Happy April!  I have a few things to blog about to start off the month… firstly real quick, I just want to let EU knitters know that you can now, once again, purchase my patterns through ravelry (or my website), including collections/ebooks, yay!

Next, I made a word list for a photo-a-day challenge for this month!  Feel free to repost this image anywhere you want to share:

I’m doing the whole challenge (planning to take one photo each day, each based on that day’s word), and you can challenge yourself to the whole thing as well, or you can just pick and choose some words that sound fun to you, or participate only on days when you feel like it, or whatever works for you!  Post your photos (tagged #leethalPAD) on instagram, tumblr, twitter, flickr, or anywhere else you like.  I’ll be posting mine every day on instagram, twitter, and flickr, and probably some of my favorites on tumblr.  This was today’s photo for April 1st, Sky:

Moving on… I have a question for you: have you ever had a weird issue with my blog, like a virus type thing (a window popping up that looks sketchy, etc)?  I just had a report that someone was sent a link to a specific blog post of mine and her Windows computer crashed, after first showing a popup window that she clicked on, and she was told by a computer repairman that my site had some kind of Windows-specific bug… Anyway, I am definitely not asking you to start clicking around, especially if you’re on Windows, because I don’t want anything bad to happen to anyone else, but I’m just asking that if you have already experienced any weirdness, please let me know (email me at leemeredith at gmail dot com), so your input can help me get to the bottom of whatever this is.  (I’ve already done a lot of searching and scanning my site and blog and haven’t found anything wrong yet.)  Fingers crossed that I can find the problem and fix it and no one else will have any bad experiences on my site!

Speaking of website stuff, I completed a minor update of leethalknits.com.  It’s a little better for mobile now, I think, just some minor changes to the layout, and I’ve switched out a lot of the rotating background photos (in the top left-hand corner) for newer shots, so you can hit refresh a bunch to see some of those (there are 18 randomized images).  I also changed the all patterns page to no longer include the quick knits pattern thumbnails – there are so many patterns now, and I figured those can just be separate on their own page.

So, I’m really happy to be starting a new month – March was really weird for me.  A lot of the time I thought the month was cursed.  A lot of stupid little bad things happened (like: needing new tires after having a flat, wasting a bunch of time+money trying to deal with a stupid plumbing problem and then needing to hire a plumber anyway in the end, my site being down a bunch, fearing my blog may have been lost forever, and then that possible blog hack issue, a big power outage, major ant problems in our house, blah blah blah) but actually some really awesome things happened between all the bologna.  So, I’ll share with you some of the positive highlights from my March!

Pete and I took a completely spontaneous overnight trip to Crater Lake last weekend!  I haven’t started sorting through my real camera photos yet (I took a ton, of course!) but here are two instagram shots above.  It was WARM but with tons of old snow – the best part was that the road from the main parking lot to the viewpoints was closed to cars for the winter, but plowed and open to people walking.  And we got there early since we stayed in a hotel somewhat nearby, so we walked a mile to the big viewpoint almost totally alone, and got to see the majestic views with no cars around and hardly any other people.  This is a major national park, which almost all the time is either A) open to cars and filled with people and tourist traffic, or B) completely closed all winter except to skiers and snowshoers, due to normal winter weather (at least, that’s what we gathered, I could be wrong, but I think the road we were on is not normally plowed during the winter).  So this insanely warm winter we’re having allowed us to have this rare experience of seeing this amazing natural sight in a way that hardly anyone ever gets to.  We felt SO lucky and happy that we made such an impulsive decision to take the trip!

And then, the days just before that trip with Pete, my parents came to visit, and we took them on a day trip to the Oregon coast (Newport area, then down to Yachats) – my highlight of that day was the tide pools at the Yaquina Head Lighthouse just north of Newport.  We went to see the lighthouse, but we didn’t know about the tide pools!  Such an amazing surprise!  I also have yet to sort through my photos from that day, but you can see a starfish above, and here’s a video of bioluminescence in the wild, soooo cool!!

We also took my parents to Corvallis (on the way home from the coast), up Mt Hood to hike to Mirror Lake, to the International Rose Test Garden, and (because it’s a required element of any trip to Portland) out for lots of awesome food!  Above is Pip’s Original Doughnuts and breakfast at Jam.  We packed so much fun times into 2 1/2 days!

Earlier in March, I spent two days shop hopping with some new knitter friends for the annual Rose City Yarn Crawl – my first time doing that!  (I’ve had trunk shows for the crawl before, but never had actually participated as a crawler.)  I visited several shops out in the suburbs that I’d never been to before, and they were all really excellent shops!  Great job, Portland metro area!  I look a little silly in that selfie group shot above, but I think everyone else looks cute, so there you go.

And then, after a half-day of crawling, I took a color theory workshop that was super cool.  I made a color collage and mixed polymer clay colors to match the colors in the collage – all those colors were made from mixing bright fuchsia, bright cobalt blue, zinc yellow, and white clay.  It was lots of fun!

As for work stuff, the March dumbness wasn’t just with home/life and website stuff, I also had some major frustration with knit design stuff.  Above is the happy bits – I’m so happy to have released the final design in the Betiko collection, and I love how Zulo turned out and everything, and I’m totally loving my upcoming design that I worked on throughout the month (pictured above right).

But, that upcoming design gave me lots of trouble… I spent a weekend going through some intense sweater surgery – ripping, cutting, grafting, re-knitting – and went through several major pattern rewrites throughout the month.  Three nights within one week I was up working till around 3am, to stay on top of my self-imposed deadlines.  All that trouble getting it just right was worth it, because I LOVE the final sample now that it’s fixed, and I’m REALLY happy with all the pattern rewrites and the final(ish) pattern.  It’s being tested right now, and I’m planning on a release date of April 16th if all goes well.

So, hooray for a fresh new quarter – after the weird, up-and-down, mostly not-great March I had, I’m feeling optimistic about this new month and ready for great things!

So, if you follow knit designers, you surely have at least heard of TNNA – it’s the biggest industry convention trade show thing of the year, every June in Columbus, Ohio (though I think that’s changing next year; oh how the ice cream will be missed by the knitters).  Last year I went for the first time, as a designer wandering aimlessly, pretty much; this year, I’m going to have a booth for the first time!  I’m excited, and very very nervous.

Because it’s a big deal, and big deals call for sales (right? maybe?), I’m having a sale this weekend!  And since I’m leaving on a red-eye flight around midnight tonight (Wednesday night / Thursday am), I’ll start the sale then, and it’ll run until Monday night, since that’s when I’ll get back.  So, Thursday-Monday, enter coupon code TNNA2013 to get 35% off any orders totaling at least $18.  This works out to be approximately buy 2 normal patterns, get 1 free, but this way it’ll work with collections as well – so you can use it on multiple normal patterns, or on the Short Stripes Trio or the Betiko collection plus one more normal pattern (you’ll save more than the price of a single pattern), or Remixed by itself (or plus more to save more).  The code will work on my website or on ravelry.

If you follow me on twitter/instagram, you’ve been seeing some peeks at my booth preparation – I’ve been spray painting picture frames, printing coupons and labels and tags, making buttons, organizing samples, and planning out my booth space.  I have some display details I’ve left secret, which I’m pretty excited about.  I’m nervous things aren’t going to come together exactly as planned, since it’s my first booth, but overall, I think it’ll be a pretty cool space… Oh, and I’m sharing the booth with Tin Can Knits, so that’s awesome too!  (If you’re going, we’ll be grouped together in the area with all the Deep South designers.)

Another TNNA prep thing I spent the last couple weeks working on is 8 new print patterns, now available wholesale to shops (through Deep South), and a new wholesale webpage on my site, which gives preview pdfs of every print pattern!  Click the preview link to see the first page, and sometimes more, of each pattern.  These are the print versions of the patterns, different from the pdf download versions – but, I am in the process of getting all my digital patterns up for preview as well!

For all my patterns which are in my new pdf format (I changed my pdf format this year, so most patterns still need to be updated), there are now preview pdfs of the first 3 pages (usually).  Currently, these previews exist for Robin (above), Maurice, Barry, plus that ebook, Betiko, Biratu, Haka, Skoodlet, and Shapeshifter (those are the only 2 older patterns I’ve updated so far).  So click those links to find the previews (orange links below the you need sections).  Eventually, I hope all my pattern pdfs will have preview links on my site, but it’s a long process…

I think that’s all for now.  My mind is very fluffy lately, with all the tnna prep and stress and excitement… Oh, I’m working on the Adventure KAL between everything else – if you see me knitting in Columbus this weekend, you’ll get a little bit spoiled if you want to ;)

So after I finished all my recent leethalknits.com style/layout updates, I worked on improving my techniques tutorials section… including the addition of video!  Yeah I know, knitting tutorial videos are nothing new and I should have started doing it long ago, but now that I have a quick+easy camera I plan to make more…

So I got all set up with an official leethal YouTube channel and uploaded my first video – let’s see if it’ll embed into my blog…

If you can’t see that here, just head to the youtube page or my cabling tutorials page – it’s a 9 minute long how-to on cabling without a cable needle, showing several different stitch counts.  Please forgive all the moments of blur and stitches being worked off-screen – it was my first time using my new i-camera so I’m just getting used to it, and I was too eager to get this how-to made so I didn’t want to re-shoot everything over again… my videos will get better with practice!

In addition to the video, I made a new tutorial page for locking in carried yarn strands, while working with stripes over several rows, and/or stripes together with short rows.  These are the techniques which are used in my Short Stripes Trio patterns (tutorials are included in those patterns) but they can be used in pretty much any project in which you want to carry yarns neatly along the back side and avoid lots of ends to weave in.  The techniques might seem kind of complex at first, but once you pick up the needles and actually do it, it’s quick and easy!

I’ve also added other tutorials over the last several months, which I think I forgot to ever mention in the blog, so I’ll mention them now!  I have tutorials for grafting both with stockinette stitch and with garter stitch…

…crochet provisional cast-on (below), and my older tutorials include the aforementioned cabling without a cable needle, twisted stitches, and make 1 increases.  (Get to them all here.)  If there are any of these that you’d reeeeally like to see a video for, let me know and I’ll see what I can do!

That’s my only announcement for now, but I’ll be releasing my new cabled shawl pattern later this week!

In case you missed it, I now have a mailing list (sign up on the leethalknits home page), so you can hear when I release new patterns without having to check the blog (or twitter, or ravelry…).  Hooray!

(More peeks at the new shawl are on flickr if you want to see more!)  Happy Tuesday!

There are more changes I’m still working on, but I just can’t wait to show you this huge update I’ve made to leethalknits.com!  First, brand new home page:

Above is a screenshot on my big monitor, and below is in a smaller browser window – some of the background photos on the left may overlap too much on your screen, so just hit refresh to see a new photo if you can’t read things.

And now I’ll list all the new things…

Down there at the bottom right you can see that I’m starting a leethal knits mailing list!  I’ll only be using it when I release a new pattern (or have some other big exciting news I suppose, but it’ll mostly just be pattern releases), and I’ll basically just link to the blog post for the pattern release, so it’s meant for if you want to be sure to learn about new patterns… I know how hard it is to keep up with blogs these days!  (Sign up on the home page.)

New navigation!  My patterns were outgrowing my old system, so now you can link from the home page to pages with all head accessories, all neck accessories, all hand/wrist accessories, all other accessories, and all quick knits, so that covers everything, plus I’ve put patterns in multiple accessory categories if they apply (like Game Knitting, Flying V’s, Haka).  So you can find everything that way if you want to browse by pattern type…

…and I’ve also majorly updated my all patterns page, so that’s a more convenient way to browse as well.  Now, not only are there the thumbnails for every pattern all on one page, but there’s also an alphabetical list of every accessory pattern down the side, plus links to all collections, solo patterns, free patterns, quick knits, all head, all neck, etc… so you can reach everything from this page (linked at the top of the home page).

New faq page!  I’ve written up lots of questions + answers that I get from knitters, and/or that I see people saying, wondering, etc, in forums and stuff like that, or just that I want to say an answer for just in case anyone is wondering… it’s a wide variety of things, from “Something is weird with my knitting, this isn’t looking how it should, what am I doing wrong?” to “Can I test knit your patterns?” to “Did you get my email?” to “Where did you get your glasses?”.  That last one is literally the most frequently asked question :-p

Also, update to my info page.  I’ve added some fun new feedback quotes (they are all taken from ravelry project page notes, so I hope no one minds me quoting them!) – my personal favorite is “the pattern is wicked clevah” -Jennifer in Massachusetts.  The other thing there that I’m really excited about is that I made a huge update to my list of shops that carry my patterns – I tripled it, since becoming distributed by Deep South Fibers, hooray!!

Those are the major changes.  I made a bunch of minor formatting changes as well… Then, after uploading the update, I checked in with netrenderer to make sure everything looks fine in Internet Explorer, and I learned that I have some major font issues.  So, if you’re viewing the site on IE, things won’t quite look how they look above (at least as I’m writing this on Wednesday night).  I think it works fine on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS.  Anyway, I figured out what the problem was, and it is requiring a huge amount of behind-the-scenes code work to fix it, but it’s for the best since it was a result of sloppy coding decisions in the first place, and now I’m forced to fix things.  I’m hoping to finish tonight, so probably by the time you’re reading this it’ll be fixed!  The main reason I’m telling you is, well two things, first because all the coding changes I’m making are causing the site layout to change slightly, so the screenshots above aren’t going to exactly match what you see, and more importantly, since I’m making all these changes to every page of the whole site, there’s a chance I might miss something.  So if you notice anything weird, especially any text that looks really wrong, please let me know!  Thanks, all!

And besides all this, I’ll actually have another big website update happening within the next few days – new technique tutorials!  So I’ll blog about that when it’s done, because I’m excited about some stuff I’ve been working on for that :)  (I’ll give you a hint… I just got an iPhone, and it has really good video quality!)  So, I hope you have fun browsing the site for now, and remember to sign up for the mailing list if you like mailing lists, and I’ll drop in here again very soon!

Quick post here to just show+tell you a few things… first, super last minute, but I’ve mentioned it before, if you’re in Seattle I hope to see you at Knit Fit! this weekend!  I’ll be teaching Self-Publishing on Saturday (tomorrow) afternoon, then hosting a Game Knitting night Saturday night, then teaching the Sideways Edge Cast-on and Bind-off techniques on Sunday morning.  I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to sign up last minute for any of these if you want to (this doesn’t go for all Knit Fit! classes, but I believe mine have room for last minute students), plus the market is open to the public all day Saturday and Sunday.

This is the dishcloth I made last night in preparation for the Game Knitting night – I game knit this to Say Anything… using short rows for my game pattern.  I really like how it turned out!

Moving on to other stuff… I was recently interviewed for the Happy Knits blog!  Go check that out to read me talk about my love of knitting, design, music, and more.

I finished a minor update to leethal.net!  (which includes the blog)  I need to give it a major update, but can’t find the time this busy season, so I settled for changing some of the colors and the headers for now.  Now the colors match leethalknits.com (sort of, not totally) and the headers feature these drawings, just to mix things up, hooray for change!

Another bit of news for pacific northwest locals – I’ll be heading down to Corvallis for a trunk show at Stash later this month!  I’ll be hanging out (with my knits) for the knit night on Wednesday, November 14th, and then my stuff will continue to hang at the shop for about a week.  So, if you are in the Corvallis area, come by on the 14th if you can, or stop in any time for the following week to see my knit goodies, yay!

You know how I’ve been talking about how I’m working on my first stranded colorwork design?  Well here are some peeks at my first samples!  It’s still very much in progress, but I’m hoping to be able to start having it test knit next week, and release it mid-month if all goes well!  (If you are an experienced stranded colorwork knitter and are interested in test knitting, check out the testing info here and let me know!)

And lastly, the mystery shawl knit-a-long is coming to an end!  These are some peeks at my small size Black Trillium sock yarn sample…

All 5 sections have been released, and you can see lots of finished shawls in the forums and the project pages… if you like what you see, you can buy the pattern now and get all 5 sections in the separate mystery pdfs (totaling the complete pattern).  Next week (hopefully on Tuesday), I’ll be releasing the final complete pattern, all in one file with photos.  I think this knit-a-long went pretty darn well, I hope everyone had tons of fun!!

I haven’t talked about knit stuff in awhile, and a lot is going on!  (And I won’t even talk about my sweater yet, that will be its own post later.)  Since I got back from our trip I have been knitting and working on knitting/pattern-related stuff nonstop!

In newest news, I’ve just started up a new section of my knit website – leethal knitting technique tutorials!

I started out with some make 1 increase tutorials (including right & left, and purl-wise both ways), beginning with a simple one to figure out my layout template and stuff… then this morning I just updated it with a cabling without a cable needle tutorial!

I’ve been putting photo tutorials in a lot of my pattern pdfs for awhile now, and a few months ago I started thinking, there’s no reason for those tutorials to be exclusive to the patterns – people don’t buy the patterns for those tutorials, right?  They are just like an extra bonus.  So, I might as well re-post them on my site for all to see!  I put the effort into making the how-tos, I’d rather more people get to use them.  So yeah, the m1 tutorials were first made for Either/Or, and some were also included in the current mystery knit-a-long pattern; the cabling tutorials were first made for Freewheelin’, and some were also included in Wobble Bass.

More tutorials from patterns which will make their ways into this section include twisted stitches, crochet provisional cast-on, weaving in your ends while knitting, grafting… and then more in the future… I’ll mention in the blog when I add new tutorials over there.

Another thing I’ve just completed is updating the charts on a couple of Remixed patterns.  When I designed Wobble Bass, I made a new cable chart font for it, which looks much nicer than what I’d used for cables in the past, as well as for twisted stitches.  So, I updated the charts in Wild is the Wind (on ravelry):

Here are the old chart symbols versus the new chart symbols:

And I updated all the cable charts in Freewheelin’ (on ravelry):

A bit of one of the old charts versus a bit of one of the new charts (the charts aren’t smaller, it’s just the way I cropped the screenshot):

The original charts worked fine, but these should be a bit smoother and easier to follow, making for a more pleasant knitting experience!  Enjoy!

In other knitting news, the mystery shawl knit-a-long is in its second week right now, and going very well!!

There are 79 projects on ravelry (at the time I’m writing this) and lots of them have spoiler photos, so click over there, or to the spoiler forums, if you want to see how it’s looking!  I won’t show any spoiler photos here, but you can also click over to my rav project pages for my 3 samples – in Anzula worsted weight, in Black Trillium sock weight, and in Cascade aran weight – to see my section 1’s.  I’ll post my section 2’s on Sunday night when I release section 3.

If you like what you see, there are still 3 sections left after this, so plenty of mystery knitting still to go if you join now!!

Besides all that knitting-related stuff, I’ve also been actually knitting a ton!  I am working on a stranded colorwork design, something I’ve done very little of in my 10 years knitting.  So I spent many days figuring out the best way for my hands to hold the 2 strands at once and work a colorwork design – one strand in each hand does not make my hands happy!  Ouch!  What ended up working best is holding both strands in my right hand, one over my first finger and the other over my middle finger… It’s tricky at first (and at second, and at third), but after several days of practice I got much better and faster at it, loosened up, and my hands stopped hurting.  Yay!

I don’t want to show you too much of the design yet, since it’s still in the beginning phases, but here are some super-cropped peeks of my colorwork:

And I’ve been working on another pattern as well, which is also still in the very early stages, swatching and note taking, more swatching and more note taking… Here is some swatching in progress (in lovely Knitted Wit yarn left over from this hat):

One last bit of news – I’m excited to be a part of the Woolly Wormhead blog tour, for her new book Classic Woolly Toppers!  So in a couple weeks that’ll be happening… I’ve never been part of a blog tour before, so it should be fun!  And if you read my blog, there’s a good chance you like to knit hats, so yeah, good stuff!

I think that’s all my knitting news for now.  Happy knitting, dear readers!

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!!

Oh my, it’s already December!  I have a bunch of leethal shop news!  The main thing is that (as you know if you follow my blog) I have pretty much transitioned completely to knit design, and away from all the old stuff I used to make and sell.  I have tons of things in my shop from the old days which I would really love to clear out, so I’ve discounted lots of the items, and I’m also adding an extra big incentive:

Through December 18th, 25-40% of all leethal shop sales will be donated to Heifer!  You can learn more about this organization on their website; their “mission is to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the earth. … With gifts of livestock and training, [they] help families improve their nutrition and generate income in sustainable ways.”

The exact percentage depends on the item – at the top of each category page within my shop, you’ll see whether those items are 25% or 40%.  I’ve also added a bunch of new items to the shop and made some other updates…

This isn’t new, but it is relevant to the season – I have a bunch of these connect-the-dots holiday cards available:

I have added a bunch of photo greeting cards for the first time – these are all made from 100% recycled/reclaimed materials (reclaimed blank greeting cards and envelopes, and 100% recycled high quality matte photo paper).  There are a few different single cards:

And two different sets of 3 cards – crafty photos and flower photos:

I’ve also added two buttoning cowls to the accessories – these are both made from recycled sweaters (one is 100% cashmere), vintage buttons, and other recycled/vintage materials, and they are both discounted from their original prices (they were originally for sale through Trillium):

And more old items that have been newly added – knit kits!  Some ninja mitts kits, 2-color hat kits, and one spiraling stripes hat kit; all include hand-dyed recycled yarn, and the pattern(s), and the spiraling hat kit also includes a couple of recycled paperclip stitch markers.

These were all made for Trillium also, long ago – most of the kits I made back then (pictured below) sold, but these few that didn’t are now discounted for you!

I also had made a skein of handspun awhile back that never made it up for sale, but now it’s there!  I named it Soft as Chalk (a Joanna Newsom song title) because it’s made from all super soft wool, spun into a smooth single.  I also discounted the skein of handspun art yarn that’s been there for awhile, Rainbow in the Dark.

And the last newly added items – buttons are back!  They are the same buttons that used to be there, but I had to take them down when I ran out of button-making supplies… Portland map buttons, respect the needles / tame the yarn, and shoot film / shoot polaroid / shoot medium format sets.

Some things that haven’t changed, but you know, they might make good gifts… recycled printed shirts – for knitters:

…and other designs.  All printed onto reclaimed shirts, in professional screen printing inks, totally washable.  There are a couple of kids size shirts as well!

And in the accessories category, there are a few cuffs remaining, like this velcro one, all made from recycled fabrics…

…and several hats!  Some kids sizes, some adult sizes, all made from recycled materials, at discounted prices!

Percentages of sales of connect-the-dots stitch sets, clock kits, and photo prints all go to Heifer as well!  I’m leaving town to visit family for the holidays, so orders must be placed by December 18th… not only will the charity donations end then, but the shop will be significantly changing and many items will be gone for good!

____

A quick unrelated note – the fifth Remixed pattern went up today!  I probably won’t be blogging it till next week, so I just wanted to tell you now!

I’m in the process of reformatting all of my patterns so that they all share the same stylesheet (fonts, layout elements, wording of certain parts, etc) – thanks to Knitgrrl’s book for calling my attention to this – and I’ve finished the main 4 that I was most eager to get updated.  Skoodlet, Ten 10 yard Cuffs, Mr. Pointy, and Spiraling Stripes Hats are now freshly styled, partially rewritten, and looking much better I think!

I also knit up and included a new example of the Skoodlet – it’s in a bulky yarn (Lamb’s Pride) and an extra large size for a gigantic hood!  And I LOVE the vintage buttons I found and how they look against the grey!  I also reshot the rainbowy example since I didn’t much like those old photos of that one:

Mr. Pointy and Spiraling Stripes Hats were two of my very earliest patterns – Mr. Pointy is a pretty basic pattern compared to my new stuff, but I still like it, and there are some gorgeous versions knit up in handspun which you can check out on ravelry.

The old version of Spiraling Stripes was actually the first pdf I ever built, and it was kind of terrible so I let it hide away…. But now, with some new photos, a bunch of rewriting, reformatting, etc, I am super happy with the hat set and want to make sure you know about it!  6 different hat patterns, and tons of variation ideas and instructions for different hat styles and ways of striping.

I also did a new photoshoot with some of these old hats – you can see here the slanted brim above, and the straight brim and brimless versions below, as well as different kinds of stripes and fits.  I think this hat set coordinations well with my Custom Tritops set – between these 2 pattern sets, you’d be set for unlimited one-of-a-kind hats for a lifetime of knitting!

I also completed a minor redesign of my main patterns page yesterday – not a big deal, but I think it’s a little easier to browse through all my patterns+ebooks now.

Ok that’s all for now… it’s some busy times around here lately… March’s quick knits club will be out on Monday, and I’m doing a crazy thing for the first time ever next week!  I’m hosting trivia night at Zach’s Shack here in southeast Portland on Wednesday night!  My guy has been a trivia host regularly for over 3 years now, and I’ve always kind of toyed with the idea of trying it sometime… and that time is 5 days from now!  I’m totally nervous and super excited at the same time!  I’ll probably blog later with how it went and I’ll share some of my favorite questions and/or categories (the way Zach’s trivia works is: 4 categories, 10 questions per category – and I’m really excited about some of my categories!)… Ok that’s all for reals now.  Happy Friday!

Well, this stupid sickness has much delayed my knit design work, but luckily finishing my website updates required slightly less energy, so I got it all uploaded yesterday!  Some of this stuff had been in progress for several months, so I’m so happy for it to be public, but there are some other more minor updates still to come in the near future!

So, the two major things you’ll notice on the blog and on any page within leethal.net are the new headers and the new drop-down menus.  There’s also a new link to a search leethal page in the blog menu to make that easier – there has always been a search bar on the leethal.net home page (since the new site went up about a year ago) but now there’s an obvious place to click here on any blog page, hopefully helpful!

Anyway, I’m really excited about those drop-down menus!  A lot more work than I’d expected them to be, with my limited understanding of css and javascript (code is from here), but so totally worth it!  Now you can basically get to any page within leethal.net from any other page!

And, the headers… those were a sudden burst of inspiration that happened right after the summit last week… I love headers that look crafty and real (like here and here and here for example) so I made mine kind of as analog as I could – these are the photographs I took that got edited to become the header, with different photos plugged into the frames for each leethal section:

And then, there’s some new content!  Finally, photography prints are now for sale in the leethal shop!  I put together these photo trios and matted prints way back over two years ago, and had many of them for sale on etsy for awhile, but etsy and I don’t really get along, so I’d been planning this update for quite some time… There will be further updates to this section, as you can see eluded to on the page, but for now – affordable artwork, trios of 4×6’s or matted 8×6’s for $15!

Other more minor update – I separated my knitting patterns into ebooks and single patterns, since there’s kind of a big difference, and I have more ebooks coming soon, so it seemed like a good idea.  You can still browse through them all together on the same page, but now in 3 separate categories: ebooks, single patterns for sale, and free patterns.  Oh, and I keep forgetting to say here – my ravelry designer page is now viewable to non-ravelry members!  So, that link is in the patterns drop-down menu also, for easy clicking.

And gigantic update #2 – brand new leemeredith.com!!  This one was a loooooong time coming, always pushed down on the to-do list, until finally I had a burst of inspiration from somewhere and just went ahead and built it!  My superold photo portfolio that used to live at leemeredith.com still exists (in major need of updating!) through this new page, but now this page makes a heck of a lot more sense to who I am now.  Through this home base, you can click over to leethal.net, do stuff! blog, photo portfolios and shop, my twitter, my flickr, me on ravelry, bad movie bingo, me on blip.fm, and more…

And after some extreme coding frustration, I was eventually able to get my blog’s feed (and twitter and flickr feeds) to show up in the drop-down menu on the page, yay!  I don’t know if it was worth the effort, but I wanted to make it happen and I did, so I was happy about it!

Oh, if any of this stuff looks super different (bad) on your screen, or doesn’t work or something, if you could let me know what browser you’re on and what the problem is that would be excellent – I’m on a mac with firefox and safari, so I’m just hoping everything works out fine in other systems…

Ok that post was much longer than I thought it would be… hope you enjoy the new stuff!

Ok, first of all, my new Cameras stitch set is available, and to celebrate, here is an extra camera design that didn’t make it into the set!  Click the image below to download the full size version, print it out (100% size is 4×6 inches), and find out what camera it is!  (Ok, it’s not that much of a mystery, but it’s fun still!)

I’ve been all motivated the last few days with website updating! I’ve been into reading all the comments that came in from my survey a little while ago, and I made a couple of changes based on people’s suggestions…

Someone had this idea – “it would be cool if your front page was more like a shop window, in that the displays changed often (maybe by season, or bi-monthly)…” – and I started thinking about that a bit and really liked it!  I already had the 6 featured things that I changed seasonally-ish, but I wanted to make it pop more and also make it easier to to change often…

So now there’s this big photo at the top, which I plan to change about once a week (or 2), to whatever i’ve most recently made/released/been working on or just a photo-of-the-day that I really like, or whatever seems to fit… And then below that are 4 square photos of “featured stuff” which I’ll also change, but not as often.  Instead of those being set categories like before (they used to be “featured shop item, featured pattern,” etc), they are just photos with no text so I can change them to anything I feel like featuring.  Of course, all the photos link to whatever is shown for easy navigation.

And then I got a few comments about my shop being confusing (like I find the shop side of the site hard to navigate. There’s too much information on a page and it’s hard to see and sometimes find again what’s there.), which made me realize that having the shop home page featuring items from every category the way it used to probably made things too busy and I needed to simplify that.  So I changed the shop home to match the patterns and yarn home pages, with just square photos for each category, for hopefully easier navigation.

If other things about the shop are confusing, I would love more feedback to make it easier!  (Or, about anything at all in the site that’s confusing.)  I’m planning on further simplifying in the future – I’m thinking about phasing out some things (hats, accessories, prints…) so I might be taking things out of the shop soon (and/or having sales!) and cutting back the shop pages.  (Side note, if there’s something you want, it might be a good idea to grab it – the whole house buying thing is motivating me to get organized, clear out some stuff, and I might be taking things out of the shop if they don’t sell by the time we move…)

I also did a bunch more updating this morning, and my about section is now up to date (that was on the to-do list for months!), and some other random things here and there that needed to be done.  I’m going to try to be more on top of updating, really I am!  Still need to get to the yarn section, and get the March club photos and info up… Oh yeah and I also got the new dyeing tutorial up on the tutorials page...

One of the reasons I’m showing you all these updates is another bit of feedback I got – Since I pick you up on the feeder I don’t notice changes to the website.  Maybe an occasional “Here’s what’s new on the site” or a featured area of/button on the blog would make me think about clicking though. I figure this is probably the case for lots of you, hence the site-update filled blog post!

Wow I can’t believe it’s up!  2 months+ of serious work, it’s a weird (good!) feeling for it to be done!  Well, not done done, it’ll always be a work in progress, always new stuff to add, but it’s up and you can see it!!  There’s so much going on, I’m dividing it into a few posts throughout the day – first, the new site in general, next will be about the new quick knits section!

You can click around and see for yourself, so I won’t tell you about obvious things (and there’s also the stuff I talked about last week).  Pleasepleaseplease let me know if you notice any typos, errors, broken links, weirdness, confusing anything, something looks weird on your browser, etc.  This was so much work spread out over so much time there’s a really good chance I missed some mistakes somewhere…

One fun new thing – free leethal wallpapers!  I’ll be adding more soon, then whenever I feel like it; there are not many photos yet, so I’m hoping to add more of those over the next few days…  The tile patterns are from photos or scans, made into boxes that will tile seamlessly on your desktop!  They’re meant for personal use only – if you want to use one as a website/blog background or anything else public, please credit me and link to leethal.net, and please let me know, thanks!

Something random you may have noticed – it was always part of my leethal branding (or something, branding is weird) that everything throughout my site and blog was lower-case, but I’ve decided to re-brand that aspect.  There’s still lots of lower-case throughout leethal.net (including “leethal” which I always spell lower-case), but for the most part sentences and names and things are capitalized and the blog will be too, starting now.  More professional, dontcha think?

Moving on, here are some aesthetic comparisons between the old and the new sites, just for fun…

Home page – the new home page not only works as navigation to any section of the site, but it has some featured stuff, my twitter feed, and a search bar!

Shop – after designing the new site, I really hate how the old shop looked!  Most exciting thing about the new shop: click the pictures and see!  Also new, an info section and a feedback page!

Patterns and Yarn – instead of smooshing everything knit-related into one single page, I’ve given patterns and yarn each their own section, with every single pattern getting its own page, and each type of yarn getting a page with big photos!  The only problem is that old links to patterns will direct to the yarn section, and old links to handspun for sale to the yarn gallery (handspun is for sale in the shop now).  But I think navigation is easy enough that it’s obvious where you should go to find what you’re looking for.

Another thing I’m excited about – I’ve added a favicon to leethal!  That’s that little icon you can see in the url bar, or the tab, or the bookmark, depending which browser you’re using.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for me in Firefox because of the cache or something, but it does show in Safari, and it shows in Firefox when I go to the old leethal.coloredlights.net address as you can see above.  Also, I don’t know how to put it in the blog because that’s php which I don’t know…

Speaking of coding, I feel pretty accomplished to have gotten so far in css!  A few months ago I knew absolutely nothing about css, and now I’ve made a pretty lengthy stylesheet for all of leethal, it’s error free, and I feel like I could totally go into any style sheet and know what it’s talking about! Yeah!

Ok that’s all for now… except, if you’ve ever gotten leethal yarn and knit it into something, be sure to add photos to the flickr pool or send them to me, so I can link to your creation from the yarn page! Woo!

ohmygosh i feel totally out of touch with the world.  a little while back i started planning a website redesign, kind of vaguely, and then about a weekish ago i started teaching myself css. (the current version of leethal.net, as well as leemeredith.com and my other sites are all just plain html, no style sheets.)  that resulted in sucking myself deep into code-land for the last several days!  i’ve totally got a good solid grasp of css now, all self-taught, so i would go at things kind of backwards and have to find the right path to figure out what i needed…. so i’ve spent hours at a time trying to figure out one little element, then i jump with joy when i figure it out, hah!

days of designing, trial and error, codecodecode, and i’m so so so so happy with how the site is looking!!  all the elements of leethal.net will be one cohesive website, with easy navigation, and there will be some new pages and a brand new section which is a project i’m super excited about!  it’s still a couple weeks from all being done, but i can’t wait!  pardon my rambling, it’s this code-land i’m in, it’s hard to focus in here!

you can see a peek of the design that’s coming here in my blog – i’ve updated some colors to match (don’t worry, there will still be tons of orange!), put borders on the pictures, and the menu bar has a new look!  let me know if anything is weird or buggy.  editing the css for the blog is a little trickier since someone else wrote it to begin with and there are some mystery parts that i don’t understand.  i think i made it work though (if you happened to click over to my blog sometime around noon today, you may have seen a messed up in-progress version with no header or something)….

moving on… my last craftstylish post ended up being a free cuff pattern – one of the designs that didn’t make it into the set. it’s a little weird, but it’s a fun lace pattern, if you’re new to lace (like me). i’ll knit a size large version sometime soonish because i think that’ll look better that this small version…

i was so excited to see this craftstylish post about other people’s versions of my skirt pattern!  my favorite picture is the second one on this post, with the crafter and her mom both wearing their skirts!!  so awesome!!

ok, back to code-land, since i can’t get my head off the site… hey can i ask you all a few questions that could help me with my design?  any feedback you could give would help me with some of these decisions….

• how do you feel about outside links opening in a new tab?  example: you’re on a leethal pattern page, and click to see the pattern on ravelry. is ravelry opening in a new tab ok, or annoying?
• do you like/prefer buttons over text for “buy now” “add to cart” etc?  if the font size/color is different to set it apart, is that enough, or are buttons much better?

hmm i can’t think of any more questions.  thanks!!  back to coding i go!