Glad it’s April 1st, no foolin’
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!