I’m so happy to tell you about this new ebook by Kristin Roach, of Craft Leftovers! Card. Paper. Ribbon. is a fabulous 63 page pdf ebook, packed with well photographed and illustrated how-tos for projects like turning used wrapping paper into “papercloth” and then sewing it into awesome things……

…..combining used gift wrapping ribbon with yarn to crochet or knit into sturdy bags and boxes……

…… and making paper from old greeting cards, which could then be turned into new greeting cards, or a rad stab stitch sketchbook!

Divided into 3 sections (greeting cards, wrapping paper, and ribbon, naturally), each project goes into great detail, and also has tons of room for creative personalization.  I love the horizontal format (in fact, thinking that’s how I’ll be laying out my next ebook!) – more friendly to computer screen viewing – and the whole thing is beautifully designed.

Kristin collaborated with Diane of Craftypod for the publishing part (love that idea of an indie craft business person publishing another indie crafter’s ebook!! keeping it all in our awesome community!) and they just did a fabulous job of putting this book together!  As all of Diane’s ebooks have, Card.Paper.Ribbon. has printable pages for each project, with no unnecessary photos wasting up your ink.  What really makes this book visually stand out for me is Kristin’s great illustrations throughout – both practical and super cute, love them!

So hey guess what?!  Diane and Kristin offered me a giveaway copy of this awesome ebook!!  Leave a comment here sometime in the next week (by Monday the 15th around noon) answering the question:  what’s something that normally gets trashed (like wrapping paper) that you’d love to see in crafty reuse project ideas? I’ll pick a winner at random to be emailed the prize ebook.

And if you want to grab a copy for yourself right away, head over to the Craftypod shop, where you’ll also find all of Diane’s awesome ebooks!

Ok, it’s a fact: I am a terrible blog host when it comes to comments.  I love getting them, as all bloggers do, but I just suck at responding, so I’ve done something to change that!  The main reason I’m awful at replying is that the way my wordpress commenting has always worked made it so email-replying was the way to respond… so the comments get mixed in with the rest of my emails and I just can’t keep up with it all… excuses, excuses…

So I’ve installed Disqus comment system!  The most significant thing that this means is now I (and you, and everyone) can reply to individual comments right here on the blog!  Replies automatically get emailed to the original commenter, and show up for all to read, and you can subscribe to get notices about comment threads you want to follow… it’s fabulous!

I’d thought about doing this for awhile, figuring it would be more work to get set up than it actually was (easy peasy!)… I finally made the switch partly because of the issues I’d been having with wordpress comments not getting emailed to me lately, but mostly because of the excellent conversations that have been happening on Make & Meaning, started by Alice’s post here.  Just scrolling through the comments on that post shows how these kind of threaded disqus comments can turn single blog posts into conversations, really turning a blog into a community!  Rad!

And speaking of great conversations, and Make & Meaning, I have been super inspired following Diane + Paul’s talking and writing about Free.  I highly recommend the latest episode of Craftypod, especially if you are a blogger and/or trying to make money off of handmade things (or anything like that), and then there’s Diane’s follow-up post here, Paul’s original post, and Kim’s fantastic response post here.

A few excerpts… Diane:

In the creative community, because information is abundantly shared, we all learn more. We grow in skill, yes, but we also grow in interconnection to each other. Because of Free, we know more about each other, and this knowledge helps us to respect and help each other – despite geography or personal differences.

That interconnection has way more value (and future potential) than mere money transactions. In the podcast, in fact, we talk about the idea of there being different kinds of currencies in the online community. Web traffic is a currency. Goodwill is a currency. Connection is a currency.

Kim, writing about how the money part will “work itself out”:

The money doesn’t really just materialize, though. There’s one thing you have to do to get the money: seize (the right) opportunities when they come around. You don’t need to have an air-tight business model if you don’t want one. Free involves deliberately winging it. With a good emphasis on the deliberate AND on being comfortable winging it.

I, like Kim, started putting things out into the world for free (and some for no-profit cheap) without any plan to make a living and without thinking about the money end of it much at all, and it’s kind of magically transformed over the years into a rent-paying career.  I try never to stop with the free, and sometimes I do find myself distracted by the money part, realizing it’s been awhile since my last free pattern, for example, but there is plenty of free coming your way this year, I assure you!  “Woo-woo” for free, I say!

Ok stitch set giveaway winners have been picked!  I used the random number generator when I should have used the sequence generator, since I was choosing 9, so I ended up with duplicates.  As you can see below, I chose 3 more to replace the duplicates, and one of those was yet another duplicate, so I chose 1 last number, and that gave me the 9 winners…

So the winners are:

• Matted stitch set:  17. Marie in Florida
• Regular (old version) set:  18. Roxy
• Regular (old version) set:  7. April

Individual connect-the-dot stitching pieces:

• 9. Anita
• 37. Lil
• 29. KAT
• 24. Renee G
• 11. Kelly
• 12. Jenny G.

It was a crazy super awesome coincidence that Marie – the only person to specifically mention loving the orange/yellow/red matted set – was the winner of that exact set!!  Like holycrap wow!  Marie must have amazing karma!

Thank you everyone for the comments – it seems that color preferences are kind of evenly spread between lighter and brighter shades, so I’ll continue ordering some of everything, and if buyers want specific colors, you can always email me with requests… seems to be the best way to do it.

So I’ll be emailing all the winners to get mailing addresses today.  If you don’t hear from me, it might be related to the weirdness of wordpress comments lately, so you could shoot me an email, but I think it will all be fine…

For everyone else, I want to offer up a free connect-the-dots puzzle!  This is a winter accessory that didn’t make it into the Winter Knitting mini-zine for the January club.  It’s sized to print out approximately 4.5 x 6.5 inches – you can print it on a lighter ink setting if you want to, so the numbers won’t distract from the picture so much.  It’s a fun picture to color in and decorate to customize, or for kids to do and color I’d imagine…  Go to the original file on flickr to download and print!

Last minute reminder – today (Monday) is your last day to sign up for the February club!  I usually switch the sign-up month over in the early afternoon, so you can sign up late Tuesday morning if you aren’t reading this till then.

I’m going a bit out of order to start with some yummy yarniness!  Lots more knitting this week, plus more taxes…..

24th + 30th handspun for myself! Wooo yeah!  It’s a self-striping single, mostly my hand-dyed bfl wool; haven’t named it yet, but it is for a specific project, so I’m excited to start knitting with it soon!  And then some swatching and the beginning of a project in this yummy orange yarn that Kate gave me:

25th finished knitting these the night before actually, then wove in the ends and photographed them in the morning.  My basic ninja mitts pattern, from a kit yarn (for sale on etsy through Trillium) – I saved one skein for myself when I made up the kits for sale, so I could kind of test out the kit and knit it exactly from the pattern (instead of improvising the number of rows, etc, how I’d normally make mitts):

26th riding in the car on the way to grab our buddies and head to trivia, on a rainy Portland night:

27th oh so many receipts, taxes taxes:

28th made some supercrazy nachos:

29th + 31st gathering a ton of materials for the class I was teaching the next day; today I mostly worked on the computer finishing up tax-related stuff, not photogenic, so I took a shot of these sweaters that I’ve just started taking apart to unravel:

And that’s it for January!  That first month of 2010 flew by so quickly!  I’m surprised I didn’t miss a day of this photos project – hopefully I can keep it up throughout the year!  February should be fun – Pete’s taking some time off his day job, to work more in his studio, and also so we can take a day trip or two and have some mini-vacation time here in pdx, so I should be taking some fun pictures!

Ok time for those giveaways I’ve been talking about!  First, Diane is giving away a stitch set of your choice on CraftyPod blog!  Such fun comments to read, answering the question “which of your favorite crafts feels most game-like to you?”

And, Mr X Stitch blog is giving away another one, along with 2 other embroidery-themed prizes!  Mr X Stitch did a separate review post for the stitch sets earlier today, yay!

Don’t forget to enter futuregirl’s giveaway by Sunday, and mine here on do stuff! I wanted to get this posted while it’s still business hours (at least on my coast) but I’ll probably be updating a little bit later with yet another giveaway!  Right now, I’m off to two of my favorite places in the world – Knittn’ Kitten and Twisted!  Hooray for my work errands being so much fun!!

Ok, giveaway time!  So there will be more stitch set giveaways happening on other blogs this week, which I’ll be sure to let you know about – for those, the winners will get to choose their set themes, so for mine I’m doing something a little different…

I have 3 Craft Tools sets in the old (pre-Spoonflower upgrade) format, left over from holiday craft show time – 2 regular and 1 matted – so I’ll be choosing 3 winners to each get one of those.  Also, I had some extra prints made of the example images (unicorn/squirrel/triceratops/pincushion) so I could stitch up different kinds of examples, but it gets boring stitching the same images over and over, so several runners up will get single example image fabric squares, just for fun!  So there will be something like 8 or 9 winners total!

To enter: leave a comment telling me what kinds of colors you like best for connect-the-dots stitching.  (Light, bright, neutral, pastely, etc; I never know what everyone will prefer most, so this will help me for future print ordering.)

I’ll pick the winners at random on Monday (the 1st) around noon (Oregon time) – I’ll blog the winners then and email everyone to get addresses.  Good luck!

update 1/26: so this is just fantastic timing – my blog is having issues with comments. hopefully it’s super temporary.  I’m not getting the comments sent to my email (again – that happened awhile back, then just magically fixed itself a few days later) and some people are getting error messages when trying to comment.  It seems that if you try commenting and get an error, the comment still goes through (I just have to approve it before it shows up) – I’ve seen a couple of people commenting several times because it seems like it’s not going through, but it is.  Anyway, I’m sorry about this, I don’t really know what to do at the moment except wait and see if it gets back to normal…

A little belated – I sent these out on the 12th – but that means everyone’s gotten them by now for sure, so I won’t be spoiling anyone’s surprise!  (It also means you only have a few more days to sign up for February!)  My club theme for January was keeping warm, so everything tied in somehow…

The 15 yard pattern was Pinwheel Earmuffs (rav) – 2 swirly circles (weird decreases make the spiral design), backed with recycled sweater felt, bound together by a cord strap and ties.  You could also use something like a ribbon or strip of fabric for the top strap for a thicker look.

And the 10 yard design – Afterthought Earflaps (rav):

These are triangle-ish pieces of knit fabric, made slightly more interesting by eyelets along the sides, which get sewn into a hat that doesn’t get enough wear, to make it more cold-winter-wind friendly.

The earmuffs are made with a bulky 86% wool, 14% acrylic yarn recycled from a Gap sweater, dyed shades of red, blue, green, and purple, over the beige base – each of the 6 skeins were dyed separately, making them all either slightly or drastically different from each other, so everyone’s mini-skein is unique.  (You can see in the back right down there, my first skein had some issues with dye absorption and I ended up adding more, so it turned out much darker than the rest.)  In the context of the club and the individual mini-skeins, I like that the dye lots were all so different so all the earmuffs will be one-of-a-kind!  It’s called Rose Parade:

The earflaps are made with this bulky spun recycled yarn – a strand of 54% nylon, 40% angora rabbit hair, 6% lambswool dark red, plied with a strand of 95% extra fine merino wool, 5% cashmere brighter red – this yarn is SO soft!!  It’s from the 2 sweaters I blogged over here, and I love it so much!  It’s called Coming Up Roses:

So then everyone got a piece of felted (yeah I know it’s technically fulled) sweater for their earmuffs lining, and also some light blue secondhand superfine yarn to use for sewing the earmuffs together and stitching the earflaps to a hat.  Everything needed for both projects except for the needles!

For the extra goodies, I had to do something connect-the-dots related, since I’d been spending so much time with that obsession, so I made a Winter Knitting mini-zine!  7 number puzzles, all revealing pictures of various warm knit items:

And then one last little thing to round it all out – everyone got 2 leethal “recipe” cards for warm winter drinks, 1 with alcohol and 1 without, just the way I make the drinks (chosen at random out of 6 drinks total):

So that was January’s package – hope everyone had fun with them!!

In case you’re wondering, I am planning to release the first 4 months of club patterns in mini-ebook form, available to everyone, sometime in February (and probably give the option of buying each month separately, if all you want is the moustache, hehe).  My plan is to group the patterns twice a year into quick knits club design sets, once the exclusivity periods are up, so each set will have 8-10 patterns, plus any extras from the months (like how to make pom poms in November).  Should be fun!

So are you liking those connect-the-dots stitch sets?  Want a chance to win one?  How about several chances?!  Today, Alice at futuregirl is having the first in a week full of giveaways!  Well, maybe not totally full, but there will be at least a few more… so stayed tuned throughout the week!  For now, head over to the futuregirl blog and get your name in there!

I spent a few hours and a couple movies yesterday stitching away on 2 more examples (I love my job!) – the pincushion above gives a better idea of what that image should look like than my previous examples.  The craft tools set seems to be my least popular theme – I just want to remind you that the example images are often the most simple (which can mean most boring) so if you are turned off by the pincushion, keep in mind the other craft tools could be much more interesting!  Just sayin’….

And I stitched a fuzzy squirrel!  I used vintage tapestry wool, or needlepoint yarn (the label says both), which is basically a worsted weight wool yarn, and used the back stitch method, but with longer stitches than I normally make.  Worked well!

Photos of the week!  Lots of supersecret knitting and designing this week, so you get blurry shots of yarn and charts…

17th + 18th making those crafty wallpapers; starting to work on taxy stuff in preparation for our meeting with a loan broker the next day (yes, the very first step to eventually buying house!):

19th + 20th my days off, so I didn’t really make anything or work much, so I took photos of myself ready to head out rollerskating (fun!) and some orangey goodness I picked up for my studio during a day spent at Ikea (also fun!):

21st this dinner I made was better than anything else I made that day, so I shot it!  Tofu, potatoes, soycutash, with Trader Joe’s green curry simmer sauce and brown rice:

22nd + 23rd that secret knitting, and my first ever cable chart:

That’s all for now!

You may have noticed, since I first released my connect-the-dots stitch sets in December I haven’t really been mentioning them – well that’s because I’ve been working on a major format update for the last month!  (Oh yeah, I actually did mention them back here, but I said I’d be blogging about it later, so now is later!)  The sets are now being printed by Spoonflower, so the fabric and the printing are both higher quality than my original home inkjet printed numbers onto thin recycled fabric.

The regular sets are linen/cotton blend canvas, in assorted colors, and are now 6×6 inch squares, which means you must use a 5″ embroidery hoop.  The pictures themselves are 4×6 inches or smaller, so they can be framed in standard 4×6 frames if you want.  The fabric has a great, subtle texture, as you can see in the close-up shots; it’s thick and sturdy, and if you want to wash it that will soften it up a bit.

I seem to like these yellowy-green shades for my example stitching, but they are semi-rare in my color assortments – the most common color types are light neutrals, blues, and yellow/oranges, with a fair amount of pinks, light purples, and greens.  If you order a set and want certain colors, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.  (I could make sets in a certain color genre, like neutrals, or shades of blue, but I can’t get too specific with what I have in stock.)

The matted sets are pretty much the same as the original kind, since the Spoonflower fabric used for them is the quilting weight cotton, which is about the same thickness as the recycled fabric I was using, but with higher quality printed numbers.  The update with the matted sets is that I now have 6 fabric pattern options to choose from, at the bottom of the page.

A couple other minor changes from when I first released them… I no longer offer pdfs of the sets.  They weren’t popular, so I’m thinking about saving them up for a future connect-the-dots ebook perhaps… not really sure yet though.  And, I used to have the total number counts in the corners (as you can see here) but I changed my mind, thinking it’s not useful enough and it looks bad up there, so those are gone now.

So now I have the 4 different sets: Cryptozoology, Craft Tools, Woodland Creatures, and Dinosaurs – each with 5 pictures total, 1 shown as the example, and 4 remaining a mystery (unless you want to spoil it).  The example images are generally the ones that are most obvious in dot-form, so the other 4 are more mysterious.  Most of the sets have a range of difficulty levels, meaning some of the pictures have fewer numbers for simpler shapes, and some have many more numbers for more complex shapes, which I think are the most fun!

Ok I think that’s all the info I’ve got… now that the format is all figured out, I’m excited to make more sets!  (some I have planned for the future include: musical instruments, cameras, sea creatures, something food-y…..)

Oh yeah one last thing, just want to give a big thanks to Evil Mad Scientist Lenore, who first brainstormed the idea of having the sets printed by someone like Spoonflower, over beers at Kennedy School when meeting up turned to crafty shop-talk, as it often does!

I was interviewed on a knitting podcast!  It’s called Knit Happens, and it’s part of pdx.fm, but we didn’t talk much about Portland-specific things (except to mention that Twisted is my favorite lys!).  She asked me about a bunch of different things that I do and have done, so we talked about Game Knitting, the quick knits club, recycling yarn, having patterns in knitty, crafty tutorials, how I learned to knit, and more….  It’s available on itunes too, just search knit happens in the itunes store and you’ll see it, with the pink yarn skull logo.

And something I just want to make sure you know about – this one’s for sock knitters… My buddy Star just released her brand new Socks for all Seasons sock pattern club!!  A new pattern every month, based on a holiday or some other element of that month, and huge savings by signing up for the whole year!  No pictures of club patterns since the socks are a secret till they’re released each month, so here are some shots of Star (holding a pair of socks knit by Barbara Walker, and a couple days ago with her new haircut)…

And one last thing just for fun… The Oregonian’s knitting blog posted about my chevron cuff pattern and quick knits pages back during their one skein pattern of the day series in December, which automatically entered me in a drawing for a giant prize package – and I won!!  Holy crap so awesome I still can’t believe it!  Look at all that stuff!  Most of it will be a much appreciated addition to my knitting and craft book collection (including 2 knitting audiobooks!) but there are a couple of books that I think someone else would get more use out of than me, so I’m planning a couple of giveaways!  Fun stuff!

So I meant to do this forever ago, but I finally made the time to add a bunch of new photos to my free wallpapers page!  I wanted to add some of the crafty shots I took for the Knittn’ Kitten ebook, so while I was at it I made more and more, and I ended up adding a total of 16 new shots!

Well, not new new – they are mostly old photos from years ago when I used to shoot for fun more often, and play with film (yum, film!).  I chose a variety of different kinds of shots and subjects and stuff, so hopefully you’ll find something you like!

I had planned to release new wallpapers in December as kind of a holiday gift to you, but oh well, happy January!

Wow, the knitters’ response to Knitters without Borders and ravelry’s Help for Haiti has been incredible!  I know more established designers have been raising thousands – crazy awesome!  I am happy to say that you’ve helped me raise way more than I expected when I put out the word that I’d donate all pattern sales through the weekend – my donation total to Doctors without Borders will be $235!!

So thank you thank you thank you to Alex, Emma, April, mountgigantic, annecarol, Nicole, JooLee, bunnydozer, Becca, Kate, Anne, Kristi, Jen, Jessica, Sarah, Silver, Elaine, Katie, Jackie, Kit, Amanda, Libby, Rachel, RedSamur, Stacy, Wendy, Ruby, and Melissa.  And thank you ravelry for helping all those donation sales to happen, and for making it possible to link to all those blogs!

I have something fun to share with you soon – probably later tonight – but for now, I’ll show you this mosaic I made of 2009 projects… not anywhere close to all of them, but just an assortment of things I made throughout the year:

2009 was a crafty year alright!!

Want to hear a little about what I’ve been working on lately?  Well, I’ve been designing a mystery something for a secret thing, which ended up not working out for that thing (vague, yeah, sorry) which means I’m going to get to self-release the mystery something, and I’m pretty excited about it because it’s kind of crazy!  It’s like the most avant-garde thing I’ve designed, and I love it, so hopefully I’ll be able to find the time to develop it into a finished pattern and release it soon-ish!

Well it’s 16 days into the year and I haven’t missed a day yet in my shooting a photo a day plan; haven’t been great about uploading and posting so far though… I’m gonna try to post each week’s photos over the weekend, maybe it’ll become a habit.  So here are the last 12 days…

5th + 6th spinning recycled yarn:

7th + 8th designing January club knits:

9th + 11th building club packages with all the goodies:

10th jewelry party at Twisted:

12th Wet Hot American Trivia night at Radio Room:

13th + 14th stitching a squirrel at Star’s place and a mystery little weaving project:

15th + 16th knitting projects and this morning I was interviewed for a knitting podcast!

And a note for those not on twitter… I was about to make a donation to Doctors without Borders earlier today, but then I thought, it would be cool if I could donate more, so if you buy any of my patterns (or many, including ebooks) 100% of the pattern sale goes to helping Haiti, for Knitters without Borders.  I said on twitter it would be through the weekend, but I’ll let it go into Monday a bit for those of you who don’t go online during the weekend.  So, buy any of my patterns through Monday afternoon and all the money goes straight to dwb!  (See my roundup on Threadbanger for more ways you can help!)