Mad Men Starts Tonight (and I’m having a sale)!

In honor of the AMC television show Mad Men, whose Season 5 premiere is tonight (eee!) I’m offering a special one day sale on my Women of  Mad Men stitchmarker series! That’s right, take 15% off any of the stitchmarkers shown below with the coupon code MADMEN15 – today only! In case you missed this series of markers, they are in tribute to the fiery trio of women who make up the show’s core group of ladies: Joan Holloway, Peggy Olson, and the former Mrs. Don Draper, Betty. See if you can match up the stitch markers below with their counterparts!

Advertisement

Holy crapola!

I’ve been slowing reorganizing my blog. Adding links here, a couple of more friends there, and studying my statistics carefully as a handful of visitors roll by little corner of the web (three people Monday, another one on Tuesday,seven whole visitors Wednesday…).

Then tonight I logged on before heading to bed and saw that my little visual stat counter had skyrocketed. I absentmindedly swung my mouse over to it, wondering where my visitors were coming from, and the mouse-over produced a number that made me sit up and gasp! Yesterday, 1,121 unique visitors visited my blog! Ok, you can close your mouth.

This statistic blew every other number out of the water. Just last week I was thrilled when 26 people checked out the blog the day I added a new pattern to Ravelry. So you can imagine that I’m a little numb right now from shock. The reason for it, of course, is the magic of publicity.

I mentioned it indirectly in my last post, but a couple of days ago I was wandering around the Internet when I stumbled upon a free pattern website, aptly called Knitting Pattern Central. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I decided that it couldn’t hurt to tell the good people there that I had some free knitting patterns that were available for download to the general public. They sent me a nice email back, and I figured I’d be added eventually to their lists.

I guess I was added all right! According to yesterday’s statistics, 1 person found me by checking out my Ravelry profile, a second person followed a direct blog link out of a swap group in Ravelry, a third found me through Google, and 1,049 people found me through the Knitting Pattern Central! Out of those visitors, 737 alone were interested in finding out what the Betty & Veronica Scarf looked like, and many of them downloaded the pattern. Wow. I think I need to sit down.

Well, if you’ve stumbled across my blog because of Knitting Pattern Central, hello and welcome! (waves) I’m glad to have you checking me out. 🙂 Good night everyone!

Betty & Veronica pattern goes live today!

A new published pattern, the Betty and Veronica Scarf, goes live today! After a month of testing on Ravelry (I had eight fabulous testers helping me out), we’ve worked out all the kinks and come up with an accurate estimate of yardage to make it easier for everyone else to enjoy knitting.  I’m thrilled to report that one of my testers likes the pattern so much that she is starting a knit-a-long for it on Ravelry, in the Fun KALs – Shawls and Such group that she runs.

You’ll notice that currently I only have links to Ravelry for downloading my patterns. Well, that is going to be changing soon as I want to be a gateway drug for Ravelry give those who aren’t on Ravelry the opportunity to download my patterns as well. After all, I clearly remember trolling the Internet looking for great free patterns to knit up for myself, so it only makes sense that I would give others the same courtesy.

Also, for those of you interested less in the knitting aspect of this project and more in the owning of said scarves, I am selling two of the finished projects in my Etsy shop. The Raspberry Cheesecake Souffle one was the scarf that was actually the first of my final design prototype, and was knit in an extra-ruffly style that really makes the Veronica version of the scarf stand out. The second one I am selling is Veronica’s Dark Secret, and it was inspired by the fictional character Veronica Mars, from the television show of the same name. There’s just something lovely and deep about that scarf, and it is the first fine-tuned version of the pattern. The others have been traded and given away in turn as promotional efforts for the pattern.

Again, I want to give a huge thanks to all of my testers and everyone who willingly helped me out by knitting one, or two, or even  more of these for me! In truth, this pattern is slightly addictive, and many found that they couldn’t resist doing a second or a third to see how different it came out every time! I’ve actually knit this scarf six times already, and I’m currently on my seventh scarf. As soon as I get a chance to push aside my other deadline knitting projects, that is. This is a great stashbuster – my favorite kind of project!

On hold and dreaming

As I sit here listening to Stephanie Dosen‘s dreamy, whimsical music, on hold with something for work (frowns at phone) I decided that this would be the best time to update everyone on what’s going on in my fibery world. My dream of a scarf that would show off complementary handspun yarns and be cool and cute is nearing completion. The Betty & Veronica Scarf is in it’s testing phase! I’m still looking for testers, so if you are interested, go check it out here.

It took a lot of prototypes to get it exactly right. One of the first things I realized was that I couldn’t block the scarf, because it only flattened out the ruched look I was going for:

My next foray was great, except that I pulled the ribbed edging together too much, making it look rather ruffled instead of simply having a gentle edging:

Now that I’ve knit this scarf four times, I’ve finally figured out how to make it look “juuuust right,” as Goldilocks once said. After everyone finishes testing it and gives me feedback, I’ll be able to tweak the pattern and publish it for everyone else to make! Ok, the phone is ringing and the music has ended, so I’m diving back in!

P.S. – Almond Crush Pocky is delicious.

Image by Robert Otani

Betty & Veronica are rockin’ it

I’m sugar and spice and everything nice but if you wanna mess with me you better think twice.

I knit this scarf twice – once with the general idea of the pattern I wanted, and then a second time after I realized what I had done wrong the first time. UGH. I hate frogging. It was only sheer determination that kept me going. Basically, what I wanted to do was pair together two complementary yarns in my stash. Because one was handspun and the other a very expensive skein of yarn, they didn’t have much yardage, and therefore weren’t worth much by themselves. But together, they were more than the sum total of themselves alone.

I split the Rapture yarn evenly into two balls based on weight (which weighed about 22 grams each). Then I cast on with the Rapture yarn. Ik nit four rows of k2, p2 ribbing to create a loose ruffle. At this point I was torn – my original idea was to create short-rows a la Laura Chau’s Just Enough Ruffles, but I wasn’t sure I’d have enough. As I sat and envisioned how the final project would look, I got more and more mentally frustrated by things not knitting up properly, and decided that a short scarf with the added problem of having narrow ends probably wasn’t a good idea.

Instead, I retreated to my favorite knitting technique – ruching! Unlike most of the ruched patterns on Ravelry, I stuck to all stockinette stitch in order to show off the handspun look of my center yarn, as opposed to hiding it with garter stitch. Then I created a second ruffle at the other end, cast off, and viola! The Betty & Veronica Scarf. Now it’s time to write this pattern up and get it out there to share with the world! Ok ok, just with like-minded knitters on Ravelry. 😉 I’m also going to knit it again with slightly different yardages and weights in an effort to gauge how differently it can come out. Yey!