The Secret of Jimmy Beans’ Success

If you’ve been in the online knitting world for a while, you’ve probably heard of Jimmy Beans Wool. An actual yarn store in Nevada, Jimmy Beans is best known as an online marketplace for a wide variety of yarn and supplies and has an annual revenue of more than $7 million.

How did a little yarn store started by a pair of former software engineers become one of the biggest things on the Internet? There are lots of reasons, no doubt, but a big part of it was posting videos on YouTube. As Laura Zander told the New York Times blog You’re the Boss, the company has focused on building its brand since 2007 and used Zappos.com as a model for building their business.

And the company’s YouTube channel has more than 1,400 subscribers and nearly 1.5 million page views, and serves as a great educational resource as well as a way to connect with customers old and new.

Check out the blog for more information on this fun yarn company.

[Photo via the New York Times.]

Fall will be here before we know it, and that means there are holidays coming right behind where we might be entertaining at home. It’s always fun to have a hand knit touch in your home for other people to see, and if you’re going to be in the kitchen all day you might as well have some nice knit dish cloths to use.

I love this little plaid hand towel from Darling Jadore. Use a little bit of leftover cotton yarn from another project for the plaid portion. It looks like the horizontal stripes are worked as you knit and the vertical stripes are done with duplicate stitch, making this a quick and easy project even newer knitters can make.

Combine garter stitch and an easy eyelet pattern worked sideways to make the Annette Dish Towel from Cluck Cluck Boots, which is meant to be reminiscent of flour sack towels. It calls for DK weight yarn and you can work it in one color or two (or even three!).

Add a little more texture with this set of kitchen towels from Whileberry Creative. They’re mostly worked in garter stitch with borders in easy knit/purl patterns, and you can work them in sport or worsted weight yarn.

Two of Wands Shop has another cute allover knit and purl pattern they call the Seersucker Textured Tea Towel. It’s an easy repeating pattern worked in worsted weight yarn, and there’s a chart in the pattern you can use, but don’t have to, if you want to practice knitting from a chart.

The Classic Cloth dish towel from Handmade Home by Connie is another one that can use a little leftover yarn in a contrasting color, or you could color block it our use stripes throughout the pattern. This one uses worsted weight yarn and another easy repeating knit purl stitch pattern.

If you like to hang your towel on the oven handle or elsewhere but it’s always falling off, try the Stay Put kitchen towel from Fancy Step Knits. This project is worked in garter stitch and includes a hole partway through so you can pull the towel through itself over a rod or handle. Stripes are optional but a nice addition.

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