The Knitting Fiend

Jim’s going to have a cardigan soon!

I picked up some blue “Chaco” brand yarn, which, according to the vendor at the fiber fest is “just like” Plymouth Galway. In fact, it’s spun by the same manufacturer.

Do I believe the vendor? Well, actually, I do. The yarn does look like Galway, it knits up like Galway. Yarn mills often do sell the same yarn under various labels.

I do know the yarn cost about 1/2 what I would have paid for Galway. So is it “just like Galway?” I guess we’ll see over time.

In any case, I knit a swatch using “Welted Leaf Pattern” and “X - and - Diamond Border” in Barbara Walker’s “A Treasury of Knitting”.

I plan to design a drop sleeve pullover using these yarns, and I’ll be illustrating the steps as I go along!

If I happen to find any thing to write Haiku’s about I will, but for better or worse, knitting designs have gotten less awful recently. So I’m having trouble finding inspiration!

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Knit Blogging Tip.
From now on, when I write a blogging tip of general interest over at my blogging blog, I’ll post a link here.

Blogging tips for the week: To increase links to your blog, get a better page rank and encourage traffic, advise your friends to try coComment. I discuss coComment at my blog.

I set up a knitting group at coComment. I’m not entirely sure how those groups work, but there weren’t any for knitting. I think having could might help us track collect all the comments tagged “knitting” and help us track conversations at a variety of knitting blogs. Worth a try anyway!

Obviously, I’ve been in a knitting and knit blogging slump. But winter is approaching and I finished my “Floridays Shawl”, which I cast on in June. Obviously, this is a pathetically slow rate of progress. But, fear not, I think I may have found something I find fun: Post casts.

For some reason, in the past, I have never been tempted to turn the little dial on my camera to the little “movie” recorder. On Saturday I did. I discovered I could take movies. I filmed on very, very bad one and deleted it.

Then, I broke filming into clips and recorded a fairly bad set of clips. Rather than try for perfection, I decided I’d teach myself how to actually finish a video and show it at my blog. So, I imported the pretty bad clips to my mac and edited in “IMovie”. Then I uploaded to YouTube. Now, the worlds can see my pretty bad podcast.

I could bore you by listing everything wrong with the quality– but I made so many mistakes, the list would be pretty boring.

So instead, I bring you a relatively poor quality podcast showing me blocking my “Floridays Shawl!”

Now that I’ve figured this out, I’ll probably show streaming periodically, and also provide links to things associated with the steps in the podcast (when the links are available.) That way, knitters can benefit from the things that are best shown on video and also from the things that are best show as stills.

Later this week, I’ll try to collect the links for the various stitches. The shawl is easy, and the general idea can be used to create your own shawl in your own yarn. The one thing you really need is a yardage estimator so you have enough yarn. So, I’ll get that together… some time!

Hope you like the video!

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Details for shawl:

1. Yarn: JaggerSpun Zephyr : 5,040 yds./lb. - 1 lb. cones. 50% fine grade Merino wool, 50% Chinese Tussah silk.
   Jagger recommends dry clean only; hand wash.
2. Twisted Long stitches: I haven’t written a tutorial!
3. Eyelets: How to Knit an Eyelet Row
4. Bind off: Picot Edge Bindoff

 
 
When I was a girl
I loved my Raggedy Ann.
What a sense of style!
 
 

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Pattern from Berrocco.

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Based on this pattern, it looks like Nora Gaughan wants hand knit fashion to return to 90s era drab - punk - poverty look. It’s somewhat updated though: this outfit is dark brown. During the 90s, we would have knit it in black.

I would advice knitters: If you like these sorts of all stockinette hand knits, you should consider buying a knitting machine. You could whip something similar out in a day.

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Answers to questions. . .

On discussing non-knitting at a knitting blog

Luna asked whether it’s ok to discuss tracking blog traffic at a knitting blog. The answers is, “Sure it is!” I’ve done it before.

Many of your visitors are bloggers and enjoy the occasional blog about blogging. The reason I started a new blog about blogging is that I was planning to write tons of posts about blogging. Those would have seriously bored knitter to tears.

What’s Stumble? Can it help my knitting blog?

As to your not knowing what “Stumbles” are… that’s not surprising. I never paid attention to these sites until I started blogging about blogging!

But knowing what Stumble is may help you get traffic to your knitting blog. If you blog for business purposes, this could get you business for your store. So if you’d like to try, I’ll describe what it is and how to use it.

Here’s the story: There is a site called “StumbleUpon”. It’s possible to do a number of things. One is to nominate a post as “excellent”. (This is called “Stumbling”.) When doing this you place the post in a category.

The other thing you can do is visit posts people have nominated as “worth reading”. It turns out a lot of people find blog posts that way, so if a post gets enough “stumbles” in a particular category, it can draw a lot of traffic. (I don’t know if it works in knitting, but we can give it a try, right?)

Would you like your best knitting articles to be stumbled?

The most effective way to get stumbled requires doing three things:

1. Add a “Stumble” button to your blog. It looks like this:

   Stumble it (and place in knitting/crochet!)

   You can get the correct code for your blog at StumbleUpon I edited the text to suggest placing my posts in “knitting/crochet”.

2. Tell your blog visitors about Stumble. Otherwise they won’t have any idea what “Stumble” is, and won’t click on the button.
3. Write posts knitters are likely to love. Then your visitors will click. Knitters you don’t know who visit stumble will click. You may see traffic.

If you do get Stumbled you’ll benefit not only from traffic, but from good links Google counts toward your rank. This can help you attract more search engine traffic on things like “sock yarn”, which is a good thing!

If you have more questions about Stumble (or similar programs) just ask.

Offer to knitting audience.

If my regulars would like, I can explain some of the more useful “blogging tips” I post about over at Big Bucks Blogger. I figure roughly 1 out of 10 of those posts are of interest to knitters, knit bloggers and knit store owners.

Actually, even though my post on Jason Calacanis’s new “human powered search engine that will put Google out of business” won’t help your blog or store, knitters might be amused by screen shot of some results. Evidently, for some knitting searches, we knitters are offered links on gay marriage, bannana peppers or Disney Movies.

I think it’s safe to say these current results are . . . . irrelevant?

Well, evidently Mahalo is in Beta and only 60% complete. (Or Alpha and 5%-10% complete. I think I’ve read or heard both in the past few months.)

Anyway, enough for now! I’ll looks for more silly knitting patterns, and let me know if you’d like tips about things that can bring traffic to your knitting blog.