Lee Does Stuff

Bundle Up! November quick knits ebook, plus some recipes!

Hey, it’s November already! That’s crazy, huh? Well, I released my third quick knits club ebook on Tuesday – themed Bundle Up! Here it is:

Pattern number one is Oval Pockets, which can be sewn onto a sweater that’s in need of pockets, which is pretty much all sweaters, as far as I’m concerned! There’s a 20 yards of bulky version (each pocket uses just 10 yards), pictured on the cardigan, and then a larger any-gauge version, pictured on the two pullovers:

These are now instantly my three favorite sweaters – but I think the hooded fair isle yoke one is my all time favorite sweater (found at a thrift store in Salt Lake City, isn’t is fabulous?!)… The any-gauge pocket pattern is a little wonky, so I’d recommend attempting in a finer-than-worsted yarn it only if you’re comfortable with short rows and making adjustments – it’s been tested in the bulky and worsted weights, and I fear that finer weight yarns will need some extra steps (all this is discussed in the pattern).

The second pattern is a little weird, maybe… I called it a Cabled Cowl Maker – it loops and wraps around a long scarf to kind of turn it into a cowl:

Depending on how you wrap it, your “cowl” can be snug…

…or fluffy and loose:

And you can tie it behind the scarf to hide the ties, or in front for a bow design element. You can’t really see in these photos, but it’s designed so that the cables appear to come off the piece and become the i-cord on one end, and the braided ties on the other end… very similar to the way the cables come off the garter stitch based piece and become buttonhole tabs in Twisted Ankles. And because they both use bulky, you could whip up this quick knit with leftovers from that project, making those legwarmers and this cowl maker a good winter pair!

A running theme throughout the ebook is modifying stuff that’s easily found at thrift stores (all the sweaters in the examples were thrifted, as well as the blue scarf), so my extra is 2 pages of tips and info about thrifting for secondhand sweaters! Ideas for reconstructing and embellishing, and how to felt wool sweaters for crafting – and the craft tutorial this month is a recycled sweater wool felt mug sleeve:

Make it either with velcro or ties; a template is included in the pdf. Keep your coffee hot longer this winter with a wool sleeve, yay!

This month’s cozy winter set matches January’s club, themed Keeping Warm, with its Afterthought Earflaps and Pinwheel Earmuffs designs (available in Vol. 2 of the old quick knits pattern sets – ravelry link)…

…and included in that club was some hot winter drink recipe cards, fitting right in with the mug sleeves this month, so I wanted to share my favorites with you! These are leethal “recipes” which means they are just the way I make the drinks, not necessarily the best way or the right way, but they work for me! The first is non-alcoholic and the others are adult drinks…

leethal Tea!

flavored black tea of your choice (berry flavors are good, like blackberry sage)

hot water (about 2 thirds of a mug full)

milk (soy or regular, a third of a mug full)

white chocolate syrup/sauce (a generous squeeze)

hazelnut flavor syrup (a big splash)

Let tea steep in hot water for a minute or two, then add milk and syrups, and leave tea bag in to steep as long as you like.

Hot Buttered Rum!

hot water (a mug full)

butter (a small chunk, about a teaspoon)

brown sugar (a tbsp-ish or as sweet as you want)

cinnamon (a teaspoon-ish or very generous sprinkle)

cloves, nutmeg, any other spices you want (a little)

dark rum (as much as you want)

Pour water over butter, sugar, and spices, and stir until butter is melted. Add rum and enjoy.

Variation: Skip cinnamon & stir with a cinnamon stick.

Hot Toddy!

hot water (a mug full)

honey (as much as you like for sweetness)

lemon juice (a splash)

bourbon whiskey (as much as you want)

Stir honey and lemon juice into hot water, and add bourbon. Sip and enjoy.

Variations: Use hot apple cider (like Trader Joe’s spiced cider, heated) instead of water for an apple hot toddy (yum!); add a tea bag for a tea toddy.

And then there’s my Spicy Cup of Yum recipe from the blog last winter – a coffee drink with optional adult twist. So good!

As usual, you can grab this month’s ebook alone for $5, or you can subscribe for 6 months of club ebooks (starting with this one) and save $10 – either on my club page, or on ravelry. My club page has been updated, so now you can get past months’ club ebooks there on my site, and add the subscription to a patterns cart so you can continue shopping in my patterns section as well (where the old club ebooks live).

Happy winter knitting, and I’ll be announcing a super fun thing soon… ok actually I can tell you what it is right now – a mystery knit-a-long! Hopefully it’ll be announced officially, with details, early next week, and it’ll start around mid-month, as close as possible to the 15th. I’m super excited about it! It’s gonna be awesome! Yay!

Custom Tritops!

Pattern release! Wooo hoo! (This one was due out quite some time ago, so I’m super happy to be finally getting it out to you now!) This is not a normal pattern, but rather a totally customized, any-gauge hat pattern set…

…with 3 different options for top decrease patterns, 3 different options for brim/hat style types, and the brim width is your choice, as well as striping, and yarn, of course, which can be anything you want, from super fine to super bulky!

I knit up 6 different versions, to show 2 examples each of the different top designs and style options, and to show a variety of different yarn/striping looks. Because the brim is worked sideways and the body in the round, stripes (either manually made, or self-striping yarn) is a great fit for these hats.

The decrease designs all have some garter stitch element, to tie in with the garter stitch brim, and a tri- element – there’s the tri-petals design…

…the tri-swirl (below left), and the tri-star (above in the red+blue, and below right). The hats are pretty basic, as far as knit hats go, but the decrease designs spice them up a bit, and the custom fitting and any-gauge aspect are what make this pattern set special.

Plus, they are fun to knit because of the sideways edge cast-on construction and all the choices you get to make! The garter stitch brim width is completely up to the knitter, so it can be super wide if you want…

…or super narrow. And, there are three different style options, which are all based on the ratio of stitches in the hat body to rows in the sideways brim (see my sideways edge cast-on post for more about that, if you want to). So, you can use the pattern set to make a floppy beret style hat…

…or a loose fitting kind of bucket hat…

…or a more standard, fitted knit cap style, with a snug brim (below). And you can further adjust your style by choosing how long to knit before decreasing – my examples are pretty much all the standard 6 inches but the hats are easily made shorter or longer. All the yarns I used in the examples are listed in the pdf, and you can read everything you need to know about the pattern set on ravelry or on my pattern webpage – I already copied many paragraphs of info into both those spots, so it seems silly to copy it into this blog post also.

The pattern set, with its limitless customization, is $6, available on ravelry and on my website, as usual.

And hey, how about a promotion?! Since this pattern uses my sideways edge cast-on technique, the same method used for the cuffs in my Swerve fingerless mitts, if you buy those 2 patterns together, now through November 10th, and enter the coupon code sideways, you’ll get $1 off your order! It should also work if you’ve previously purchased either of the two patterns (through me, so if you bought Swerve through Knit Picks it won’t count, though I still appreciate the sale!) – just buy the other pattern, enter the code, and get $1 off! This will work both on ravelry and in my website pattern shop!

A couple last things… the pdf is 18 pages (I know, pretty crazy) because I made photo tutorials for the provisional cast-on and grafting, as well as photo help with understanding the sideways edge cast-on, and there’s tons of details about all the different custom options, how to do the custom sizing etc… so basically, yes, there’s a lot of stuff in the pdf, but it’s not meant to be printed out! It’s meant to read on a computer screen, and then print out the 3 or 4 pages that you really need to use for knitting your hat.

Also, I just want to thank my awesome test knitters for all the great feedback they gave me – I made a ton of changes from my original test pattern, so hopefully everything will be super clear and easy to follow now. (It’s not a hard pattern, really, it’s just all the custom stuff that takes some getting used to!) Love my testers!

“As always, Lee’s pattern was expertly written, easy to follow & fun as hell.” -Ady Bee in her project notes [aww, thanks, yay!]

And a quick semi-related reminder, for Portlanders only: my self-publishing class is happening at Twisted on Thursday at 5pm! You can still sign up!

Oh and then something else for everyone: Twisted (my most favorite local yarn shop!) now sells online to everyone, and the awesome owners just did an interview over at Handmade in Portland, where you can find a coupon code for a free pattern with any online order! Rad!

Back from 2 weeks on the road!

We’re back! 2 weeks away is a long time, and it’s weird to be back, so I’m slowly catching up and getting back into work routines… for now, this is just a popping-in-to-say-hi post, with some highlight photos…

I spent something like 8 hours yesterday editing photos and am not even halfway done yet, but I’ll be posting them all to flickr eventually. I won’t be clogging up the blog with too much trip stuff – just this, then the usual photo-of-the-day posts (probably with links to lots more photos) and then a wedding post once I get photos from that. There should hopefully be a new knitting pattern next week and some other fun content to get the blog up and running again!

So… that top shot is at the Grand Canyon, which was cool, but not nearly as cool as Bryce Canyon (in Utah), where these shots were taken.

I shot lots of film! Well, a few shots each on many different cameras, so now I need to take some photo excursions around Portland to use up all the unfinished rolls so I can get them processed!

I also shot some video! Fun! I was doing a video-postcard thing with talking to the camera a lot, so it might be super silly, and I also played around with stop-motion-y interval recording stuff on the road (not stop motion, but shooting 1 second at a time, 30 seconds apart)… someday when I have time I’ll go through it all and put bits up on vimeo. Notice my super hi-tech dashboard tripod system? (Yes, that’s my foot holding everything in place.)

We saw animals! I believe these are mule deer, spotted along highway 12 in Utah. We also saw elk (near the Grand Canyon), a wolf (just a glimpse!), an adorable chipmunk hanging out super close to us at Bryce Canyon, some weird and cute unknown squirrel-like guys, more different kinds of deer, lots and lots of cows and horses and sheep, and lots of cool and interesting looking birds…

We ate some amazing food once in awhile! Road tripping can be tough for food, but we only had to resort to Denny’s twice (and Taco Bell zero times!). The best Chinese food we’d ever eaten was discovered in Pocatello, Idaho, and the most delicious breakfast ever was at Chow in Bend, Oregon:

Cities we stayed in: Flagstaff (just a night), Page (near the Arizona border – passing through on the way to Utah), Salt Lake City (for a full day), Boise (for a full day), and Bend (Oregon, for the last night). (and LA for a couple nights before the wedding, and Anaheim for a few days after) Didn’t end up making it to Wyoming or Montana or New Mexico (all of which I’d hoped at some point we could get to), it just would have been too crazy, and it ended up being a perfect amount of driving in the end. These shots were taken at the Gilgal Sculpture Garden in SLC (so weird!!) and in our room at the McMenamins hotel in Bend – such as awesome place!

We tried to hit lots of good thrift stores and yarn/craft shops in each town – this (below) was probably my favorite one, called Puffy Mondaes in Nampa, Idaho, super close to Boise. Got some great local fiber to get me spinning again! Oh wait, it’s probably tied for favorite with HeartFelt Designs Gallery in Red Bluff, California, where we stopped on the way down to LA – tons of locally farmed+spun yarn (I got three skeins of local handspun wool with the names of the sheep on the labels, for way too cheap!) and an amazingly picturesque upstairs studio space with giant stacks of free old magazines!

The one low point of the trip – on the wedding day (I assume), I was bit or stung a few times by something evil and had some kind of allergic reaction (maybe?) that started making an appearance the next day at Disneyland… Probably because of all the walking, the spot near my ankle got pretty brutal (infected, so gross) by the next day, and we ended up having to spend the first day of our roadtrip sitting in waiting rooms and seeing doctors, bummer. (By the way, awesome health care story… went to a low-income urgent care since I don’t have insurance, waited a couple hours, doctor had no idea what it was, prescribed some antibiotics, and told me I needed to see a dermatologist right away… Made same-day appointment with local derm, paid to have him look at it, also have no idea what it was – just, probably yes, a bite or sting of some kind – tell me, yes I should indeed take the antibiotics that the previous doctor had prescribed, and that’s all. Luckily, he only charged about $75 for that, much less than I was expecting, and, weirdly, less than the urgent care charged me.)

Anyway… thrifting! Didn’t thrift as much as we’d sort of planned, but scored a few fabulous finds! Above is a shot of most of the non-clothes items I got (that sweater doesn’t count as clothes, since I’ll be unraveling it to recycle the bulky wool!) – I tagged everything in flickr so you can read more there. Below, you can see the best present ever that Pete found for me at a Savers in Boise – 100% wool Pendleton robe! (Like this, except vintage and colors I love! …and around $195 cheaper!) And, hanging to dry are 2 awesome wool sweater finds from Salt Lake! I’ll take some modeled shots of them and other rad clothing finds later, perhaps…

Speaking of thrifted sweaters, sort of… The weather throughout the whole trip was pretty darn summery, but finally, on the last night, Bend got chilly enough for Pete to try out his new (thrifted) shawl collar cardigan! Loving the new style!

And lastly, the wedding itself! Just a few shots for now… my table decorations ended up looking great! The framed lyrics really took over, with the fabric flowers being just an extra bit of color, so I’m really glad I ended up doing the last-minute frame project! I let people know they could take one home as a wedding favor, but we still ended up bringing over half back with us – so I have 32 framed lyrics to hang on the blank walls of our home! Yay!

I got all the flowers (around 300ish, I think) made in time (with help from Pete and my mom, thanks!) but I made my bouquet in the back seat of my dad’s car on the drive to the wedding! Gathered up a collection of favorite flowers, twisted them together with fabric-covered wire, and covered the bottom with a couple of vintage doilies. Took about 10 minutes and worked out perfectly!

By the way, I still don’t have any photos of my dress, but our wedding photographer (my old buddy Kim!) got plenty, so you’ll be seeing it in a couple weeks for sure!

That blue line is our whole trip route (not including all the driving around LA and Orange County the days up to the wedding, doing wedding business stuff and meeting up with family and friends) – a close-up with tons of tags all along the route is on flickr here!

Ok so that’s a bit of a glimpse into my last 2 weeks. Upcoming photo-of-the-day posts will show and tell some more, but I’ll be back to you will non-trip content soon, for reals!

Time to hit the road… and Celebrate!

So we’re leaving super duper early on Wednesday morning, and I’ve been working all day today on 4 hours of sleep… it’s now 1am and before my energy is drained completely I just need to get this one last post out there to you… I’ll be checking email (and comments) once in awhile, but I’ll basically be out of touch from the world until the 21st. I’ve been really super appreciating all the great roadtripping recommendations, even though I’ve been so beyond busy getting everything done that I haven’t been replying, sorry about that!!

Anyway… my brain isn’t fully functioning, so I’m going to mostly let the photos do the talking from now on… October’s club ebook is out now! (on ravelry here)

Inspired by my wedding crafting, but not wanting to do a wedding theme, I made all the projects relate in some way to celebrating – with friends over wine…

… or beer, with these drink sweaters (cabley, knit-tastic versions of wine glass charms for drink identification)…

…or celebrating out at a special event or just dressing up for fun, because it doesn’t have to be a super special occasion to wear a lapel flower!

They can also be worn as brooches, or you could turn them into hair accessories too I’m sure…

The non-knit craft project this month is frilly crocheted shoes, which are my wedding shoes. As you can see, they can have all kinds of different styles depending on how you lace them up (well, these two aren’t super different, but you get the idea). Tonight, after I’d already finished and released the ebook, I discovered another way of lacing them that I like even better, using the ribbon more as a drawstring instead of criss-crossing it; I’m sure there are tons more possibilities!

This is what they look like before weaving ribbons through:

This project is a 4-page photo tutorial of how to turn old flip flops into the new shoes – once you get to the point where the crochet starts, you can come up with your own stitches for your shoes, if you are experienced with a hook. This is the first crochet design I’ve ever written out, and I wrote the whole thing more as a tutorial rather than a pattern…

The final extra goodie in this month’s ebook is a set of 7 of my favorite song lyric cards that I made to frame for these wedding decorations/favors. I included the title and author of each font in the included lyrics, so you’ll be able to find and download any fonts that you especially like, choose your own personal favorite song lyrics, and make your own lyric art!

These picture frames will be another project for another blog post… after the trip… Have a good October, I’ll be back in 2 weeks!

oh wait, one more thing. I keep forgetting to mention this! Portlanders, I am teaching a self-publishing class at Twisted on the 28th! This is going to be very similar to the class I taught at Summit of Awesome, except I won’t be trying to relate it to sewing and other craft patterns (which I did very badly since that’s not my area of expertise!). If you are starting to design knitting or crochet patterns and want to try self-publishing pdfs, but have no idea how to start (or what that even means), then this class should get you on your way!

Ok, now, for reals, I am getting some sleep and heading out! Bye!

Double Excitement! Ocean Breezes pattern release + KnitCast Interview!

It’s here! Ocean Breezes is now available to all! On ravelry or on my website, the pdf is 9 pages (3 of which are photo-less pattern pages for printing) and it’s $5.

I originally blogged the hat design here a year ago, when it was released to Twisted‘s Single Skein Club members. Since then, I’ve knit up another Alpaca with a Twist Highlander version for myself, in the larger, beret style size (the rust one), and put these great tree buttons on it. Not so oceany, but I love it!

And then, super last-minute earlier this week, I made a smaller, cloche style size version, with contrasting color waves! I absolutely love how it turned out with the 2 colors, and in the Malabrigo Worsted merino, couldn’t be happier with it! (ravelry project page)

So that’s yay news #1. Yay news #2 is that I was interviewed on KnitCast!! I was crazy amounts of honored to be asked, and had lots of fun talking to Marie about alllll kinds of leethal knitty goodness… like… Game Knitting, any-gauge patterns, the quick knits club, other designs I’ve done, making my wedding dress during the make-a-long, and lots more!

Listen on the site, or subscribe in itunes, since it’s a great podcast! (I’m still working my way through the older episodes… the Woolly Wormhead and Lucy Neatby episodes were both excellent!) One totally random note – the recycled sweater circular needle holder that Cosy made, which I mentioned in the interview, can be seen here. Let me know if I mentioned anything else you want links to…. And enjoy!

Hittin’ the road! Now, where to go?

As I predicted, this month is flying by so quickly I am feeling more and more overwhelmed by the minute! It’s all leading up to extreme awesome fun, but, oh man, the to-do list is out of control right now! We’re leaving town on October 6th, driving down to LA, gettin’ hitched on the 10th, spending the next 2 days at Disneyland (wooo!), then driving all around the west side of the country on our way back to Portland (Pete doesn’t have to be back at work till the 21st!)…

A lot of the important stuff is taken care of… our buddy (and knit designer) Homero is cat-sitting and watching out for our house while we’re gone, so that rocks, and we just got a final tune-up on Pete’s getting-old Prius and upgraded his AAA membership, so we’re all set for lots of driving. We got every map we could possibly want/need for where we’re headed – we are traveling analog style, no iPhone or gps bologna for us! Nothing against those, of course they would surely make our trip much easier, but I have this weird love of analog map navigation, so I’m reeeeally looking forward to the road-tripping!

Getting to my point… So now is where I ask a favor of you, dear readers… We need recommendations! We’re heading to all these states, towns, and cities where we’ve never been and know nothing about! Our general trip (which might change as we’re on the road, since we’re keeping everything very loose and open to our whims):

LA area to Flagstaff, Arizona
Up around the Grand Canyon and through scenic Utah stuff to Salt Lake City
A possible quick swing into Wyoming, just to add another state into the mix
Up to Pocatello, Idaho, then over to Boise
Possibly up to Spokane, Washington, and maybe a quick swing into Montana
Around Washington and eastern Oregon with whatever time we have left, and maybe some southern-ish Oregon if there’s extra time

If you live in, have lived in, or have been to anywhere on that route, we would love love love to hear your recommendations for: vegetarian-friendly restaurants, thrift stores, and yarn stores – the main three – and also: bookstores, record shops, cool coffeeshops or bars, other stores worth checking out, sights to see, fun or weird places to take pictures, etc…

These engagement photos, by the way, were taken by the awesome photo team of Vivian+Alex, aka L’Oiseau Rose – Portlanders, they are open for business for these kinds of shoots as well as boudoir photos, ooh la la!

So, yeah, um… I’m working on tons of projects right now, wedding-related, club-related, and knitting pattern-related, so that’s fun… If you were thinking about signing up for a club subscription and liked this month’s ebook, be sure to grab that this week, as the October club gets released in a week and you’ll no longer be able to get September as part of the subscription (but you can still always get it alone, don’t worry). Just so you know.

And hey, guess what, October 1st is coming on up Friday, and you know what that means? Ocean Breezes will finally be released for sale to all! (I know there are some people who’ve been looking forward to that for awhile!)

September 1st – 21st photos

Well, my camera is still in the repair shop (it’s been gone for 4 whole weeks now!) and now my computer is being repaired as well (slightly major laptop accident, oops, but the apple store is awesome and getting Apple Care was the best computer decision I ever made!) – hopefully I’ll have it back in a few days, and for now I’m able to use Pete’s computer, but yeah I’m having a weird technology time at the moment…. anyway… photos that I got edited and uploaded before bringing computer in a couple days ago…

1st + 2nd – Spent the day shooting products for PenFelt, which I love, especially these badges, so cute! Then the next day editing product photos for Trillium all day long – so many great products!

3rd + 5th – More editing, and also a chunk of time spent writing a guest blog post for an awesome blog (which will go up in October), then I got to start my Game Knit Buttonhead hat for the knit-a-long! Yay!

4th – Designed for the September club today; brainstormed up the circular needles hanger the night before when I couldn’t sleep, sketched it out in the morning, and worked it up that day:

8th + 9th – Wedding paperwork, fun! Then I spent the whole day working on a design submission that you can’t see, but I was really happy with how my sketch turned out, hehe…

10th – Tiki karaoke bar party time!

12th – Turned in PenFelt photo job and was tipped with my choice of a badge and ring! Super awesometastic to the max!!!!

13th + 14th – Used a couple of delicious garden cherry tomatoes in my baked eggplant leftovers lunch, with mushrooms and plenty of mozzarella, yum! Worked on my final hat from my set of new pattern hats, to be released sooooon!

16th + 17th – Picked these 3 tomatoes today – a yumtastic little cherry tomato, the first ripe full size Early Girl, and then that unripe guy fell off! Oh well, the weather has been so terrible lately, I fear all the rest are going to die before ripening anyway, so sad… And then some better food action – breakfast with Pete at Jam, one of our top favorite bfast spots ever! Yes!

18th + 19th – Make-a-long!! First, a shot of my dress progress… that beginning of the top turned into this (so much pleating work, but worth it!) which is still very much in progress… and then I was starting to sew on this vintage lace during the last hours of the make-a-long, around 4-6am, so it definitely counts as the next day even though there was no sleep in between!

20th + 21st – Sliced up the only cucumber that grew into a healthy little edible and didn’t shrivel up and die by the time it reached 1 inch… however, I feared for the ongoing health of this one so much that I picked it at about 2.5 inches! But, it washed up great, sliced up into a ton of tasty wee slices (no more than an inch across), and I was able to spread them out into lunch, on toast with cream cheese, and several slices into a big pitcher of water. Cucumber water is my new favorite cold drink!! Next day, Pete and I had engagement photos taken by our buddies Vivian and Alex – I took no photos throughout the day, since millions of photos were being taken of us, but here’s a computer shot later of me wearing makeup – weird!

Thanks for your patience with me during this last month of crazy busy-ness and technological failure… I can’t wait to have my poor camera back and start taking some decent photos-of-the-day again! Our wedding trip is coming up super soon (time flies so freaking fast, damn!) so I probably won’t be blogging any tutorials or fun stuff like that for awhile, but you can expect some knitting pattern releases soon, as well as the October club, of course! And then, after our trip, I’m sure there will be many fun photos to share, stories to tell, and crafty awesomeness to catch up on!

Home Decor and Traveling quick knits patterns available now!

In order to release the switch plate cover pattern sooner (since there was much demand when I showed the club back in May!), I’ve released vol. 3 of the first generation of quick knits club patterns early! Only half the patterns are past their exclusivity periods, so right now the book just includes the first 4 patterns, and then in November an updated ebook will be released and automatically sent out to everyone who purchased the book, complete with all 8 patterns from May-August.

So, right now, the ebook includes the Garter Strip Light-switch Cover, Stuffed Ball Cord Pull, Luggage Tag Pouch, and Leaf-ish Sleep Mask; in November it will also include Blooming Flowers, Robot Monster Pouch, Custom Game Pieces, and Fitted Pocket Case – all those for only $6. (Each month’s set alone is also available for $3, as usual.) Buy it now – on my website or on ravelry – and get the update delivered to you when it’s ready in November.

To celebrate this release, but much more to celebrate the release of ravelry coupon codes (so so so exciting!!), I’m running a promotion for the next week, just for fun! Through Friday Sept 24th, if your order includes at least 2 quick knits pattern sets (including this ebook, a club subscription, Ten 10 yard Cuffs, and all the club patterns ebooks) and you enter the code quickknits, you’ll save $2 on your order! Either go to my ravelry pattern shop (everyone should be able to see and use the ravelry shop, not just rav members) and add what you want to your cart, then click where it says to add a coupon code and enter quickknits. Awesome!

In other pattern news, Swerve is now for sale on Knit Picks, so that’s cool! I think their Independent Designers Program is pretty darn great – designers keep 100% of sales, and we’re not even limited to selling for $1.99 anymore like we used to be. (My mitts pattern is $2.99.) And I really liked knitting with the City Tweed yarn – don’t love any of the color options, sadly, but the yarn is really soft and nice.

If anyone’s wondering about the status of my hat pattern set…. my camera is still in the repair shop with no word yet, and since it’s Thursday night now, I’m doubting I’ll have it back before Monday (which sucks extra because the make-a-long is Saturday!), and I can’t release the pattern without photos (duh) so it’s still on hold…. next week I hope…

2nd Make-a-Long and Skirt I made during the 1st one!

This Saturday, Sept 18th, will be the second official make-a-long, wooo yay! The first make-a-long, in case you missed it, was April 10th, and I first wrote about the idea here, then posted about the various ways you can participate here. Scroll to the bottom of this post (under the skirt photos) for a recap of how you can make-a-long this weekend and join the fun!

So, I realized when I talked about everything I made last time, I said I’d be giving this skirt its own post, and then with the move, a lot of planned posts never got written… so now’s better than never! I absolutely love this skirt I made out of the sleeves of 2 shirts:

The concept is simple – detach the sleeves from 2 long-sleeved, button-down shirts, and sew them together, rotating shirt #1 sleeve, shirt #2 sleeve. Because left and right sleeves are different (buttons/buttonholes on opposite sides), two of the joins will have a button and buttonhole together (perfect – no need to add a zipper or anything), but one join will have buttons on both sides, and the last will have buttonholes on both sides. In the top photo, you can see how I handled the join with the holes on both sides, with a ribbon closure. If you make a skirt like this, you’ll have to figure out how best to join all the parts together depending on your particular sleeves.

I added one button of my own to make for a smooth join (sometimes things don’t automatically line up perfectly), and as you can see, I added a few bits of ribbon where things needed to be neatened up. And I added some wavy top-stitching all over, just for fun. I wavy-sewed all around the bottom edge, which was just cut and not hemmed:

And then I sewed extra wavy lines along all the seams where the sleeves were joined (below). I don’t have a good photo of me wearing this skirt, but it fits perfectly and I love it! If you want to make a skirt like this, hopefully you’ll luck out like I did and find sleeves that fit around your waist perfectly when joined together, but you may need to play around with different sleeve arrangements, or join them differently, to make for a good fit. I didn’t take step-by-step photos, and the construction would be different depending on your sleeves, but hopefully this is enough info to inspire you to try one of your own!

For this make-a-long, I will be focusing on wedding-related crafting: my dress, shoes, fabric flower decorations, etc. You can make anything you want! Catch up on old, forgotten projects, try a new craft you’ve been wanting to explore, finish up all your work-in-progress pieces, open up a craft book you bought and haven’t used yet, as long as you have fun making!

The date and time are loose… if you have plans scheduled for Saturday, but are free on Sunday, then make that your making day! I will be again attempting to make for a full 24 hours (didn’t succeed last time, but maybe this time I’ll do it!), so I’ll be trying to go from 7am-ish Saturday to 7am-ish Sunday, or as long as I can last. Read the original make-a-long post for my initial inspiration and ideas about the make-a-long concept.

And then, to participate (the “a-long” part) – use whichever social media outlets you prefer: twitter, facebook, ravelry, blogs (commenting on mine, posting on your own), flickr. Use hashtag #makealong on twitter, join the make-a-long group on facebook, I’ll be starting a thread in the leethal ravelry group… and then I strongly encourage everyone to add any photos you take to the flickr group. I won’t be posting photos during the actual make-a-long day (probably just some twitter pictures), but I’ll be shooting throughout the day for sure, and uploading them to flickr within the next couple days.

Share what you’re working on, your making trials and errors, talk about the crafty fun you’re having, and get inspired by fellow make-a-longers! You’ll find me mostly on twitter throughout the day, but I’ll be checking in on the ravelry and facebook groups, and blog comments of course. Hope to see you making!

August 10th – 31st photos

I know I’ve been busy, but I had no idea it had been so long since my last photo-of-the-day post! Oops! So, I’m splitting them up a bit – here’s through the end of August for now…

10th + 13th – Making the last physical quick knits club – spun up It’s a Game recycled yarn, and designed the any-gauge version of the pocket case:

12th – Used my clothing line for the first time to dry some sweaters and things – the previous owners even left that full clothespins bag behind, ready to go!

15th + 16th – Stopped by Happy Knits‘ sale and picked up this Austermann Natura (merino, bamboo, cotton, alpaca, mohair blend!) and swatched a bit for an idea I had, successfully! Knit up just about the whole brim for one of my hats in the set I’ll be releasing soon, at my neighborhood knit night, which is great! And worked on the hat set pattern all day:

17th – Tested out my custom knit game pieces by playing some pop culture trivial pursuit with Pete! Fun!

18th + 19th – Spent some quality time at Ikea picking out a new unit for our dining room area (with the gift card my parents gave us, yay!!) – at 104 pounds, it was quite a job to get it into the house and built, but it works fabulously! The next day, I cleaned up the house a bunch, and we ate dinner actually at the table (which is usually being used as a craft table or photoshoot location) – you can see the new furniture piece in the background there:

20th – Started making stuff for the next day’s housewarming party – made an elaborate, delicious pasta salad (pretty much this recipe, with a few changes), which involved so much chopping (peppers, green onions, pickles, celery, fresh garden basil and rosemary…) with my dull old knives that my hand was super sore by the end! Totally worth it though!

21st – Housewarming party time! It went super well, lots of fun, great potluck food, and this photo is during an intensely passionate group sing-a-long to Total Eclipse, thanks to our ps3 karaoke game, yay!

22nd – Elif brought us a gorgeous bouquet of flowers from the farmer’s market, which I had lots of fun photographing the next morning! And they smelled so good!

23rd – The weather was perfect, and I got this picnic table from Village Merchants a few days before the party, so I did a couple hours of work outside – sketching/planning a new design, knitting on a hat, while listening to music on my little portable speakers, good stuff!

24th + 25th – Got sucked into staying up all night getting Pete’s new website set up, reviews posted, photos added, etc – once I got started, I couldn’t stop! Also started work on another hat that day… The next night is when I picked up my camera to shoot my photo-of-the-day and got that dreaded error message. Stayed up for hours going through forums and the instruction manual, concluding that it wasn’t something I could fix (confirmed the next day at the repair shop) – shot this computer photo booth shot of the poor camera and my knitting from earlier that day:

27th – Made these yummmtastic roasted potatoes with fresh garden rosemary! Gosh, I love potatoes…

28th – Borrowed Alex‘s camera today (check out her gorgeous carded batts, by the way!) and shot allll day for freelance job – had fun using all this different food as props for shooting handmade glass plates, bowls, etc:

29th + 31st – Did little but shoot all day for the next four days while I had the camera – didn’t take photos-of-the-day these days, but here are a couple of the products I shot. Love ex libris anonymous‘s Dr. Seuss journals! Roped our trivia buddy into modeling this Flipside hat for me, since I needed a guy model and it didn’t fit Pete’s big head, hah!

30th – And I modeled all the women’s hats myself – here is one of my favorite blooper reel shots:

I’ll catch up to the present later this week… several dates are missing, due to my still being repaired camera, but I’ve been getting point+shoot pictures most days. And, mark your calendars, this Saturday will be the 2nd official leethal make-a-long! Post about that coming soon, I promise!