Kathleen Early Patterns

 family published by 

YarnArts since 1988

This is a picture of our YarnArts start-up in 1988-1989.  It gives you a clue to some of the items being reformatted into color patterns, along with numerous patterns created after that date.  You can see our knitted lion "King of the Jungle" picture sweater in the back ground.  We have a "King of the Jungle" crocheted afghan pattern which we are currently reprinting in color.  It was previously printed in black and white only, with symbols for the color changes.  We will eventually tell you about the YarnArts family and how we started.  We will also talk about the development history of some of our patterns.  ____________________________________________________ This page will be updated as we change but we wanted to tell you about some of our startup goals.  THIS SITE is a changing, growing site which will be updated with new, unusual crochet patterns and helpful answers to crochet questions on our "Pro-tips" page. Kathleen also has a number of cloth doll, knit, needlework patterns and "one-of-a-kind dolls" which she may make available on this site in the future, but this site will be primarily devoted to crochet patterns and general crochet information. We are publishing this site in it's infancy and allowing our fellow crochet enthusiasts to watch and participate in its development. This is a small, individual, personal designer direct site and not a relisting of patterns which are available on large commercial store fronts. We don't buy and resell other peoples commercial patterns.  As with our YarnArts publishing of Kathleen's patterns, this site is family produced and operated (currently by Fred and Michelle) instead of commercially, professionally produced. This allows us to continue upgrading our site, based on our customer's requests and feedback, while keeping it consistent with our personal site goals. We would like to sell enough patterns to make it profitable for our family, yet still have FUN producing them - and hopefully helping our customers have fun from their crochet art, whether they make them for gifts, profit or home display.     We have been designing and publishing our own Kathleen Early Patterns since 1988 under the name of YarnArts, but haven't made them available on the internet until July 2005 when we started individual sales of Kathleen Early YarnArts patterns on E-Bay. We were urged by bidders to quickly make those patterns available on our website. Although Kathleen's daughter Taunia, purchased the kathleenearly.com domain name for her mother a number of years ago, and her son Sean repeatedly offered to set up a site for her, we still didn't have a website in June of 2005.    As a five year old, Kathleen made crocheted "Granny Squares" for show-and-tell in kindergarten and has been designing crochet items ever since.  Now as a grandmother, the family had to drag HER kicking and screaming onto the internet. Kathleen's specialty is soft-culpture crochet art which adds individual personality to stuffed animals, baby dolls, playtime dolls, teddy bears, famous personality dolls and unusual artistic items. We also have toys and patterns crocheted just for fun. We will eventually tell you about the design history of our Bellybutton characters from a dream Kathleen had and why they are always listed with details of their personalities.       Because our one designer, Kathleen Early, is the mother of seven children, many of her designs are based on her family and children's personalities or interests, as they were growing up.  These designs have unique features not normally found in crochet. Creating these crochet patterns while raising a large family, Kathleen has found unique ways to economically incorporate common household items and create special details from common knitting weight or baby yarns, instead of requiring the purchase of expensive and difficult to find plastic parts or special effects yarn.  We will constantly be updating our website with new or reformatted patterns.  If you have any difficulty purchasing patterns from our website: please e-mail us at yarnarts@msn.com with a list of patterns you would like to purchase, your full name and shipping address.  We will send you a PayPal invoice which allows payment even if you don't have a PayPal account.