So, here in Portland, starting today, the second Sock Summit is happening, which is so super awesome, but I still feel a wee bit out of place in the whole scene since I tried to knit a pair of socks last time the Summit happened, 2 years ago, and they haven’t gotten much farther than you see in that photo taken then… I am just not a sock knitter.

But hey, I want to do something to celebrate this event, so, since I don’t design socks, and I don’t design anything in sock weight yarns, but I do design things for any weight yarns – buy one of my any-gauge patterns, get one freeeeee!

Enter coupon code socksummit in your shopping cart, with at least 2 of these patterns, and you’ll get one free: betiko, custom tritops, shapeshifter, skoodlet, game knitting (not the same, but you can definitely game knit in any weight yarn), the mystery knit-a-long hat (scroll down for more on that), and ten 10 yard cuffs (not actually any-gauge, but easy to adjust, and great for using up sock yarn leftovers!).  I wouldn’t exactly recommend using sock yarn for some of these (like skoodlet), but it’s possible to if you want to!

As for those of you actually here in town for Sock Summit itself, you can see a trunk show of my designs down the street at Twisted!!  And they’ll have all of my patterns, double scoops knit kits, and connect-the-dots stitch sets on sale for 10% off during the weekend!  (This photo is from my last trunk show at the same shop, last year.)

Twisted is a must-visit shop if you’re in town for Sock Summit, so be sure to make it there!  Along with my trunk show, they are also having shows for Star Athena, Imperial Stock Ranch, and Larissa Brown (that one’s mostly at Twisted’s booth at the Summit).   Another shop I strong encourage you to visit is Urban Fiber Arts – an excellent new-ish shop in northwest which focuses on local stuff – tons of locally spun and dyed yarns, plus lots of spinning stuff as well!  We have so many great shops here, so hopefully if you’re visiting you’ll be able to take a day to yarn shop hop around town!

As for my part in the Summit, you’ll find me wandering the marketplace tomorrow (Friday), before I’m taking a class on natural dyeing with Kristine of A Verb for Keeping Warm (excited!).  I’m bummed that there’s not a big panel discussion like there was last time, because that was a major highlight; and we’re all sad that ravelry isn’t playing a part this time (that ravelry party last time was one of the funnest nights of my life, no exaggeration!).  But, hey, I can’t complain that this amazing knitting event is happening right here, a 10 minute drive from my house! Yeah!

Moving on, I do have a couple other things I wanted to mention…  The mystery hat knit-a-long is coming to an end – the final pattern won’t be up till Monday, but I have posted some photos of the hat on flickr and ravelry.  I won’t put the fully spoilery photos up here, to avoid spoilers for anyone who’s still in the midst of the knit-a-long, but you can click over to my ravelry projects to see them all.  I made samples in sport weight (with buttons), in worsted weight (guy-size, with no buttons), and in bulky weight (with buttons) (those links are to flickr photos).

There’s another pattern that will be released on Monday that I am insanely excited about – it’s a secret, but what the secret is has already been revealed on ravelry, so I’ll just point you over there for now… I can’t wait till Monday!!  Eeeeeek!

I have also been hard at work on several other patterns… re-visiting this one that I mentioned awhile back, for (hopefully) an early fall release, and working on a few future ebook patterns.  Here are a couple peeks at those, above and below – once I finish the three that are close to done (third here), my plan is to release the ebook for pre-orders, which will come with those three patterns!  More on that as I get closer!

Okay that’s not even everything I have going on, but it’s enough for now!  Back to work for me, and maybe I’ll see some of you at Sock Summit!!

Hey Oregonians!  I’m going to be hanging out and having a one-night-only trunk show in Silverton (which I think is about 20 minutes east of Salem) on Thursday (tomorrow) night from 6-8, at The Purl District‘s Pints and Purls knitting night, which is at Seven Brides Brewery.  Knitting and good beer – 2 of my favorite things!  It seems like a pretty awesome local knit night, so I hope you can make it if you’re in the area!

I’ll have with me lots of samples of my designs, and my print patterns for sale.  Aaaand a bunch of these:

I finally replenished my button making parts supply after running out over a year ago, and have spent a chunk of the last couple days remembering how fun button making is!!  I’ll have these to give away at the knit night Thursday, at Sock Summit (coming up soooon!), and anywhere else I might go, and I’ll also be including them with orders of anything in my shop (that isn’t flat).

I’ll soon be making some to finally put up in the shop (it’s been saying buttons will “be back soon” for way too long!) – I’m not sure exactly what they’ll be yet, but I’m excited to play around with some ideas.  For now, these recycled magazine/catalog/book leethal.net/do stuff! buttons are so much fun – I love that every one is unique!

Here are all the ones which were sent out yesterday to be stuffed in Cooperative Press‘s giveaway bags at Sock Summit!  I’m so excited to be a part of those!

And I made a few just plain do stuff! ones too (below)… Tomorrow I’m planning on hitting a thrift store or two in search of cool old books (but not too cool for cutting up) with crafty illustrations or lots of colorful photos, perfect for buttons!  Anything you want on a button that might be neat for my shop?  Let me know!

So, those are the two things I wanted to tell you about for now.  It’s a busy week, and going by so quickly!  Our weather is nice and gloomy here in Portland, but if you’re in one of the regions with the crazy heat wave, hope you’re doing okay!  Drink lots of water!

Hey did you know I like records?  If you follow me on twitter, you’re probably sick of hearing about it, but my many-weeks-long project of reorganizing our collection is just about done now, so I’ll be shutting up about it after this.  I was planning to post about my collection, along with some crafty things you can do with records that are no good for listening to (thrift stores are full of those!)… but then it all just got too massive, so that crafty post will come later.  For now, read on if you like music on vinyl!

So, I just realized a couple weeks ago, while in the middle of my reorganization project, that it’s been exactly 10 years since I started collecting records!  At the end of my first year of college I started thinking it would be cool to have a record player, and then during the summer of 2001, between my first and second years of college, I found this record player on ebay for $12 and immediately started buying records.

During those first couple years, I didn’t live near any good record stores or thrift stores, so I was mostly buying new indie music on vinyl, not much old stuff.  But then I moved to a cool neighborhood for my last year of college and started digging through the rows of records at my local record stores, fun times!  I was pretty picky back then, though, and my collection grew very slowly…

Then a year later, in 2005 when I started dating Pete, we got really into record shopping together, and have been ever since!  We’re not always active about it – we’ll go long chunks of time without going to a record store, but then we’ll get back into it and go digging through albums whenever we have the chance.  Right now, because of all this record sorting that’s been going on, we’ve gotten obsessively into it and have found some awesome albums over the last month!  Our favorite shops in Portland are Everyday Music and Crossroads, and we also love Music Millennium, and thrift stores!

So, here it is – our entire LP collection:

Ordering it all chronologically involved days of sorting them all into stacks by decade/year, filling our entire living room floor with piles of vinyl…

Which, of course, meant I had to grab that opportunity to sort of recreate an image from one of my all time favorite movies:

Not perfect, but it works:

So, do you want more detail about my massive undertaking?  Probably not, but I’ll give it to you anyway!  I guess if you didn’t care about my records, you’d have stopped reading long ago… Anyway, I started out by cataloguing everything into a google docs spreadsheet.  Here’s a tiny glimpse of that:

Then I used this list to group all the LPs into stacks of 50’s, 60-64, 65-69, 70-74, 75-79, 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s…

Then I went through group by group and sorted them into individual date piles, and finally shelved them in chronological order, alphabetically within each year.

The giant spreadsheet of every record we own is way too much fun, by the way… Want to know what we have tons of?  There’s more Bob Dylan LPs than anything else (15), with The Beatles and Elton John tied for second at 12 each.  Third is David Bowie and Joni Mitchell tied at 10 each, followed by Frank Zappa, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Beach Boys with 9 albums each, and then 8 LPs by Bee Gees.  John Lennon is the person represented most, with those 12 Beatles records, 3 solo by him, 4 by John Lennon and Yoko Ono together.  (I have 3 by Yoko alone as well.)  A couple you might be amused by include my 6 Glen Campbell records, and 5 Carpenters (feel like I should have more, I love them so much).  Ok I’ll stop now!

And then there are our 7″s…

We rarely buy these anymore these days, but I used to be waaaay into them!  They are all catalogued in the spreadsheet, but I haven’t yet organized them – they’re just grouped into vague sections for now.

Lastly, I made some record “bookmarks” – to mark the place when we take out a record to play it.  I have my old record player in my studio, so I take groups in there sometimes, hence the multiple bookmarks.  Plus, they’re fun to make out of ridiculous album covers:

I hope I didn’t bore you too much, but I just spent so much time with this project over the last several weeks, I had to share!  I’ve been pinning some of my favorite records that we own, so you can follow that if you’re interested.  I just love records so much – the covers as art forms, the vinyl for the analog listening experience, everything.  And now that they are organized, I will definitely be listening to them more than I had been!

I noticed a quick spurt of overcast sky a few days ago and took advantage by photographing my garden!  I planted most (from starters) 3 weeks ago, and most are doing very well!!  With the hot, sunny days we’ve been having this week, they’ve actually grown quite a bit since I shot these – it’s so much fun to see them every day, how much they’ve changed from the day before…

It’s my second year attempting to grow food, and last year resulted in mostly fail (due at least partly to the terrible weather last summer); I am still very much learning and don’t expect major success, but things are looking healthy so far at least!

So, let me give you a tour.  Starting at one end, with this planter – 2 tomatoes and some garlic chives over there in the corner:

There’s an early girl tomato plant, a sweet 100 cherry tomato, and then I’d thought I could squeeze 3 tomatoes into this planter, but I didn’t want to hurt them by putting them too close, so I stuck the chives there instead.  (The upside down boxes are to try to stop some neighborhood cat from using this planter as a litter box! Dumb cat!)

Next is the cucumber planter:

I have 1 burpless, 1 pickling, and 1 slicing…

They are already doing extremely well compared to my cucumber experience last summer – I have high hopes that I’ll get to try some picking this year!

Next to that one are these two big pots (all the planters and pots were left in our yard by the previous owners) – I have an eggplant and one more tomato in there:

The eggplant seems healthy, though I don’t really know how it’s supposed to be looking at this point… and this tomato plant – juliet grape tomatoes – is crazy super leafy, especially around the bottom.  I might try pruning a little once I see where the flowers are starting to pop up.

And lastly are these 3 narrow planters:

The long one is full of mostly lettuce – “gourmet blend” – and I know it’s closer together than it’s supposed to be, but I had very limited space to work with, and the lettuce came in a box of 6, so I just put them all in there:

One of the above pots used to be filled with tons of oregano, sage, and tarragon, and a tiny bit of thyme, from the previous owners – I was keeping it until I decided it was a waste of a nice pot for me, since I rarely used any of the herbs last year and I didn’t see that changing this year.  So, I took out most of them (left a couple bags of them free on the corner for neighbors to take), and attempted to transplant some of the oregano (since I do use that occasionally) and the tiny bit of thyme that was living.  That was a few weeks ago, and they are both still living, so I guess the transplanting worked!  Those 2 are on the sides of this planter, and I put a new sweet basil plant in the middle:

And then my strawberries!  These two strawberry plants (quinalt and another variety I don’t remember) in the small planter popped back to life from last summer and have been doing okay, but not great.  And then I added one more, a bigger plant (tristar), in the same long planter with the lettuce:

Does anyone have advice for growing strawberries?  My main problem is that they’re ripening when they’re still bitsy:

Most of my ripe strawberries are the size of large blueberries.  Might I be giving them either too much or not enough water?  Or maybe there’s a problem with the soil?  I really don’t know what I’m doing, so any tips would be much appreciated!  Thanks!

So that’s my garden so far… I can’t wait till I get to start eating the tomatoes!  And I may get to have a whole salad from my own yard, if all goes well!  If I do end up experimenting with pickling, I’ll let you know how it goes!  Ok that’s enough excitement for one post!