Bonus!

Posts on Twitter today alerted us to a new knitalong. Examiner.com,  says “Beginning next week, we will offer a step-by-step tutorial on how to make cuff-down socks from the cast-on to the bind-off. ” Read more here. The pattern they’ll be using is our Sunday Swing sock, shown at left. Lovely idea! We’ll be looking forward to seeing some completed socks when the knitalong is over! Have fun, everyone!  

We’d love to have you. There are two openings that we need filled, and maybe you’re just the person for it! Are you a knitting savant, crafty and clever and good with a video camera? Then perhaps you’d like to be our new Techniques Video Columnist! All the details are at the link, include what we need you to do and what can help you make a successful entry! Or perhaps you’re really great with a pen and ink, paintbrush, computer illustration program or camera? Well, then enter our Artwork for the Knittyshop contest! Again, details at the link. We’ve already had a few entries in both ...

What do you do when an undead Puritan woman is dropped on your doorstep? Simple. Put her to work. You may have guessed that this fabulous, creepy thing is a promo for the upcoming movie, ParaNorman. You would be correct. I decided that I should make a [crappy but heartfelt] little movie of my own as I opened this amazing present. Here. Watch.

[I’m hijacking Jillian’s Spinning Tuesday for a time-sensitive post. She’ll return next week!] …And I had come home from another day of proofreading stuff like this. At my day job, there was also fun stuff to proofread, but the majority of it was this kind of brain-suckingly boring bank stuff. I had been doing this kind of work for almost 20 years. And so during the dull summer of 2002, I began dreaming of a way to escape proofreading…to become a copy editor. At the same time, knitting blogs were few, and just starting to get interesting, and I had found tons of patterns being given away ...

We cut a lot of cords in knitting [I’m pushing the metaphor here a little…], but this post isn’t about knitting. It’s about what some of us do while we knit.   Watch TV.   I don’t know about where you live, but where I live [Toronto, Canada], cable TV is expensive. I’m embarrassed to say that I was paying the ghastly sum of $130/month for cable — for all the basic channels, tons of stuff I never watched, but was packaged in with the movies + the actual HBO and movies. And that’s about average up here. Until a week ago. We cancelled the whole shebang, and ...

It’s not secret that I like a cup of coffee (or twelve). And I’m pleased to report that Portland, Oregon, seems to be my kind of town. The residents of Portland, seemingly, love coffee as much as I do. There are excellent coffee shops on every block. I had terrific cups of coffee wherever I went: at Grand Central Bakery at the legendary Stumptown Coffee heck, I even had good coffee at the convention center. Yes, there is a Starbucks at the Oregon Convention Center, although apparently they ran out of coffee on the first day. I will only take partial responsibility for that – there was also an Open ...