Working with technical editor Tamara Gooderham

Hello! I have been a bit quiet across all my social media platforms lately and on this blog. I have been working away on various crochet projects (I'll share these in a future post) and I have been finalising my fabulous socks! pattern for release.

finished socks

After the testing stage and after making the necessary changes that were brought up I sent the pattern to Tamara Gooderham who many of you may know as craftyescapism, the well known crocheter, knitter,  podcaster, certified crochet teacher, blogger and vlogger! I have known Tamara for a few years now, having successfully worked with her on the Back to School Sweater blog hop in 2017 and this October on the Sock Along 2018 blog hop and I had heard that she had recently done her technical editing training and was looking for some experience so I got in touch with her.

toe and cuff detail

Tamara was excellent at keeping me informed of when she would be working on my pattern and how long the process would be likely to take. Within the agreed time frame she had emailed me with a draft of the pattern with lots of colour coded notes of changes to consider. There were suggestions for clarification, formating and grammar - all with their own colour of "marker pen" and cute little arrows as you can see in the screenshots below ...

screenshot of technical edit

screenshot of technical edit

Looking through now, I realise there were no grammar errors pointed out in pink and I am pretty chuffed with that! If you go ahead and purchase the pattern from Ravelry you will see that I followed through with most of Tamara's suggestions - they really did make the document flow better and look more professionally finished. This is the third time I have sent a pattern to a technical editor and I think the small fee is invaluable for making the pattern stand out from the crowd. It's a final step beyond sending it out to testers - yes, some of them may point out little formatting issues but generally the tester's job is checking the pattern for errors.

detail of heel

I would thoroughly recommend getting in touch with Tamara at the link above if you have a pattern for tech editing. I am sure, like me,  you will be very pleased with Tamara's attention to detail and excellent communication throughout the process.

My fabulous socks! pattern is now available as a pdf download from Ravelry.com, I hope you like it!

Happy hooking,

Marta xx