you as a guest and talking about your experience working on your custom fit sweater.

There will also be a sponsor page listing all sites that are participating in the tour and KAL.

Free Course Access

All participants of the 30 Day Challenge promotional tour will receive a copy of the deluxe ebook (a $39 value).

For media partners interested in participating in both the tour AND the challenge, we will provide free access to the 30 Day Sweater course (a $129 value).

Commissions On All Affiliate Book and Course Sales

As a reward for successfully promoting this event to your audience, we are offering a 25% commission on all book and course sales that come through your affiliate link.

The commissions will work out accordingly:

• eBook – $4.99 commission per sale
• Deluxe eBook w/Patterns – $9.99 commission per sale
• Online Course – $24.99 commission per sale

Prizes

The top affiliates who refer at least 10 customers will be eligible to win some cool prizes, including yarn, needle sets, and a $1,000 cash prize for the #1 referrer.
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Awesome! How Do I Sign Up?

Click Here to Register

Additional FAQs

What is the difference between the Challenge and the Design Competition

The 30 Day Sweater Challenge is a nationwide KAL with the goal of helping 5,000 knitters complete a custom fit sweater. Not all participants will choose to customize the sweater. They may use one of our example patterns to help guide them along.

The Design Competition is geared toward aspiring and established designers who want to push the framework to the limits and create something totally unique. Using the framework, your sweater should be able to be customized to anyone’s size, so you only have to make the pattern once and it’s instantly scalable.

Both are open to everyone.

Who’s Behind the 30 Day Sweater?

Johnny Vasquez is the founder of Craftory Media, a content company dedicated to providing interesting, useful, and entertaining resources to the fiber arts industry. In 2011 he started the video stitch dictionary website New Stitch a Day and in 2012 began the Yarn Craft Academy. In 2 1/2 years he has produced more than 1,000 video knitting and crochet tutorials and helped more than 750,000 people improve their craft. He designs knit and crochet wear under the label Argyle Sheep, and is also the host of the web shows Fiberstory TV and the upcoming Yarn Review Daily.
[divider] Lacie Lynnae (Vasquez) is a model and knitwear designer you may have seen on the cover of KnitScene Magazine. Her modeling career has taken her all over the world including New York, Brazil, and China. She currently works as a house hair model for Vidal Sasoon and is the in house knitwear designer for the Yarn Craft Academy. She is also a guest instructor on New Stitch a Day and will be joining Fiberstory TV as co-host.