Hi readers!  I am excited to tell you that I have a new page on my website: print patterns!  An assortment of my most popular patterns (kind of a random selection actually, based on things like formatting, not just on popularity) are now available in high-quality printed format; you can see them all on that page, where you can link to the pattern info pages to learn more about the patterns, and click over to buy them through MagCloud.

When you buy a print pattern there, you’ll also receive a digital copy of the pattern (not the ravelry digital version in your rav library, just a pdf of the print pattern, but that way you can get started right away!).  The pricing of the print patterns there is the same as my print patterns sold in yarn shops; if you want to save on shipping, you can always ask your local yarn shop if they carry my patterns ;)

And speaking of yarn shops, if you happen to own or work at a yarn shop, the other big website update I just completed is my wholesale page.  It’s now all up to date, with a current downloadable line sheet, and previews of all available patterns.

So those are my announcements of what’s new right now… as for more exciting new pattern type news, I have been working hard on many things, including this year’s Adventure Knit-a-long!!  But you’ll learn more about that very soon (like, next week!) so I won’t say anything else for now.  Lots of other things I’ve been working on lately are supersecret, so I don’t have much to show you for now.

I just got this Ikea cart thing (way discounted, woo!) and filled it with my in-progress / soon-to-be-in-progress projects, meaning yarn which has a planned purpose and needs to be knit up asap.  I have A LOT of knitting to get done in the next few months!  Ah, who am I kidding, the next few months, I have A LOT of knitting to get done like always and forever.  So many exciting project ideas, so little time!

So, I’m hard at work on Adventure Knitting.  I have a collection in the works, which includes that stripy project in the corner up there, which is not supersecret – I’ve posted some insta peeks at that one (below).  That collection was originally meant for a spring release actually, but due to timing issues, and more thinking on it, I decided it’s actually a better fall collection anyway, and I don’t want the Adventure KAL to be so late in the summer like it was last year (when it happened in August).  I’d rather push the KAL to earlier in the summer, then release the collection after that, when we’re thinking ahead to cooler weather, so yeah, that collection is something to look forward to a bit later in the year…

And then I’ve been working on several secret things, one in the so-not-leethal yarns pictured below!  And another in a secret yarn I can’t show you, but it is fabulous and I can’t wait to show you eventually.

And then there’s a collaboration project in the works which is VERY exciting – I’m working with awesome Portland designers Star Athena and Shannon Squire, local yarn dyer Blue Moon Fiber Arts, and our photographer friend (and sometimes designer) Vivian Aubrey.  This is actually the idea for which the seed was planted several year ago between Star, Vivian, and I – I blogged about it briefly here back in 2012 – but it got put on hold for years, and then evolved.  We’re really excited to have brought Shannon and Tina of Blue Moon on board, and the ball is officially rolling!!  Here is an epic pile of Blue Moon yarns:

As for more personal life update stuff – I was down with a horrid flu for the last few weeks, so things have been slowed down a bit.  There were a few days, two weeks ago, when I felt like my body was trying to kill me and I couldn’t even knit, and then I was well enough to knit simple things but not really do anything else, for like a week… and I’ve been kind of slow and blah for about the last week.  Yesterday and today I’m finally feeling just about normal, so yay for normal!  (I think my furry buddy was a bit worried about me when I was really sick.)

Here in Portland, the weather is turning, the weeds are going crazy, and I’m trying to enjoy the nice bits and not think of the uncomfortably hot days ahead… I got this beautiful poppy plant for the front yard which makes me happy to look at everyday, and I’m growing tomatoes, strawberries, and blueberries in the back yard (and the wild blackberries, which involves mostly cutting them back, and keeping a small-ish patch to harvest).  I made granola yesterday for the first time, and it went really well – had my first warm weather season breakfast this morning: yogurt, blueberries (store bought for now), banana slices, and granola, yum!  (I’m a very seasonal breakfast eater – oatmeal everyday October-ish, through May-ish, and then cold cereal/yogurt topped with granola, berries, and other yummy things in the warm/hot months, one thing I love about summer!)  Anyway, to sum things up, the weather is super nice right now, the yard work needing to be done is overwhelming and awful, but berries are good, and flowers are pretty.

So that’s all for now… you can look forward to Adventure KAL news very soon!  Happy springtime!

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!

Exciting thing!  The awesome knit designer Sarah Wilson (who I got to meet and hang out with awhile back), aka The Sexy Knitter, in addition to designing fabulous patterns (I love this and this!), makes these handy Knitter’s Tool Tins…

And for this month only, there are 5 Tool Tins available featuring my photos!  So cool!!  She sent me one of each (for free, blogger disclaimer) so I’ve had a chance to check ’em all out, and try out the tools.  Each tin is filled with all that you see here.

In a Tool Tin, you get: a colorful tape measure, tiny scissors (she just launched a new kind of scissors this month, sharper than her old style, and all different colors – I tried them out and they totally work, while also being adorable), a stitch holder, a cable needle, a double-ended crochet hook in 2 sizes, 5 stitch markers (very cute!), and 3 types of sewing needles which stay on the lid of the tin with a magnet!

These are the 5 photos of mine which are available on the tins right now:

Above, Pigment (in Malabrigo Chunky) and Color by Number Plaid Cowl (in Malabrigo Twist).  Below, Lerro in Anzula Cricket.

And then two really different samples of Mikkey, the yellow-y one in Jill Draper Makes Stuff Adirondack and Madelinetosh Tosh Merino, and the neons one in Space Cadet Elara.  The photos all look a little different on the tins, but they look nice.

The tins are $25 plus shipping in Sarah’s etsy shop – the ones with my photos will only be around until the end of September!  Unless you place a wholesale order; anyone can order in bulk at the wholesale price (you don’t need a special wholesale license), $150 for a dozen tins, and you can continue to get old designs after they’re retired.  (If you have a dozen knitter friends/family members, this could make a great holiday gift purchase!)  You can also get all 5 of these leethal tins at the discounted price of $100, through September only.

But hey guess what – Sarah is offering a coupon code to you, leethal knitters!  For the next 10 days only, enter code LEETHAL to get 20% off your order of $25 or more from The Sexy Knitter etsy shop (except for the wholesale/bulk orders).  She has tons of cute stitch markers, knitting patterns, the scissors and tape measures by themselves, and other assorted knitter gear, like needle gauges and project bags… Use the code to save 20% off all of it!

One last fun note:  If you have a knitting photo that you think is tin-worthy, Sarah is always looking for new tin photos!  Show her your photo (contact her through etsy) and if it does get picked to be used on tins, you get the tin for free!  I know mine are going to get lots of use!

I have a few announcement kinds of things for you – first, for Portlanders, I’m having a trunk show this weekend!  At Sellwood’s brand new excellent shop, Yarntastic, on Saturday (Sept 14th) 2-5pm.  My stuff will stay on display throughout the week, so if you can’t make the official event on Saturday, you can still stop by and see the samples and stuff.  (But try to make it to the event, and say hi!)

The show will kind of focus on Adventure Knitting, and all eight of my sample knits will be there, but there will also be other designs, an assortment of favorites (my newest, Lemmy, will be there for sure), to get you excited about the start of cool weather knitting season!  Check out the Yarntastic group on ravelry to learn more about the shop.

For the broader Pacific Northwest area, a reminder, because I only mentioned it very briefly before, that I’ll be teaching Recycled Yarn Making, and hosting a superfun Game Knitting night, at the awesome Knit Fit! in Seattle November 2-3.

(That photo is of the Game Knitting night last year, which I realized I never blogged about!  So I will be doing that soon, showing you all the fun we had last year.  This year we’ll be game knitting to Seattle classic, Singles!)

And now, something for anyone anywhere… I wrote a guest post for the Fresh Stitches blog that went up yesterday, and it includes a discount code for Adventure Knitting!  Good through Sept 15th, so go check it out, for the code and also to read me talk about my love of options in knitting patterns, and to see a crazy flow chart thing I made about Adventure Knitting choices.

A review of Adventure Knitting also happened over on the Knit Picks blog, so that’s supercool.

And, just moments ago, another Adventure Knitting write-up went up over on Alex’s Dull Roar blog – she made a crazy water bottle sleeve, with two different section 2 patterns for extra adventure!  (She also just released an ebook about becoming a designer, so check that out while you’re over there.)

And that’s all the news I can think of… I’m spending most of my time working on the big project I can’t talk about; those photos above are the start of another sample knit for that, which I am loving!  I’m doing a photo-a-day thing on instagram, so there are lots of random photos being posted for that, like many of my cat, and assorted daily stuff and things.  So that’s that, happy knitting!

The weekend before last I spent 5 days in Columbus, Ohio for the industry trade show of the year for all things fibery and needley.  We had a time.

I roomed with the fabulous Andrea Rangel (who is pictured above and is the best at colors – check out this palette she rocked one day.)  And I booth-shared with the awesome Alexa of Tin Can Knits; we had tons of fun:

Our booth was in the Deep South Fibers cluster, so we were booth-neighbors with lots of great people, yay!  Like Hilary Smith Callis (pictured below, adorably giggling about posing with the issue of Knitscene in which she was the featured designer!) and Carina Spencer, posing with me below, and lots more lovely people I don’t have photos of, like Carrie Sullivan of Irish Girlie Knits (my birthday twin!), Juju at Loop, Olga Buraya-Kefelian (one of my all time favorite designers of ever), Woolly Wormhead… the list would go on but I’ll stop there because that’s who was immediately next to us…  It’s great being around all these other designers once in awhile, since they are kind of like my co-workers but we all work alone in our homes with only twitter to connect us (basically, usually).

So, my booth!  I started out with the hanging spray-painted frames on the back wall:

Then I hung lots of photos along the side wall, with mini-clothespins (closeup):

Then I built a ceiling!  I ran wire from bar to bar across the top, then more and more wire from wire to bar and wire to wire, and so on, until I had a spiderweb-esque mesh ceiling.  The photo to the left there is after I’d already started taking it apart a little at the end, but you get the idea.  Then, from the ceiling, I hung trays:

And I put things on the trays, using them as mini-tables, instead of having a big table.  And I hung lots of samples along the tops of the side and back walls.

So my business cards, postcards, buttons, and lots of smaller sample knits, were all on the tray tables.  It was a bit unwieldy, functionally-speaking… people were afraid if they walked into the booth and bumped into the trays everything would fall; but that wasn’t true, I made sure they were very stable.  Overall, it didn’t turn out perfectly, but I was pretty happy with the booth setup :)

Here’s me standing in it, photo by Stacey Trock of Fresh Stitches!

Here is our whole booth, with Tin Can Knits on the right:

Besides the actual trade show booth stuff, TNNA weekend also involved lots of eating (not just ice cream), a bit of drinking (Columbus has some good local beers!), and tons of talking!  Alexa and I were pretty darn into our truffle mac n cheese at Barley’s!

Click to enlarge the photo to the right below to read all the amazing flavor options at Jeni’s!  My personal favorite out of the EIGHT flavors I tried throughout the weekend (that’s only 4 servings – my favorite thing about Jeni’s is that you get 2 flavors in a small size) was Queen City Cayenne, yum!

Much fun was had at the Grass Skirt tiki room with the ravelry crew (where I took this photo of Mary-Heather, Jess, and Ysolda being supercute).  And, after all the mac n cheese and ice cream, I was happy to fill up on veggies (and a local beer, of course) at a pretty good greek place.  Good job, Columbus, I like you!

I also hung out with lots of other designers and yarn-type people I didn’t photograph – some people I met last year at TNNA, and I met loads of new people.  Yarny people are the greatest!  Everyone is the best!

So then on Monday I broke down my booth and packed it all back into the suitcase it came in, but it was much harder to close this time!

I brought home all the yarn I could possible fit!  There’s some secret hidden yarn I can’t show you yet, and lots of glorious Anzula!!  Enough Cricket and Squishy to make into two shawls (one 2-color and one 3-color) – these yarns will eventually become the samples of the colorwork shawl in the Betiko collection!

And then lots of bits of awesome yarns for future use – Imperial Yarn, Fibre Company, Sincere Sheep, and Cestari are pictured below, all so lovely!  There were a few others I talked to but have nothing to show now (notably Phydeaux, Space Cadet, Sweet Georgia, Cephalopod, Briggs and Little) – yummmm yarrrrrn.  And I didn’t even walk the entire floor or spend much time seeking out yarn, since I was focused on my own booth.  It’s overwhelming how much there is to see!

Lastly,  I treated myself to some new clothes for TNNA – I really love this dress (found at Village Merchants, my most favorite secondhand shop), so yay, because good dresses (for affordable-on-an-indie-designer’s-budget prices) are hard to find, man!  I think I scored this for about $12, with the original tag still on, so possibly never worn.  Oh how I love a good deal, so I had to share with you ;)  And another shot of me in my booth, to round things out, all covered in knitwear (too much air conditioning works out well when you want to show off your wooly samples).

That’s TNNA!  Good times!

Hey guess what!  February is my birthday month, so I’m inviting you to celebrate with me by offering a 31% off coupon code!

Enter the code leethals31 (that’s “leethal’s 31” without punctuation) into the coupon box in your shopping cart, on ravelry or leethalknits.com, and get as many patterns/ebooks as you want for almost a third off!  This code will be valid at the start of February 1st, through my birthday on the 11th.

Moving on… I made a couple of proclamations over on my tumblr at the beginning of the year, and I wanted to address them both here.  First, I claimed that for 2013 I’ll be posting a tumbl-a-day.  I have stuck to it for most of this month, but not completely… as the days went by, I found that some days I had something personal to post about, or something knitting–related, and those were all good, but other days I didn’t have anything to post, so I’d just waste a bunch of time looking for something to reblog.  This ends up being a bad thing for multiple reasons – the time wasted, and the littering of my tumblr with reblogs, which I want to mostly avoid doing.  So, no more strict post-a-day plan, I’ll just try to post things over there when I have something worth posting.

I do like using tumblr, as a kind of halfway between a tweet and a full on blog post over here, and I think I’ll continue with the posting of pattern sneak peeks (like I posted last night!), so if you want to see those you might want to follow me over there.  And, I do plan on doing some monthly tumblr based projects, like I mentioned in that first tumbl-a-day proclamation post… I’m going to try listening to and posting a record a day in February, so we’ll see how that goes.

If you want to help give me things to post about over there, you can ask me a question.  Also, if you know of any of those photo-a-day projects for an upcoming month (in which you’re told what to photograph each day), let me know – I did one of those for a month last year and it was fun!

So then, the other thing I announced at the beginning of the year was that January would be the month that I finally get my studio in actual proper, functioning, usable order.  I have made some progress, but damn, it’s been a busy month.  I actually have a chunk of time set aside for this afternoon/evening to get it as far along as possible before the month is over, but it’s far from finished.

These photos were taken 20 minutes ago.  In my defense, I have done a lot of more internal organizational work, like figuring out where certain things can live, projects which aren’t really visible behind all the clutter.  A couple months ago, there wasn’t close to enough room for all my yarn, but then I got some new yarn organizing systems set up and now all my yarn has a place to live!  Even all the small leftover balls.  Organization feels so good!

I’ve lived in this house, with that room as my studio space, for over 2.5 years now, so it’s embarrassing that it’s always been used as basically a storage space, with rarely a surface clear enough to work on.  The thing is, the room is significantly smaller than my studio room in our old apartment, and I’ve accumulated a ton more crap stuff over the last 3 years or so… Doing my old quick knits mail-out club encouraged me to buy lots of random crafty stuff, and then doing Remixed encouraged me to buy lots of sweaters to unravel, and this and that, and excuses excuses… basically, I am cursed with hoarding tendencies and I just have too much stuff to easily organize it in that one small room.  But I’m doing my best, really.

My old studio space was never really organized either, always a work-in-progress, just like this one… until we bought a house and moved.  About a month before we bought our house, I was told the Oregonian wanted to include me in a story about studio spaces, which would mean them sending a photographer into my space.  I used it as a motivator to get my room in order for the first time ever, succeeded, was featured in the paper, then immediately packed everything up to move!

During all the house buying and moving chaos back then, I managed to take photos of the studio before packing, but I never got around to editing and posting the photos… until last night!  I got them all sorted, edited, and up on flickr;  so here and now, I’m showing you these photos of my old space, because I always meant to, and so that they might motivate me to get my current space as functional!

Got pretty good light in that room!

(Coffee can cubbies tutorial is here.)

Gotta have a record player in any decent studio space ;)

Some areas looked messy, but they were actually in order.

Thrifted wine rack (I think?) as yarn storage/display.

Reclaimed CD cases (from my old photo lab day job – I didn’t go through all those discs myself!) as yarn storage.  And Ikea plastic bag storage units as yarn storage.

I’ve been sewing at the kitchen table for the last couple years… I can’t wait till I have space to actually craft in my craft studio!

Yeah, I like Ikea.  I’ll leave it at that… there are more shots on flickr if you want to see more.  I do have more to post about, but it can be for a later day… For now, you can be expecting the new stripy pattern release next week!  I’m aiming for Wednesday morning… it’s a fun pattern, I’m excited about it!  Yay!

First, exciting news, I have a new Quick Knits print book of an assortment of 12 of the most popular patterns!  They all use no more than 20 yards of yarn, and they come in a 16 page high-quality printed booklet for $12.  When you buy through MagCloud, you’ll also get a free pdf download of the book, great for iPad or other device viewing!  (rav link)

Besides that brand new pattern collection, I also now have print versions of my Terrapin and Flippable patterns (for sale on MagCloud here), and I’ve updated all of my print patterns so that they all come with a free pdf version of the booklets when you buy through MagCloud.  (Note that these are pdf versions of the print books, not the same pdfs that you would buy through ravelry or my site – same patterns, different formatting, and they won’t go in your rav library.)

These brand new patterns are now also available to Portland locals at Twisted, and will very soon be in Richmond, VA at Rag & Bone!  If you own or work at a yarn shop and might be interested in my patterns, check out my wholesale page with everything you need to know!  If you think my patterns would be a great fit at your favorite local shop, tell them to check out my stuff at leethalknits.com, or let me know the name of the shop and I’ll get in touch with them!  Okay that’s done, moving on now…

So, I’d been meaning to get those new print patterns set up for quite some time, but the thing that finally made it a top priority was TNNA – I went to this biggest convention of the year for the first time (back in June)!  I wanted to have my print patterns and catalog all up to date, so yeah, I did that, plus new business cards (and my new website, of course!), and then I headed to Ohio and my mind was blown with how many people I met… by the end, I was the most exhausted I’ve ever been, in an awesome way!

If you follow designers and other yarny type professionals on twitter, or blogs, or where ever you do your following, then you’ve surely heard of TNNA – it’s an industry-only convention, where yarn companies, designers, etc, show off their stuff and yarn shops place their orders… unless you go as a designers without a booth, like I did, in which case it’s more for just meeting a million people and passing out business cards and wholesale catalogs whenever possible.

I did lots of walking around Columbus (which I liked a lot!), hanging out with tons of designers who I either knew online and met in real life for the first time, or just met for the first time period, and we’ve since become internet buddies, talking shop.  It’s indescribably great to talk with big groups of people who all do generally what I do, which is a completely solitary job, about all different aspects of being a designer – and I do have good designer friends here in Portland but it’s different when it’s a wide variety of lots of different kinds of designers… Anyway, it was great.

I just brought my little point-and-shoot camera since I knew photography was off-limits inside the convention and I didn’t want to have to carry around my normal camera if I couldn’t even use it most of the time… So I ended up taking very few photos, sadly, the best ones all seen here.  This is the North Market across the street from the convention center, where the ice cream could be found, and other good food.

I got new shoes just before (which was bad news, of course, since I was still breaking them in and they killed my feet by the end of the second day, so I had to wear my super dorky running shoes for 2 days which I brought as back-ups in case I might need them), and I finished embroidering my plain black bag on the plane there:

Alex and Stephanie had the coziest booth in all the land, so we took breaks there as needed, especially the last couple days as the exhaustion got more severe.  Here’s Stephanie (Tiny Owl), Alex (Dull Roar), Stacey (Fresh Stitches – with birds in her hair!!), and me, squeezed onto the blow-up sofa:

Of course I had to go to Jeni’s each day (just once per day though, not a big deal!) and since their small size can be 2 different flavors, I got to try 8 flavors – I think my favorite was the goat cheese cherry, but the lemon blueberry was fantastic, and the black coffee, and the juniper lemon curd, and the pistachio honey…..  There’s Cirilia in the background, who was so busy actually working that she barely got to hang out, bummer (but I’ll be seeing her at Knit Fit! in Seattle soon!):

The Craftsy party was a definite highlight – an insane claustrophobic highlight!  In this crowd shot, you can see Daniel Yuhas in focus in the center there – I met him for the first time in Columbus, even though we live in the same city!

Here’s Jess having a super adorable Marilyn Monroe moment over a vent:

I like taking photos of people taking photos… here’s Mary-Heather (Rainy Day Goods) and Sarah (Sexy Knitter):

And Sarah and Alex, yeah it was a silly fun party:

There was lots of hanging out and knitting at night, of course, and laughing, and trying to stay awake… Alex doing one of those things and Sarah doing the other:

Other highlights:

I didn’t get any photos with her at all, but on the first day there I met up with the awesome Jaala and did an interview for Knitcircus!  You can read the article here (pdf), in which I’m labeled a “ninja innovator”!  Love it!

I shared a cab with Lisa Bogart, who just released the book Knit with Love – she’s super nice so you should check it out!

I had a great roommate experience with Jessica, who has a fun blog and podcast, so you should check those out!

Since I took so few photos, I got permission to grab a few from friends… Here’s Stephanie and me wearing her fabulous deer hat, taken by Katy (and there’s another cute shot of us on Hilary’s blog).

Hilary (The Yarniad), Sarah (in her incredible Lady Sybil Jumpsuit!), and me, taken by Alex, at the brew pub where I got maybe the best mac n cheese I’ve ever had:

TNNA ended up being so much about the people, that I haven’t even mentioned the yarn!  Oh the yarn!  Yummm how I do love yarn.  I met lots of nice yarny people, and made note of many companies I’d love to work with at some point.  One of them was Anzula, who offered me some gorgeous yarn for my next design!  They were super nice and their yarn is beautiful and I am now knitting this into a sample for my upcoming mystery shawl knit-a-long!

Mmmmm yes I love it!  Oh and what was that?  Mystery shawl knit-a-long?  Yup, you heard me right!  The actual knitting will begin on October 1st, but more details and sign-ups will be released very soon!

Okay I’m going to jump around a bit since I’ve been gone for awhile (from here, busy times) – first, I’m extending the raffle for the Remixed knit-a-long by a few days.  I’ll be picking winners on Monday night or Tuesday morning, so you have till then to get any Remixed projects you’ve made up on ravelry (with photos) to enter the giveaway! (More in the rav forums here.)  If you’re late to the KAL and just starting a project now, that’s okay, the rav project photos can be in-progress and you’ll still be entered in the raffle!

Speaking of knit-a-longs, there are some changes to the twitter mystery KAL; it is now going on a bit longer, ending on July 6th.  Section 2 still ends on June 26th, but now I’ll be giving you some options via tweets for what to do after that and there will be some new repeat rows tweeted daily, with the whole thing coming to an end after a couple more sections of those repeat options.  The free pdf will be released at that point, once the tweets are all out.  Above and below are some somewhat mysterious photos, but you can check in with the ravelry group weekly threads (or my flickr stream) to see weekly progress photos – we’re now a bit into section 2 so you can get an idea of how the construction is working.

Yesterday, June 1st, marked an exciting anniversary for me – 4 years since leaving my day job to be self-employed full time!  (Well, May 27th actually, but I always think of it as June 1st being the self-employment mark.)  Since my high school and college graduations happened after 4 years, and I worked day jobs out of college for exactly 4 years, I kind of feel like I’ve graduated from my self-employment struggling trial period or something, like it’s really official now and I’m beginning the next stage of my life where hopefully this whole career thing just keeps getting better!  Yay!

Another fun thing, though completely off in a different direction… we had a couple friends over last night so I decided to try out this insane recipe (found via pinterest), mostly out of intense curiosity.  It totally worked!  For my version, I used 1 bag of frozen strawberries and 1 bag of frozen blueberries, white cake mix, and ginger ale.  We ate it with some Tillamook ice cream on top:

We want to try it with different experimental variations – I think our next attempt will be with apple slices, spice cake mix, and Dr. Pepper!  (Pete’s idea)  And next time I think I’ll stir it up just a little so that all the cake mix gets wet – the recipe blog post warns “If you stir the two, you will have a cake like topping” but that sounds pretty good to me!

I took some photos of a squirrel in our front yard, and I thought you might like to see them.  Speaking of photos, I just finally finished going through and editing over 800 photos I took over our 2 day trip up north 2 months ago (they’re not all flickr’d yet), so you can expect a blog post about that soooon!  The main thing I’ve been working on for the last month or so is my new website – leethalknits.com – which will be the place you can find all my knitting patterns, organized and separated from everything else leethal.  I feel like leethal.net is getting cluttered and needs to be redone a bit, so this new site is the first step, then I’ll be fixing up leethal.net to be more representative of what I’m doing now.  So that’s that plan.

A couple other things… I am going to be teaching at Knit Fit! in Seattle in November, along with many other awesome teachers and I’m super excited about it!  If you’re anywhere near Seattle, I hope you can make it; you can follow the Knit Fit! blog to learn more about everyone involved and stuff.  I may be doing another fun thing besides teaching… still a secret for now, but it might be awesome!

A little while back I was interviewed for Knitters Rumble blog, so you can read that if you’re interested.  I’ve been tumbling a few things lately, like movies and records, so when I’m absent from this blog, at least there’s that… I do have several posts planned for here… anyone want to give me extra hours in the day so I can do all I want/need to do?  Damn time!  Anyway, one thing at a time, and for now I’m going to try to get this new website done, then move on to the next things… So for now, keep on doing stuff!  And happy knitting!

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks!  I’ve taken several overnight trips for various purposes, to places as exciting as Seattle and as boring as Salem.  I went up north to Washington with my buddies Star, Vivian, and Marcia, for the purpose of going to Madrona fiber arts retreat in Tacoma, but I think hanging out in Seattle was the real highlight of the trip!

We spent the night at Marcia’s sister’s fabulous cabin-like house in the Wallingford neighborhood, made dinner and knit and talked around the fire.

Then in the morning we took a walk to the Fremont neighborhood…

…where we ate a delicious breakfast at Silence-Heart-Nest…

…and then stopped by the Theo Chocolate factory store!  Free samples of spicy sipping chocolate, oh wow, so good.

We walked back to the house along the water…

…and saw some fun sights.

Then we headed down to Tacoma, to the Hotel Murano for Madrona.  We spent some quality time in the marketplace, and then sat and knit by the fire and the horse lamp (and the Chuck Close).  Another random trip highlight was stopping at Burgerville on the way up and on the way home – because of the usual goodness of Burgerville, and because of the crazy future touch screen sodapop machine at this location (in Woodland, WA).  Raspberry Coke Zero, mmmm.

And then there’s something I can’t fully talk about yet, but… last year, when Star, Vivian, and I went to Black Sheep fiber festival, we brainstormed up a plan for a collaborative project, and then we were all so busy we never got it going.  Well, on this recent trip, the spark returned and we’re all really trying to make it happen this year!  Here’s us at Black Sheep, filled with new project excitement energy!

So that’s all about that… besides all the mini-trips I’ve been taking, I also spent some fun times showing visitors around Portland recently.  We tried to pack as much awesome Portlandyness as possible into one full day, so we did: Genie’s for a late breakfast, Movie Madness, Multnomah Falls (below), Kennedy School, Ground Kontrol, and Hopworks.  Playing tourist for a day is fun!

A couple other things I wanted to mention – I was recently a featured crafter on Think Crafts! so that was neat.  Even more exciting though, I was interviewed on Stash and Burn podcast!  I talked with Nicole for about a half hour, about all kinds of things… Remixed, my other patterns, color, TV spoilers, etc… You can listen to the podcast through iTunes, or stream it directly on the website (the interview starts after about 20 minutes).  Yay!

So, the traveling combined with some assorted teaching and other stuff has meant a brief pause on Remixed work, but I did spend all day yesterday working on that eighth pattern, so it’s on its way!  Now that I’m feeling more confidant that it’s going to work, I can reveal that it’s a design for your hands – more than that will be shown soon enough, once I have a decent enough prototype to photograph.  It’s a tricky pattern concept… I’ve made 4 prototypes so far, and still working out major problems to get the shape right…

I think that’s all for catching up.  I actually have another overnight trip planned soon, one which will involve lots of photos!  And something I’m trying to find the time to really focus on lately is getting my studio in functioning order (instead of a storage room that I can barely walk through), so I may post some studio stuff in the near future, we’ll see how that goes… Oh yeah, lastly, a quick reminder that you still have almost a week left of my birthday month sale – save 30% on any 3 or more of my patterns!

How’s your 2012 going so far?  Mine is off to a slooooow start, but I feel like it’s just about to start taking off!  I wanted to jump in here after my long delay with kind of a catch-up post, with some stuff I’ve been up to so far this year, and random bits and news and things I wanted to share with you.

First, Portlanders: I’ll be teaching a couple of free Library classes on making my no-sew recycled t-shirt bags, plus other things with the t-shirt leftover scraps (like the cuffs above), which you can see some more photos of over here.  The first class is this Saturday (the 21st) at the Capitol Hill branch, and the next one will be on February 18th at the Albina branch – check out my info page here for details and library links.

And then a bit of leethal news – I wanted to let you know how much I ended up raising for Heifer… $110!!  Thanks to all who bought stuff in December, you are awesome!

And now moving on to what I’ve been up to… One thing I did on an impulse a few days ago, a kind of mixing things up for the new year new project-ish thing…. I started a tumblr!  I figure, I’ve always been terrible at little posts here on do stuff! – I’ve gone through phases of trying to regularly post small things like recipes, thrifty scores, mixes, etc… but it never sticks and I always go back to my long posts.

So, I thought, how about I break it up?  Keep this blog as it is, but really try to do more tutorials and valuable content, and stick all that little content over on the tumblr.  I’m thinking of it as a halfway point between this blog and twitter – the posts will be more permanent than tweets, but much less of a big deal than the leethal blog.  My plan is to rarely even mention knit design over there, or even crafts in general – all valuable crafty content will be for here on do stuff! (so if that’s all you care about, you don’t need to follow both) – and to just use tumblr for silly personal stuff, assorted photos of things I’m doing, movies, books, music, food… we’ll just see where it goes, I don’t even know what to expect!

And now speaking of movies and music… I have a couple long term project updates.  Remember a year ago, when I decided to try to watch 365 movies in 2011?  Well, I did it!  JUST!  I watched my 364th and 365th movies on New Year’s Eve and just barely succeeded.  The list is a little embarrassing, but remember, I watch most movies while working, so I can’t give 100% attention to the screen, meaning I make silly choices a lot of the time, especially if I know I’m working on a pattern that needs some focus.  The questionable movies on the list weren’t really watched, they were just kind of background noise.  You understand, hehe.  Anyway, it was a fun project, but I’m happy to not have to count movies anymore and be more free to get sucked into TV shows whenever I want.  (So much TV to catch up with!  First up, probably Downton Abbey!  Not that I didn’t watch TV shows in 2011, but I just had to space them out and couldn’t keep up with everything.)

And my other project… well, you probably remember back in the summer when I went through that massive record organization project.  Chronological order!  Damn, it was a ton of work, and it was nerdy fun to do, but it was so not practical.  Cataloging and sorting our collection like that made Pete and I much more active about collecting records, like too much so, but hey, Portland has amazing shops that need our support, right?

So, once they were all organized, the collection started rapidly growing larger, and it became overwhelming, the thought of adding all the new LPs in their chronological spots.  So they just accumulated, and at the beginning of this year, the motivation kicked us and we spent a couple days immersed in re-organizing once again.

This time, alphabetical!  Sigh of relief!  So much easier to add new stacks where they belong and keep it all in order!  And, if you compare the photos of our collection from July and the current shots, you’ll notice how vinyl has almost completely taken over our shelving unit.  Love it!

Another random fun thing I wanted to mention is that Pete has gotten suuuuper into Pinterest since joining a couple days ago.  If you have any interest in men’s fashion, or neat nature/science photos, you may want to follow his boards.

And then the last thing I wanted to mention… even though it annoys me that there’s no iPad app or functioning website and everything is through the iPhone app, I still like the idea of instagram and I’ve started using it a bit more.  I’m _leethal_ over there if you’re an instagrammer (instagrammar?)…

Okay I think those are all the things I wanted to mention.  Happy 2012 all!

Hope you are having a good holiday-ish week!  I am hanging at my parents’ house in Orange County for a couple weeks, hoping to get tons of knitting and ebook photo editing done, between silly times with my brothers and California adventures with my parents…  Just wanted to kind of check in here since not much leethal stuff is going on, but will be in the near future!

Remixed pattern #6 is basically done – just needs to be tested once I finished laying out the pdf.  Giving my testers a break for now, for gift knitting times, so it’ll go out to them next week, then be out to Remixers in another week or so, beginning of January:

It can be super extra terrifying if you choose:

But it can also be folded up into a hat for normal everyday use.  See more photos of the stripy one and the bulky one on ravelry.  It’s for any weight yarn, worked top down, to get the eye and mouth placement just right.

And then the seventh pattern is just about done as well!  Gentle on My Mind is a bonnet style hat, which can be made with or without i-cord tails, and works excellently with stripes…

This is my first prototype, and was made with normal short row wraps.  After completing it, I discovered Socktopus’s shadow wraps method, which is so freaking awesome and a perfect fit for this pattern!  So my other samples are using that, and that will be the recommended technique in this pattern…

Below is my second sample, in several different handspun mini-skeins and leftover bits (plus a couple stripes of Malabrigo Twist thrown in there)… I love the front part, and I like the back of the head, but the middle is kinda weird, oh well.  It’s a sample without the i-cords (more photos are on ravelry).

Right now I’m working on another striped sample – 2 contrasting recycled solids – which I am super loving!  So, this design should be ready for testing in a couple weeks, and then just one Remixed pattern left in the collection!

Besides the designing and knitting, I’ve been making lots of recycled yarns for the ebook.  This one is the yarn used in the stripy mask – a striped wool unraveled sweater yarn, plied with thread:

Here are a couple of navajo plied recycled striped yarns – the left is cotton, the right is wool:

And from the same sweater as that wool navajo plied, a sleeve became this stripy yarn, plied with an angora blend:

So that’s what I’ve been working on – well, the work work I’ve been doing… I’ve also spent lots of time working on gift projects, or one main gift project, which you can see a peek at through my twitter.  It will be blogged at some point soon!

A couple other things I wanted to mention here…  I’ve been saving all my coffee cans for the last couple years, since I made this cubby, in case I might want to make another one, but now I have something like 16 or 18 saved up, and nowhere in my house to put another one, so I’d love to give all the cans to a crafter who doesn’t drink coffee and wants to make a cubby.  Anyone in the Portland area want them??  Comment if you’re interested and I’ll email you…

And this one last thing – thought there might be some readers out there who might be interested in this:

The casting agent happens to be an old co-worker from my day job in California many years ago… weird connection to my current world (that day job had nothing to do with craftiness).  So I just wanted to throw that up here… not exactly my thing (I don’t have that necessary tv personality) but it sounds pretty awesome!

Did you have a good Halloween?!

I did!!

My buddies and I didn’t have a plan till the last minute, but then it came together awesomely!  I was Andy Warhol, Pete was Banksy…

…and Star was Frida Kahlo:

I took Polaroids and drew sketches of people all night…

…at dinner and at the taphouse where we played trivia…

…and where we won trivia!!  It was my team’s first win at that particular trivia night, and it was a great night to win since they had some extra bonus Halloween prizes:

Before I poofed out my hair to be crazy-haired Warhol for the night, I had Pete take my photo as smooth-haired Warhol and used it to photoshop this:

I bleached my hair for the costume (I was going to anyway, to dye it colors, the timing just happened to work out perfectly) but it didn’t bleach out totally white – I was bad at getting the back of my hair.  But I think it worked out pretty well, lots of people knew who we all were, which is a lot more than I can say for many Halloweens!  Anyway, fun time.

I’m trying to blog more silly posts like this, but need to get in the habit – I had this one almost completely written and ready to post a couple days after Halloween, and then got distracted with my designing and forgot about it!  I have several old handmade gifts to blog about, now that it’s time to start figuring out gifts…  and maybe a few recipes as well… I’ll try to make it happen, really I will!

So yeah I haven’t checked in for awhile… I’ve been keeping busy, partly with work, and partly with… well, not work…

I made that comic of a few random things I’ve been up to lately with one of my favorite apps on my new iPad!  My new time-sucking toy is a combined wedding and christmas gift (thanks Matt and Mom+Dad!!), which had some complications causing the delay, but now I have it.  And holy crap you guys, it is way too much fun!

I’ve been playing with many imagey apps – like Pixlr-o-matic, which made the pictures directly above and below:

And ComicBook is super quick, easy, and fun – a couple more comics of just random stuff I’ve been doing:

(Oh yeah, another thing that’s been taking up some time is family visiting – first, Pete’s uncle Terry came to take us to see the Go-Go’s, as mentioned above, and now his mom is visiting, so we’ve been having some fun times with her…)

Another fun image-making app – Photosynth makes panoramic photos, which you can scroll through on the iPad (it’s actually an iPhone app, so it’s miniature on the iPad, but still looks cool) after shooting it… it’s hard to explain, but it looks awesome.

Instagram is fun for taking a photo, adding a quick filter/border, and then tweeting immediately, all in one place.  This one is also iPhone-sized.  (Some time-suckage has also been due to our new addiction to this board game, Settlers of Catan… yeah, we’re nerds, I know.)

This app – joyOfLight – is simple but cool looking.  I couldn’t find a way to save images in the app, but I did learn how to take a screenshot, so that works (as shown below).  Oh wait, after I wrote that I played around with it some more and found that touching the screen with 3 fingers saves the image.

And this one, oh man, super addictive – Flowpaper.  I just want to scribble on it all day long.

These are all just quick scribbles I’ve done.

Too much fun.

Most of my iPad time wasting has gone to researching and downloading recommended apps – apple gazette blog has been super helpful, with lots of app reviews, and posts like How To: Get the Most Out of iPad’s Virtual Keyboard and 10 Essential Free iPad Apps for Newbies.  I got all the apps on that list, have been heavily using Dropbox (screenshot below) and Kindle, and have played around a bit with Moleskine and Flipboard…  (and I know, I still haven’t blogged about my pattern in the new Twist Collective, which is ohmygod so exciting, yes, and you can see a glimpse of it below; it will be blogged soon……)

I’ve been using Pandora (screenshot above) a ton, and the NPR music app (screenshot below) is great, though it’s iPhone size.  I’ve bought a couple fun multiplayer games that Pete and I have played around with a little so far – Catan (I told you we got into it) and Sketch n’ Guess, which is like Pictionary, super fun!  And the New York Times free crossword app is awesome; and Sheep Shift (screenshot below) is a must-have free game for sheep lovers (they all have different baaa sounds!)…

Those are most of the ones I’ve gotten that I’ve been using lots so far, or know that I will be… there are many more I’ve gotten but haven’t taken the time to explore yet (like Goodreader, several sketching and/or note-taking apps, many rss reader and/or news apps…).  So hey, iPad owners, what else should I get?

And then, check it out, I made an iPad case!  I used my Screen-Friendly Gadget Case pattern, made to custom fit my iPad.  My major change was that I decided I liked how the reverse stockinette side of the fabric looked better than the stockinette, so I made the main case part inside-out.  Bad idea; don’t copy me with this modification.  Part of the reason the case pattern works well is that the stockinette naturally curls around the gadget – when turned inside out, it wants to curl back, away from the iPad…

But hey, it still works okay, and it was just a test anyway.  I chose some old leftover hand-dyed yarn that I don’t really like, just to try out the pattern on the iPad and see if it would function well.  Conclusion: yes, it does function, but there are some issues (needs to be removed to use the camera, for one) and I just ordered the official Apple smart case because I think that seems like the best thing out there to protect it.  I might end up knitting up another one of these in a yarn I like, fixing some problems, for a padded cover for carrying it around in my bag… we’ll see…

Oh, and it does work to keep it on for charging/syncing, and headphones, as pictured in the first shot.  I think the pattern is better suited for smaller devices, but it does indeed work for iPads, so that’s cool.

Ok it’s time for me to get some actual work done… hopefully…

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!