Jennifer Raymond of Tinking Turtle

Jennifer Raymond of Tinking Turtle was the guest on Yarn Thing podcast with Marly Bird.

Jennifer says she learned to crochet when very young, taught by a helpful occasional caregiver. She says she immediately began to challenge the granny squares she started with ‘What if’s’. She did learn to knit, but was discouraged with dropped stitches and not realizing knitting was harder because it required practice time also. She says she continued to crochet and in College, she credits a yarn store across the street from the campus as helping her get through it. Wanting to knit socks after finding it very difficult to mend crocheted socks, she seems to have become more bi-crafty at that point.

Moving on from college and realizing that office work wasn’t a good fit for her, and not really coming from an entrepreneurial background and thinking that crochet is was not something you could live on, when she and her husband moved to Washington, DC, where she discovered the Yarn Spot. Jennifer taught there and designing took off for her.

Tinking Turtle came about in a discussion with her husband. He is a train officiando and they live in a train town. With a bottle of wine, they were putting togther a model train layout which included their love of turtles, and he was naming the bar and ‘…. and there will be a yarn shop named ‘The Tinking Turtle’. Jennifer says he was so knew to her discussions of knitting that he could not have known how perfect that term is to knitters!

Marly met Jennifer at a TNNA while Marly was ‘claiming Laurinda Redding for her own’ at a booksigning. At this point Jennifer had been designing for about four years and really looked forward to finding her place in the industry. Jennifer finds her youthful appearance can make it hard to be taken seriously. Laurinda showing Jennifer around TNNA and being at Marly’s Designer Dinner, became an opportunity to make connections for her.

Jennifer is still enjoying the thrill of seeing her designs in print. The Mercury Top (Ravelry link) appeared in Interweave Crochet Fall 2015 and another will be in the Winter edition. If you heard her discuss this, you can hear the squeal of excitement in her voice when she describes the pieces. Check out her list of designs in Ravelry.

You can follow Jennifer Raymond’s website, she is in Facebook, also on Tinking Turtle where ever you might look for her like Twitter.

If you missed hearing this live, it is still available as an archived episode where it aired originally: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/yarnthing/2015/10/06/jennifer-raymond-of-tinking-turtle or in iTunes.

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