I had a really great time doing these round-up posts earlier this year, but got busy and got out of the habit.  Time to start up again!  Here is the October edition of a random assortment of my favorite posts from elsewhere in knitblog land.

Best beach photos

Most magnificent multicolor project

Most helpful technical post

Yummiest natural fiber photo

Best pairing of a knitting photo with a travel photo

Cutest baby item

Thank you for all your warm wishes on Fiona!  She is a very cute kitty and we love her very much.

Today when I was doing laundry (laundry is in the basement, which we have to go outside to access) Fiona escaped and returned to her natural habitat (she’s finally back inside now).

I tried to catch her but it just made her run away, so I decided to wait until she felt like being a cooperative kitty. I wanted to stay outside to keep an eye on her, so I took the opportunity to go through the yarn “crypt” – a box of yarn in the basement holding UFOs and random scraps.

I think that’s the yarn-y equivalent of a bloodcurdling scream, no?

Once I fought past the tangles a bit, the box was an interesting tour down pre-blog knitting memory lane.

Here is a scrap of the Wedding Afghan I started for my friends Kate and Evan, who got married in July 2005.  I ended up making them a  feather-and-fan afghan out of this yarn here.

It’s Valley Yarns Charisma, which has been discontinued. Evan is from New Zealand (and so is the wool) and Kate likes bright colors, so it seemed perfect. I still kick myself that I never took a picture of the finished item.

On the trip to Chicago when my grandfather passed away in December 2006, I got it into my head to make a top-down leaf patterned lace sweater. It didn’t turn out, but the idea later mutated into Foliage.

I frogged it, and the yarn became Wicked.

This hot mess is my second attempt at Unbiased, from circa fall 2004. 

The first attemt was according to the pattern, but the notch in the top allowed too much to spill out the sides, so I decided to modify it, but that didn’t work out either. I ended up frogging some of it VERY slowly and starting over on a purse of my own improvisation.

I kind of like it, I may finish it now that I remember it exists.

So, have you come across any interesting reminders of your knitting past lately?

Once again, I recap my favorite knit blog posts from last month.

Best retro styling 

Best 1990s reference 

Hottest yarn pr0n 

Hottest garter stitch pron 

Tied for best stripes:
Tomato
Stripes!

Favorite Interweave FO 

Tied for Favorite Knitty FO:
From the beginning of the month and from the end of the month

Must-have Ivy Day fashion

Prettiest colorway (even prettier in person) 

Best Vest 

Most Amazing Socks (and hottest wrong-side pr0n) 

Happiest Mittens 

I got a kick out of assembling my Best of January post, and I had intended to make it a monthly feature. Now that we’re a third of the way through March, let’s recap February, eh?

Best new people (In the third picture down you can see me chatting with Archiknist, shortly after exclaiming “I recognize you from the internet!”  I exclaimed “Nutmeg Knitter!“ when I met her, even though I know somewhere in my head that her name is Becca.)

Favorite Fair Isle

Best Recycling

Cutest Birthday Girl – rookie division

Cutest Birthday Girl – veteran’s division

Best Hat

Best You-Tube Link

Best Interweave Debut

Best use of Gimp

Best use of Beads

Not that we remember February anymore, but what did I miss?

(I actually hate the movie Scarface)

My husband got me (or rather, let me get) a new camera for my birthday and I am super excited about it.

I have a lot to learn, but I am very excited about this camera so far. Hopefully you’ll see an improvement in the photography around here, but that might come at the cost of relatively less knitting. I am looking forward to this process though.

One of the really cool things about having a new camera is that it occurs to me to take photos of things that I find interesting. Here is a picture of the snow that fell the other night.

We live in the city, so all the streetlights really do make the snow that color. I love the sparkle, and I love the shadows cast by the fence.

One thing I am really excited about is playing around with those artsy, only-a-little-bit-actually-in-focus so popular on the knitting blogs.

Here are three knobs:

And here is one perfectly sharp knob with two blurry knobs:

I feel fancier already.

Sorry I dropped off the face of the Earth for awhile there. Look, here I am, alive and well:

I’ve had a really busy couple of months. My whole month of September was consumed by the law school recruiting season. Fortunately I have some good options open to me at this point, but it’s a really stressful process. Before that, I finished up my summer job and went to New Hampshire with my husband. I did a little bit of knitting, making a hat for Robyn and chipping away at that Shetland Triangle that I started earlier in the summer.  (PS when my husband saw that picture of Robyn he said “whoa, it’s bizarro-you wearing your hat!”  Robyn, I like your taste in glasses )

But that’s not why I was absent from the blog. To be honest, I had a knitter’s identity crisis. I feel a little bad even talking about this, because it might sound like I’m ungrateful for an amazing design opportunity that I had. I am incredibly grateful, and next time I’ll manage the whole thing better. But it was hard on me, and it killed my interest in knitting for awhile. I would be up late knitting, and my wrists and hands would be hurting, and I’d think “what am I doing to myself?” And it’s not that the project was difficult, it was just a quick time frame and I had a lot of other stuff going on. I didn’t work on it at all for one whole weekend because my room mate from college was visiting. I had a summer job 40 miles away and a law school writing contest. Normally when I have a lot going on I relax and clear my head by knitting. The fact that I was stressed out about knitting, of all things, really threw me off.

In the mean time, knitting is my hobby. Knitting is my creative side, my relaxation. It is not my WORK.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I started this blog two years ago today.  I have the pointy sticks in hand, ready to keep it going for years to come. 

Two years ago thee was an awful lot going on in the knitblog world.  It was the Golden Age of See Eunny Knit.  Grumperina was locked in battle with Mountainash.  Some of my very favorite of Cara’s photos appeared on January One.  Gale of She Shoots Sheep Shots was making miters. Kelp was making (and fixing) beautiful lace. MLE’s blog was one of the first ones I followed, in large part because of our shared name and age, and she started her blog not long before I started mine.  Ruth of Knitting on Impulse was going strong, but I did not follow her blog until she moved to Whistler and started taking those amazing photos.  Nicole was cataloging sock yarn, but I did not get to know her until she started the Walker Treasury Project.

A lot has changed in the last two years.  Some of my favorite blogs two years ago have since gone dormant.   Some of my favorite blogs today did not exist in their current form two years ago. There is always change, always new blood, which is what makes this such a fun place to be.

In honor of my second bloggiversary I am holding my first blog contest. Please tell me about your favorite new thing to happen to the knitblog world. It could be a new blog you really love, or a new craze sweeping the knitting web. If you leave a comment I will enter your name into a drawing and one week from tonight I will randomly pick a name. The winner will receive this exceedingly festive Karabella Gossamer.

I will also offer to knit you a Foliage in your choice of color, if you’re interested.

To all who read this: thank you for making the land of knit blogs an awesome place to hang out for the last two years.

Yes, I changed my format yet again.  I liked the blue theme fine, except for one little detail.

The fact that those corners didn’t match up drove me crazy. I thought it looked sloppy and unprofessional. Not that this blog is particularly “professional” anyway, but one of my goals for the year is to improve it and gain a greater presence.

I’ve been toying with moving to my own domain so I can customize and tweak to my heart’s content. I had been seriously considering it until recently, because I would like to start offering more patterns. Now that the Ravelry pattern download system is almost done it is much less of an issue. I’d like any insight that you folks might have on making the switch away from wordpress.com to your own domain, or on WordPress blogs away from wordpress.com generally. Ruth, Mel, you run WordPress blogs right?

Hello everyone!

This is the first post in my new WordPress blog.  I decided to make the switch to WordPress for a couple of reasons.  The system is very easy to use, and I think it gives a clean-looking, organized result.  I was having some issues with Blogger, and their “Help” system was decidedly unhelpful.  WordPress, by contrast, has excellent support.  I had trouble importing my Blogger posts, and a nice fellow named Mark helped me.

The most significant reason that I made the switch was the “pages” feature of WordPress.  Now I can have a page for “Original Designs,” and my Chevron Bag pattern can live there.  I also took the occasion to write up the pattern for my Heart Lace Socks.  You can find it in Original Designs, or click here.

Over the coming months, I hope to add more to the Original Designs section and build a Finished Objects gallery. Thank you for visiting my new home.