Dyepot, Teapot

Silicon Florist has a round-up of links from last night’s Ignite Portland event. I had a great time. Those five minutes go really, really fast.

Here’s some links to follow up on my talk.

That binary scarf pattern is available on Knitty. Knitty is a great resource for interesting, attractive patterns, and they’re all free. It’s published as a quarterly online magazine.

The sweater percentage diagram came from Knitting in the Old Way, by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts. Knitting Without Tears by Elizabeth Zimmerman, is another great book for learning how to make a sweater that fits you, using any yarn you’d like. The method of designing by percentage comes from her.

If you’re just getting started, Stitch & Bitch by Deb Stoller (editor of Bust Magazine), has really good illustrations showing exactly how knit stitches are formed, as well as detailed explanations of how to fix common mistakes.

The “knitting 2.0″ site I mentioned is called Ravelry. It’s still in invite-only beta, and the waitlist is long (but moving as fast as they can handle), but as someone who uses a lot of “social” sites, I am really impressed with this one. It seems to do exactly what it needs to, no more, no less.

And for online knitting entertainment, the queen is Yarn Harlot. She has four books out, one of which won the 2006 Ben Franklin Award for humor.

Did I leave anything out? Leave a comment and I’ll add the needed links.

On Friday I packed up my recently finished knitting projects and headed off to the Japanese Garden in SW Portland with my mom and brother.

Lots of other visitors had cameras, but I think I was the only one looking for interesting things to drape a scarf around.

Did you know that the guard lions by the front gate will also help you with your purse?

I even came back with a few good pictures of the green sweater (thanks Peter!).

Crafty Wonderland was a complete bust, so this week I’m listing the things I had on display there in my Etsy shop. Here’s what’s up so far:

Luscious handspun yarn–if I wore these colors, this one wouldn’t leave my hands. It’s soft, squishy, with colors that remind me of sari fabric.

Glycerin soap.

Felted Clutch Purse–I have these in neutral colors too, but the green is my favorite.

Keep checking back the next few days, as I list more yarn and purses in different colors.

I whipped up a couple of knit wraps on the sweater machine for my Etsy shop.

Seaside Wrap

Oceania Wrap

The pictures aren’t as good as I’d like. I’m having trouble finding a spot in the apartment with decent light and no weird junk in the background (in this case, I think I failed at both—I hope it’s tolerable).

I can do these in other colors, too, if blues and greens aren’t your style.

I’ve been wanting to try stenciling (or even screenprinting, but I don’t have the setup) onto knit fabrics, so I made a small bag on the knitting machine, crocheted a handle, and h4×0r3d it.

I also crocheted a Nintendo DS cozy on the plane to Vegas last fall. I thought I’d already taken pictures of it, but I couldn’t find anything on my Flickr account.

I’ve been actively listing things on Etsy for the last few weeks, and the main thing I’m noticing is that it’s hard to sell items directly through the site, because there’s just so much listed and the search tools don’t always do enough to narrow it down (or if the features exist, they’re not obvious). I think the most successful shops are the ones that have gained a certain amount of attention from outside, so people buy things from them because they heard about that specific shop elsewhere.

So with something of an ulterior motive, I’m going to point out a few examples of very cool sock yarn that the web at large might not know about.

Hlmiller has a green and pink (like a watermelon) yarn. Great summer colors.

I love the green and blue gradient on SeeJayneKnitYarns’s Austin Peacock sock yarn. She has a lovely dark moss green listed right now too.

Some great pinks and oranges and reds from Zen Yarn Garden.

Yarnchef’s colors definitely look food-inspired. The yarn shown below is on sale, too.

And last but not least, here’s one of my own yarn dyeing experiments. I like to toss some yarn and dye in the pot and see what comes out.

I hope this helps direct a little more traffic toward everyone’s work. There’s some really nice yarn on here, but with 95 pages of listings just for this type, so much of it only gets a few views apiece.