Lee Does Stuff

New pattern: Wobble Bass cabled hat! (Plus autumn hats sale!)

September is here and autumn weather is around the corner – perfect time to knit a new hat! Yeah!

So I’ve just released Wobble Bass (on ravelry), a sideways any-gauge cabled garter stitch hat with tons of size/style flexibility – an excellent pattern to use to make a hat for yourself, plus gifts for any hat lovers in your life, custom made to each individual! Two skeins of coordinating yarn will make two matching hats, as you see above and below…

The samples are all in beautiful Knitted Wit yarn – I was quite the lucky designer to get to pick whichever yarns and colors I wanted to play with in all my various samples of this one design. I picked: Superwash Worsted in Cedar and Brown Sugar, Superwash Aran in Prussian Blue and Yellow Brick Road (which is more of a yellowish orange shade), and Cypress Hollow Yarn in Beaujolais and French Kiss – I loved knitting with them all!

The Knitted Wit shop now has yarn pairings for Wobble Bass kits, custom dyed in any two colors you want – and she blogged tons of excellent pairings! I love the shades I chose for the samples here, but I think my personal favorite is actually Peacock and Picante!

My one addition beyond the Knitted Wit yarns was a wedge in my crazy handspun art yarn, and I absolutely love how that turned out! So that’s another great way to go with this design – pick out a nice solid for the main color, then find some leftover handspun, variegated, or anything extra special in your stash for the contrasting wedge.

As for the hat design itself… like I said, lots of flexibility! This one below was made super long – I meant for it to be for an extra slouchy style, but I like it better worn inside out with the brim folded up and a little slouch:

Here it is the two other ways it can be worn: mega slouched and the brim folded up higher for a fitted top (see more photos on the rav project page):

My green sample is a more standard slouchy style – about 1 inch of height was added and it was knit with a loose gauge for a more drapey fabric (drapey in terms of garter stitch, that is). Details about exact numbers used can be found in the ravelry project pages of each hat, by the way – green, brown, blue, orange.

The orange+handspun one was made in the pointed style – this is a simple modification by rounding a number up so that you need fewer wedges. This hat being made with 6 wedges instead of the standard 8 makes for a wider contrasting wedge:

The pattern uses a couple of simple variables based on your gauge – you start by making a gauge swatch, then your cast-on number is the height you want. The short rows wedge pattern is pretty simple, just moving a marker with wraps+turns (into the garter stitch means you don’t have to knit wraps together with wrapped stitches, making it one step easier!), and then the cables are both written and charted.

The cables unravel and blend into the garter stitch back on both sides – it’s meant to be worn so that the contrasting wedge is off center in front, and the cable is positioned asymmetrically, ending in back on one side, and on the side of the head on the other side. So there are around 4-6 inches or so of plain garter stitch after the cable ends.

One of my favorite things about this design is the pacing of it – you start out with the first two wedges, getting the rhythm of the short rows pattern, working the beginning cables, then getting started on the main cables, then the third wedge is the colorwork wedge, which is the most complex wedge. Once that one is over and you switch back to one color, you’ve only got a couple more wedges of cables, which go more quickly now that you’ve gotten the hang of everything, then you end the cables and speed through the last couple wedges of plain stockinette, which go by super duper quickly and you’re done! Fun quick knit!

There are lots of photos and how-to help for the colorwork wedge, photo tutorials for cabling without a cable needle, a photo how-to for the provisional cast-on, and detailed instructions for grafting the garter stitch edges together for a seamless back. The pdf is 18 pages total, with the written pattern itself on 4 pages, the cable charts on 2 more pages.

So the pattern includes all the info you need for sizing customization, but there are also lots of obvious modifications you could make if you want – like making the contrasting wedge wider by working two wedges in contrasting yarn instead of one wedge, or skipping the colorwork altogether to make it an easier knit, or making the entire thing in two colors!

Test knitter Sonata tried out a shaping modification for a slouchy style, stopping the transition rows of each wedge short above the cables to make the brim come in a bit, and working an extra wedge. I’d love to see any modifications anyone tries out – be sure to put your Wobble Bass projects up on ravelry to share them with us all! 🙂

So hey, to celebrate this new addition to my ever-growing hat pattern collection, I’m having a hat sale for this week! Now through Sunday Sept 9th, enter coupon code autumnhats to buy 2 hat patterns get 1 free!! (Add at least 3 hats to your cart on ravelry or my site, then enter the code to get one free.)

This includes the Remixed collection since it has 2 hats (Gentle on my Mind and Wild is the Wind), Terrapin, Ocean Breezes, Custom Tritops, Brimming with Color, Haka, Mr. Pointy…

…Spiraling Stripes hat set, and Game Knitting since it includes lots of hats! (And Wobble Bass of course! All patterns are on leethalknits.com as well.)

This is also an “I’m going to the UK for 3 weeks – please forgive me for not replying to emails, comments, forums posts, until October” sale 😉

And while on that topic – if you have any pattern questions that other knitters might be able to help with, try asking in the forums and hopefully someone will be able to help you out sooner than I’ll be able to. I love all the yarn talk happening in the mystery shawl knit-a-long thread! If you have any questions about Wobble Bass, just go ahead and start a new thread for that; maybe one of my awesome test knitters will be able to answer, or any other leethal knitter. Thanks all for helping each other out while I’m gone! Yay knitting community!

UK adventures are approaching fast!

I’m going to the UK! Really soon! The summer flew by, as it often does, and now September is just about here and I’m getting on a plane in one week!

We’ve been preparing all summer – we bought raincoats and backpacks, lined up a house sitter, I’ve been working ahead like crazy in order to take the time off, etc – but it hadn’t really actually hit me until last night that we are really going.

Pete’s parents are taking us on a 3 week long adventure throughout England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland; last night they sent us the official itinerary and all of the sudden it was real! It’s really happening, whoa! So, the main point of this email is to ask you, my dear readers…

Where should we go?? I mean, the cities are planned out, but I need yarn shops, record stores, vegetarian-friendly restaurants, smaller museums that we might not know about, other sights off the beaten path, etc…

The places where I know we will be spending a day or more are: London, Bristol, Criccieth, Dublin, Galway, Belfast, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and York. I know there will be day trips to Bath, Brighton, and lots of other in-between places… we don’t know specific plans, which is making it more exciting for us! We’re just along for the ride, ready for amazingness!

These photos here were all taken by me 10 years ago when I studied abroad for the summer of 2002 at the University of Sussex in Brighton, and took lots of day trips to London and other nearby spots, and long weekend trips to Scotland (Glasgow and Edinburgh), Paris, Amsterdam, and Spain (Madrid and Barcelona).

Although I did spend that time in the UK, I was a pretty different person then – I wasn’t even a knitter!! – and I don’t remember tons of specifics, as my memory fades over the years… so my experiences back then aren’t going to factor into our plans for this trip a ton. My #1 favorite place I visited back then was Scotland, so I am extremely excited to go back there!

If you want to see more photos from that time, I’ve just put a bunch of the best shots on flickr, from all the countries I visited. As for photos this time, I’m hoping to be able to tweet/tumbl/instagram photos throughout the trip, but I don’t know how connected we’ll be most of the time… Oh, and that reminds me – blog comments are a fine way to tell me recommendations right now, but if you want to recommend anything after next Monday the 3rd, I might not be checking blog comments as much as email or twitter – so tweeting place recommendations @leethal is probably the best way to get them to me 🙂

Thanks for any knowledge you can pass on, and I will surely share tons of photos, stories, etc, with you when we return! I even have some crafty projects planned for the skies and roads!

Mystery shawl knit-a-long!!

It’s beginning! Well, it’s in the very beginning stages of beginning, but yeah, you can now sign up for the leethal mystery shawl 2012 knit-a-long! Woooo!

The knitting won’t actually begin until October 1st, but if you sign up now you’ll get the week 0 pdf with all the yarny info you need to decide on yarns/colors… there are lots of options! Shocking, I know!

The mystery shawl is for any weight yarn – make any size in any weight – and there are lots of different ways you can choose to work with color, from the most simple 1 color for the background, 1 color for the contrasting details, all the way to some various complex options involving 2 colors for the background and multiple colors for the contrasting. The week 0 pdf goes into some details about the options without giving anything away about the design. And you can catch some glimpses here of how there are small details of color over a solid background…

It’s hard doing a mystery photo shoot! I decided to do a modeled shoot, to give the knit-a-long more leethal personality, but how do you photograph yourself modeling something without showing what the thing looks like? Tricky, I tell you! So one idea I came up with was breaking out my pinhole lens – the blurry shots (below 2 and the top one) are pinhole! Fun stuff – I really should play with it more often!

So, a few more details are on the ravelry page, and my leethalknits.com mystery shawl page includes yardage estimates, which are also in the week 0 pdf of course. Also on that page, you’ll find 6 different mystery photos with the text like the one below, which you can download and use as placeholder photos on your ravelry project page.

As for the knit-a-long itself: the 5 pattern section pdfs will be released to knit-a-longers each Monday in October (starting the 1st); each following Friday, a spoiler pdf will be released with photos of how that week’s section looks (which you can choose not to open). There will be a ravelry forum thread for each week, where you can be free to post photos and talk all about how it’s going, and there will also be a photo-free no-spoilers thread for questions.

Sign-ups right now are $5; when knitting starts on October 1st, the price will go up to $6, same as the final pattern price. The complete pattern will be released on Monday, November 5th.

Something super exciting for Portland knitters – there will be an in-person home base for the knit-a-long at my favorite local yarn shop, Twisted! Details will be announced very soon in the Twisted rav forums; I’ll be in attendance most weeks, if not every week, at the real life knit night, so I can answer questions, photograph your in-progress shawl for your rav page, and refuse to tell you if you’re right about future section predictions 😉 It’ll be so hard for me to be mysterious, but I’m looking forward to it so hard!

If any yarn shops anywhere else want to host in-person knit-a-longs in your shop, the mystery shawl is available wholesale through ravelry’s in-store sales program. The pattern works with any weight yarn, so you can pick out favorite shop yarns that would make good shawls – if you want to know if a particular yarn would be a good match, ask me and I’ll let you know!

Speaking of yarn… The Anzula sample I mentioned I was working on a couple weeks ago, in the above yarns, turned out beautifully! The yellow and green are the main two colors, and there are small details throughout in the navy and caramel colors. It’s a large size and it’s so cozy I want it to not be summer so I can wear it constantly!!

And I’m currently working on my final sample, a small size version in Black Trillium Merilon Sock yarn, in a subtle dye lot of the Star variegated colorway, with a recycled white silk (or unknown silk blend?) as the contrasting yarn – photographed below before unraveling the reclaimed sweater piece. I am super loving it! Warning about using indie dyed variegated yarns for this shawl: if using a variegated yarn for the main color, it needs to be very subtle, with no contrasty colors involved. This skein of the Star yarn is perfect, but I’ve noticed that other skeins in the same colorway are sometimes much less subtle – still beautiful, but with darker purples and a more intense variegation. Wonderful for other projects, but not for the main color of this particular shawl. Point being, if you do choose to use any variegated yarn as the main color, buy it in person so you can look at the exact skeins and make sure they are quiet enough, in terms of contrasty-ness.

If you have a contrasty variegated yarn that you’d love to use, you can totally use it as the contrasting color in the shawl! Just use a solid as the main/background color, something neutral or nicely matching with the variegated, and it’ll work out great, no problem. So many options with this shawl, you can pretty much use whatever yarn grabs your attention. And then you can head over to the ravelry group forum and share your yarn choices with everyone! Yeah!

I can’t wait for cast-on day, and I know it’s far away right now, but it’ll come quickly I’m sure! For now, thanks for your early sign-ups, since they help me out in this summertime slow period, and have fun picking out your yarns! Yay!

leethal word of mouth sale!

Hey fans of leethal knitting patterns, this post is for you! I am going to try out an experimental sale during this summertime lull in the knitting world – a word of mouth sale!

Here’s how it works:

You are a fan of my patterns.
You tell a knitting friend that you think they might like my patterns, or your twitter friends, your ravelry group friends, etc.
You give your knitting friend(s) the link to this sale page, where they tell me their names/emails and your name/email.
I send them coupon codes to buy 1 pattern/ebook, get 1 free, expiring in a week on Wednesday, August 8th.
They use the coupon codes, and at the end of the week I count up whose codes have been used.
I send out referrer coupon codes to YOU – totaling $1 off for each friend you’ve referred (no limit). (Yours expires another week later, on Friday, August 17th.)
Everybody wins!

I’m running it for a week to see how it goes… if all goes well, I may do this regularly, like once every few months or something, we’ll see. I’ve gotten referral and referrer discounts from my hair stylist, tax guy, etc, so I figure, why not give it a try, eh?

Just so you know, I will be releasing mystery shawl knit-a-long sign ups very soon (tomorrow if all goes well), so these coupon codes will work on that!

TNNA! plus some new things…

First, exciting news, I have a new Quick Knits print book of an assortment of 12 of the most popular patterns! They all use no more than 20 yards of yarn, and they come in a 16 page high-quality printed booklet for $12. When you buy through MagCloud, you’ll also get a free pdf download of the book, great for iPad or other device viewing! (rav link)

Besides that brand new pattern collection, I also now have print versions of my Terrapin and Flippable patterns (for sale on MagCloud here), and I’ve updated all of my print patterns so that they all come with a free pdf version of the booklets when you buy through MagCloud. (Note that these are pdf versions of the print books, not the same pdfs that you would buy through ravelry or my site – same patterns, different formatting, and they won’t go in your rav library.)

These brand new patterns are now also available to Portland locals at Twisted, and will very soon be in Richmond, VA at Rag & Bone! If you own or work at a yarn shop and might be interested in my patterns, check out my wholesale page with everything you need to know! If you think my patterns would be a great fit at your favorite local shop, tell them to check out my stuff at leethalknits.com, or let me know the name of the shop and I’ll get in touch with them! Okay that’s done, moving on now…

So, I’d been meaning to get those new print patterns set up for quite some time, but the thing that finally made it a top priority was TNNA – I went to this biggest convention of the year for the first time (back in June)! I wanted to have my print patterns and catalog all up to date, so yeah, I did that, plus new business cards (and my new website, of course!), and then I headed to Ohio and my mind was blown with how many people I met… by the end, I was the most exhausted I’ve ever been, in an awesome way!

If you follow designers and other yarny type professionals on twitter, or blogs, or where ever you do your following, then you’ve surely heard of TNNA – it’s an industry-only convention, where yarn companies, designers, etc, show off their stuff and yarn shops place their orders… unless you go as a designers without a booth, like I did, in which case it’s more for just meeting a million people and passing out business cards and wholesale catalogs whenever possible.

I did lots of walking around Columbus (which I liked a lot!), hanging out with tons of designers who I either knew online and met in real life for the first time, or just met for the first time period, and we’ve since become internet buddies, talking shop. It’s indescribably great to talk with big groups of people who all do generally what I do, which is a completely solitary job, about all different aspects of being a designer – and I do have good designer friends here in Portland but it’s different when it’s a wide variety of lots of different kinds of designers… Anyway, it was great.

I just brought my little point-and-shoot camera since I knew photography was off-limits inside the convention and I didn’t want to have to carry around my normal camera if I couldn’t even use it most of the time… So I ended up taking very few photos, sadly, the best ones all seen here. This is the North Market across the street from the convention center, where the ice cream could be found, and other good food.

I got new shoes just before (which was bad news, of course, since I was still breaking them in and they killed my feet by the end of the second day, so I had to wear my super dorky running shoes for 2 days which I brought as back-ups in case I might need them), and I finished embroidering my plain black bag on the plane there:

Alex and Stephanie had the coziest booth in all the land, so we took breaks there as needed, especially the last couple days as the exhaustion got more severe. Here’s Stephanie (Tiny Owl), Alex (Dull Roar), Stacey (Fresh Stitches – with birds in her hair!!), and me, squeezed onto the blow-up sofa:

Of course I had to go to Jeni’s each day (just once per day though, not a big deal!) and since their small size can be 2 different flavors, I got to try 8 flavors – I think my favorite was the goat cheese cherry, but the lemon blueberry was fantastic, and the black coffee, and the juniper lemon curd, and the pistachio honey….. There’s Cirilia in the background, who was so busy actually working that she barely got to hang out, bummer (but I’ll be seeing her at Knit Fit! in Seattle soon!):

The Craftsy party was a definite highlight – an insane claustrophobic highlight! In this crowd shot, you can see Daniel Yuhas in focus in the center there – I met him for the first time in Columbus, even though we live in the same city!

Here’s Jess having a super adorable Marilyn Monroe moment over a vent:

I like taking photos of people taking photos… here’s Mary-Heather (Rainy Day Goods) and Sarah (Sexy Knitter):

And Sarah and Alex, yeah it was a silly fun party:

There was lots of hanging out and knitting at night, of course, and laughing, and trying to stay awake… Alex doing one of those things and Sarah doing the other:

Other highlights:

I didn’t get any photos with her at all, but on the first day there I met up with the awesome Jaala and did an interview for Knitcircus! You can read the article here (pdf), in which I’m labeled a “ninja innovator”! Love it!

I shared a cab with Lisa Bogart, who just released the book Knit with Love – she’s super nice so you should check it out!

I had a great roommate experience with Jessica, who has a fun blog and podcast, so you should check those out!

Since I took so few photos, I got permission to grab a few from friends… Here’s Stephanie and me wearing her fabulous deer hat, taken by Katy (and there’s another cute shot of us on Hilary’s blog).

Hilary (The Yarniad), Sarah (in her incredible Lady Sybil Jumpsuit!), and me, taken by Alex, at the brew pub where I got maybe the best mac n cheese I’ve ever had:

TNNA ended up being so much about the people, that I haven’t even mentioned the yarn! Oh the yarn! Yummm how I do love yarn. I met lots of nice yarny people, and made note of many companies I’d love to work with at some point. One of them was Anzula, who offered me some gorgeous yarn for my next design! They were super nice and their yarn is beautiful and I am now knitting this into a sample for my upcoming mystery shawl knit-a-long!

Mmmmm yes I love it! Oh and what was that? Mystery shawl knit-a-long? Yup, you heard me right! The actual knitting will begin on October 1st, but more details and sign-ups will be released very soon!

Twitter mystery KAL pattern revealed: Orthogonal!

Well the twitter mystery knit-a-long came to an end on Friday, and I think it was a success! If you joined, I hope you had fun! If you didn’t know about it in time, I plan to do it again in the future! (Keep up with the leethal ravelry group if you want to know the latest on leethal knit-a-longs!)

So, now that that’s over, the pattern is released as a FREE pdf to all! It’s called Orthogonal, and it’s a cowl or scarf (as short or long as you like) worked in modular panels with a few different options. Since it’s free, I won’t go in to tons of details here – you can click here to download right now if you want it!

The whole thing can be lacy or not, with 3 different pairs of panel options, and the panels each switch directions, without any picked up stitches! There are intricate lace panels (which are both charted), and 2 different simple panel options, in which some striping is recommended to show the directional switches.

Stripes in adjacent panels will be perpendicular, or orthogonal! If you’re not into the lace at all, you could work the whole thing in the non-lace panels – linen stitch and seed stitch – and have a more dense, simple piece that would look awesome with stripes!

Many thanks to Star for modeling with me, and to Pete for being photographer! I am way into both of my samples, especially the lighter one that Star’s wearing – so happy with how the colors and stripes turned out!

This pattern ended up being much more complex than I’d originally planned (as many of my patterns tend to do) but I’m keeping it free because that was always the plan, with the twitter mystery format. It did take me tons of time though, so if you like this pattern, it would be real neat if you wanted to check out my other patterns and consider buying any that you love, to help me keep doing what I’m doing! ❤

In other news, I want to spread the word to Portlanders about an amazing yarn spot I found through the Portland rav group. It’s this organization called Project Grow which takes yarn donations from shops and is selling them all for $4 per skein, so it’s both super cheap and going to a great cause! I went in planning to get like 2-4 skeins probably, but I couldn’t resist going through all the bins, and since it seemed like such a great place to give money to anyway (and there were goats!!), I walked out with this:

And then a few other announcement-ish things…

I am on Math4Knitters podcast!

I will be teaching 2 classes, plus hosting a Game Knitting night (which I’m SUPER excited about!) at Knit Fit! in Seattle November 3-4. Okay I think I already sort of announced this actually, but the class schedule is up now… I’m teaching a class on the sideways edge cast-on and bind-off, and another on self-publishing. Yay!

I’ve been super occupied lately with working on some future designs which I can’t show you, the main one I’m obsessed with being my future mystery shawl knit-a-long pattern! This KAL will start at the beginning of October, but the pattern is just about done, so I’ll probably start sign-ups extra early just for fun… I am SO excited about this design, seriously, yeah, so excited.

One day my log will have something to say about this.

Way back on leap day Pete and I took a 2 day trip up through Washington, guided by an itinerary of Twin Peaks related stops. It was awesome!

Besides all the Lynch nerdery involved, it was also a fun way to see tons of gorgeous places all over the great pacific northwest. I love Oregon oh so much, but wow, Washington is kind of amazing. More of that later, as I take you chronologically through our journey…

There are tons more photos on flickr; these are a few select favorites to show you the highlights. So yeah, we started at the beach where Laura Palmer’s body was found – the log was pretty spectacular!

The Kiana Lodge, which was probably the most major Twin Peaks location, used as the Blue Pine Lodge and the interior of The Great Northern and other interiors as well I think, is right on that beach…

And it’s all kinds of cool, and some pretty Lynchian creepiness as well…

The buildings were all closed but we peeked through many windows…

So then we headed over to our hotel, which was just around the corner from the lodge (and across a bridge from Bainbridge Island) – the big building on the left of this photo (that’s the log on the right):

Over there where we stayed, the owls are not what they seem…

Coffee table top in the hotel lobby:

That night, we took a short drive across the bridge to Bainbridge Island and checked out Churchmouse yarn shop there, then had dinner at the buffet in the casino next to the hotel. We considered playing blackjack, in the Twin Peaks spirit of One Eyed Jack’s, but there was a minimum bet more than $1 and we didn’t feel like throwing away money… yeah, gambling isn’t our style 😉 We did loose a few dollars in the nickel slots though; see, we’re not total party poopers! Anyway, the hotel lobby area is overlooking the shore, so we had our breakfast the next morning by the window:

Then we got on the ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle…

Which was amazing! But… oh wow so cold!

Once back on land, we drove straight through Seattle and out into the wilderness, then into a small town for lunch and pie…

…at the Double R Diner! Er, Twede’s Cafe actually:

Black as midnight on a moonless night:

Then we drove through the small town roads and took in all the Twin-Peaksyness of it all…

…imagining that the teens were up to no good, of course (they were walking on the railroad tracks!)… We even witnessed a local cop slyly passing a note, along with a secret handshake, to the clerk at the local creepy thrift shop (the secret part probably being in our imaginations, but the rest was totally true!).

Giant log:

And up the road awhile, we arrived at Snoqualmie Falls, also the exterior of The Great Northern:

Holy wowzers, it was majestic!!

After taking in all that awesomeness, we hit the road again for a quick drive over to our next stop – and we passed by this bridge (pretty sure it’s this one)…

…and some more picturesque scenery.

Then we turned the corner, and were at the Sheriff’s Department…

…which overlooks the sawmill:

We needed a bit of a rest after a long day, before hitting the road back home to Portland, so we stopped off at the Roadhouse!

Sadly, the inside is nothing like what you’d think/hope, but it was still cool to have a beer at the Roadhouse, if you’re a big nerd that is.

And that was that, some more beautiful Washington nature and we were on our way home.

It was quite the 2 day adventure! If you live in the northwest, you should totally copy the trip; even if you’re not a huge Twin Peaks nerd, I still recommend some of the stops. Amazing stuff, really. Like I said, check out flickr if you want to see more – I took over 800 (!!) photos total, which is why it’s taken me three and a half months to edit them and blog the trip. I narrowed it down to a mere 174 on flickr though!

And I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes (because we have a Doug Fir tree in our backyard)… Got to find out what kind of trees these are. They’re reeally something.

leethalknits.com! 20% off all patterns! yeah!

My new site is up! Head to leethalknits.com to explore all my knitting patterns in one place.

To celebrate this launch, you can save 20% off all leethal patterns and ebooks! Enter coupon code leethalknits to use it on any number of my patterns you want!

That code will work for a week, ending next Thursday the 14th. You could take advantage of it to get $4 off Remixed if you don’t have the collection already 😉 Want to learn more about the website? First of all, when you’re on the home page, hit refresh a few times – there are 17 different knitting-progress photos on the left that randomly rotate. I had fun making that part!

I wanted the site to be as simple as possible – an organized place to browse through all my patterns (including all quick knits, which are separate and not well organized on leethal.net), with minimal details crowding and cluttering… With as many patterns as I have (over 80), it was impossible to make it as clean and simple as I’d hoped, but I think I managed to do okay.

I did build one page with all the patterns (above) – clickable from the bottom of the home page – and I considered making that the home page, but I like dividing the patterns between collections, solo, quick knits, and free; it feels more organized that way.

So, there are those 4 main category pages, pages for the ebook collections, and then each pattern has its own page (with the exception of the quick knits, which are all in their pairs). The pattern pages are just a few key details, links to the rav page, photos, blog post, so you can click over to learn/see more details if you want, and then buy buttons, just the basic essentials.

I tried to make it all as easy to navigate as possible while keeping it clean and minimal (for me at least, it’s very minimal). Besides the pattern pages, there are just one info page and one wholesale page, and that’s it. See? Minimal!

It’s not perfect for mobile viewing, but it functions. For some reason, on my iPad, the heading on the home page doesn’t align to the right like it’s supposed to, so it overlaps a lot with the background photo, but oh well, I think all the important elements work. (Let me know if you come across anything that doesn’t work on your browser or device? This is the downside of amateurishly building my own sites, I’m not knowledgable enough to be confident it works on all browsers, so I have to ask these things… hopefully it works fine and there won’t be any problems.)

I put a little section of feedback quotes on the info page – all taken from ravelry project notes. If I put a quote by you here, I hope you don’t mind! I’ll be rotating them out as I read new quotes I want to add… There are also lots of links on that page, so you can easily click over to leethal.net, the blog, craft tutorials, leethal groups and social media presences, etc…

So yeah, that’s my new site! Enjoy! And happy knitting!!

Pop cobbler and lots of other stuff and news and things

Okay I’m going to jump around a bit since I’ve been gone for awhile (from here, busy times) – first, I’m extending the raffle for the Remixed knit-a-long by a few days. I’ll be picking winners on Monday night or Tuesday morning, so you have till then to get any Remixed projects you’ve made up on ravelry (with photos) to enter the giveaway! (More in the rav forums here.) If you’re late to the KAL and just starting a project now, that’s okay, the rav project photos can be in-progress and you’ll still be entered in the raffle!

Speaking of knit-a-longs, there are some changes to the twitter mystery KAL; it is now going on a bit longer, ending on July 6th. Section 2 still ends on June 26th, but now I’ll be giving you some options via tweets for what to do after that and there will be some new repeat rows tweeted daily, with the whole thing coming to an end after a couple more sections of those repeat options. The free pdf will be released at that point, once the tweets are all out. Above and below are some somewhat mysterious photos, but you can check in with the ravelry group weekly threads (or my flickr stream) to see weekly progress photos – we’re now a bit into section 2 so you can get an idea of how the construction is working.

Yesterday, June 1st, marked an exciting anniversary for me – 4 years since leaving my day job to be self-employed full time! (Well, May 27th actually, but I always think of it as June 1st being the self-employment mark.) Since my high school and college graduations happened after 4 years, and I worked day jobs out of college for exactly 4 years, I kind of feel like I’ve graduated from my self-employment struggling trial period or something, like it’s really official now and I’m beginning the next stage of my life where hopefully this whole career thing just keeps getting better! Yay!

Another fun thing, though completely off in a different direction… we had a couple friends over last night so I decided to try out this insane recipe (found via pinterest), mostly out of intense curiosity. It totally worked! For my version, I used 1 bag of frozen strawberries and 1 bag of frozen blueberries, white cake mix, and ginger ale. We ate it with some Tillamook ice cream on top:

We want to try it with different experimental variations – I think our next attempt will be with apple slices, spice cake mix, and Dr. Pepper! (Pete’s idea) And next time I think I’ll stir it up just a little so that all the cake mix gets wet – the recipe blog post warns “If you stir the two, you will have a cake like topping” but that sounds pretty good to me!

I took some photos of a squirrel in our front yard, and I thought you might like to see them. Speaking of photos, I just finally finished going through and editing over 800 photos I took over our 2 day trip up north 2 months ago (they’re not all flickr’d yet), so you can expect a blog post about that soooon! The main thing I’ve been working on for the last month or so is my new website – leethalknits.com – which will be the place you can find all my knitting patterns, organized and separated from everything else leethal. I feel like leethal.net is getting cluttered and needs to be redone a bit, so this new site is the first step, then I’ll be fixing up leethal.net to be more representative of what I’m doing now. So that’s that plan.

A couple other things… I am going to be teaching at Knit Fit! in Seattle in November, along with many other awesome teachers and I’m super excited about it! If you’re anywhere near Seattle, I hope you can make it; you can follow the Knit Fit! blog to learn more about everyone involved and stuff. I may be doing another fun thing besides teaching… still a secret for now, but it might be awesome!

A little while back I was interviewed for Knitters Rumble blog, so you can read that if you’re interested. I’ve been tumbling a few things lately, like movies and records, so when I’m absent from this blog, at least there’s that… I do have several posts planned for here… anyone want to give me extra hours in the day so I can do all I want/need to do? Damn time! Anyway, one thing at a time, and for now I’m going to try to get this new website done, then move on to the next things… So for now, keep on doing stuff! And happy knitting!

Remixed: the music part

During this Remixed waiting period, while all 8 patterns are out but the rest of the ebook is still in the works, I thought it would be fun to talk about the music part of the project! As you’ve seen, I’ve made album cover artwork pieces for each pattern, of the album for which the pattern was named:

You can click on these mosaics to see my drawings next to each actual album cover:

So, want to see how I made each piece? They are hand-drawn with pen, but I traced the actual pictures, using my awesome light table (from Ikea’s kid section many years ago, one of my best Ikea finds)…

I started out by putting together a messy collage in photoshop – the original album art with my Remixed knit piece pasted in. These were just meant to be printed and traced, not to stand alone, so they aren’t great quality, but I like how they look so I’ll show you my favorites:

I took a few process photos during the creation of the Rumours art, so here’s the collaged cover for printing (the levels are lightened to save ink and show more detail in the dark areas for tracing):

Ready for tracing:

And here is my drawing, which was scanned…

…and the final step was filling in parts with black in photoshop. Done!

My pdf cover designs are meant to kind of mimic the front and back of a record, with the pattern bullet-points acting as a track list… vaguely…

So that’s the music element of Remixed. Since all the patterns are named after albums that I like, it was obvious that a Remixed mix was in order! So I had lots of fun making one, and gave away copies for my latest Remixers giveaway:

The winners got the physical disc, artwork and all, but I want to digitally give away the mix for your listening pleasure! (You have to have Spotify, but a basic membership is free.) That link should take you to the whole playlist ~~(I hope it works and plays all tracks… still don’t completely understand how Spotify works with sharing playlists)~~.

Update: So, turns out the entire mix isn’t public on Spotify, but most of it is now. I put the playlist into Spotify by dragging it from iTunes, and I assumed it would automatically link up to Spotify tracks, or however that works, since it told me the playlist was public. But then when I posted it in my Tumblr, it showed as “playlist is empty”… So, I googled and read faq’s and forums for an hour, tried going through every individual track and telling it to update through Gracenote, which totally should have worked I thought but it didn’t, still empty. I finally went through every single track and searched for it and dragged it into the playlist and deleted the old one, except that 5 tracks don’t exist on Spotify. So you can now click and listen to the mix minus the Zappa, Metric, Mates of State, and Blondie remix… I’m kind of hating Spotify right now. Grr. (So, does all this mean that all my other “public” mix playlists on Spotify are empty as well? I sure wish Spotify would tell me things like this instead of letting me go on believing that I’m sharing my mixes.)

Here’s the track list artwork:

I made the track list the same way I made the cover art pieces – created the text box in photoshop, then traced the entire thing by hand (ohgod my hand hurt by the end!!), moving it at an angle a few times, then scanned it and added the title in my Remixed font. Then I embellished the hand-drawn piece with colored pencils, and scanned it again for the back artwork.

The mix will again be a prize for the Remixed knit-a-long giveaway happening at the end of May! Details are in the leethal ravelry group – all you have to do is knit a Remixed pattern and post it in your rav projects! Happy knitting!