(Belated) Congrats to Ravelry for 2,000,000!!

I am a week and a half late with this post, but just wanted to say a huge CONGRATULATIONS to Jess & Casey for reaching TWO MILLION Ravelers on February 29th.  To celebrate, many of us made special Ravatars to appear on the front page starting the minute that the two-millionth Raveler signed up.  You can pick out your own Ravatar by the bright pink border and the order shuffles with each refresh of the page.

I'm not going to lie - I refreshed a few times to get this screen shot of mine:

I used a photo from last year's Connecticut Sheep & Wool festival and jazzed it up using the Picnick option in Flickr (how is it that Picnick is going away in April?!?!)

Alternatively, you can click on the link further down on the front page and Casey has the Ravatars sorted by the order that the users joined Ravelry - this only includes the people whose Ravatars have the 2million file name, not every member.  I first joined Ravelry during the early days in May 2007 right before graduating from law school (post here).  Back then the site was still in beta and they were only sending out a invites in small groups at a time to manage the traffic.  It took about a week from the time I signed up until I received my invitation, which was fairly quickly because shortly after that it the word spread like wildfire and the list was a few weeks long to get an invite.  To think that just under 5 years later there are 2+ million of us out there (as of the time of this post, there are 2,023,634 people signed up).

Here's to the next 2,000,000 and beyond!!

I Podcast!

Popping in to say that I uploaded the pilot episode of the Commuter Knitter podcast to libsyn last night and woke up to find it was also accepted to iTunes - so exciting!

You can find the direct feed for the podcast here

I also started a blog just for the podcast show notes at: commuterknitter.blogspot.com

And you can follow me on Twitter at CommuterKnitter

Enjoy!!

FO Friday

I have an eloquent post all written out that I composed during lunch earlier this week, but I've been to tired/distracted/busy at night to type it up and post it. Yes, when I say "written out" I mean by hand. With pen and paper. Shocking, I know. Sure I probably could have done as I'm doing now and posted it using the app, but I had all sorts of links and snazzy stuff in that post that it would have lost it's pizazz if I did it here.

So instead, as to not prolong my blog-absence, I present to you a not-so-great phone picture of the husband's finished pair of socks. Details to come.

Happy Friday everyone and happy knitting!!

Oh yarn! Come out, come out wherever you are!

Stash: noun
1. Hiding place
2. Something stored or hidden away
Courtesy of merriam-webster.com

One of my favorite threads over on Ravelry is the Flash Your Stash thread on the Main 6.  I am in awe over everyone's stashes - small and large, fancy and plain.  On my to-do list at the beginning of the year was to get out all my stash for a photo-shoot.  In December, I was very diligent about photographing the skeins and cataloguing them in my Rav-stash page.  However, I did not take a family portrait of my kiddies.  So, one Saturday while the husband was at work, I got it all out of its various hiding places... bins, bags, nooks & crannies.  And I came to one conclusion... I need a bigger bed:

This is only about 95% of the stash.  And in some places it is a few skeins deep.  Along the headboard and the right edge are my kits and yarn purchased in bulk.  Clockwise from top right corner: kitchen cotton, Palette fingering weight, sock yarn (lower right corner), worsted and DK (lower left corner), sport weight, back to worsted, and then in the top left corner is the acrylic.

I think I've come a far way from my baby stash of 5 years ago:

Where does this yarn live when it's not lounging on our bed?  Well, I store the acrylic, bulk yarns, and kits in the spare bedroom in a tall bookshelf I bought several months ago.  Originally it was for the entire stash.  However over the past few months I have added to the stash quite a bit and needed more space.  The husband agreed that I could put another shelf unit in the living room as long as it didn't overflow and look icky.  In this unit, I store my higher quality yarns and the yarns I am using nowadays - Cascade, sock yarn, Palette, Malabrigo, and Madelinetosh to name a few.

Living Room Stash.  Top shelf: Sock yarns in the side baskets; notions, needles & tools in sunflower box; Clockwise from top left corner: Palette; sock yarn; Madelinetosh (2); various worsted; Cascade 220 & Malabrigo; various worsted; Cascade 220 sport superwash.  The center block contains some of my favorite books.

[As an aside - that pink tool bag you see in the photo?  It was a Christmas gift from the husband.  I spotted it one day a few months back while we were walking through Sears.  C took note and surprised me with it under the tree on Christmas morning.  I should note that we usually both know what we're getting for Christmas because we shop together, so this really was a surprise that he remembered :-)]

I do not have a recent photo of the spare-room stash.  Mostly because that room is forever a WIP and has piles of clothes and such to be donated to Goodwill.  I'm also re-organizing all my scrapbooking supplies now that I have space on the tall bookshelf.

And with that, I would like to amend the dictionary definition of stash from something hidden away to: collection of beloved items to be treasured and given a proper home.

Happy Knitting everyone!

It's Me! Mario!!

Alert the authorities - Jen posted two days in a row! It's going to snow! Oh wait, it is already snowing. A perfect setting for some crafting. The husband is at work, so I figured it'd be a good time to dig out his hibernating Mario Blanket to get it back into the rotation. It's a surprise and I have the chart written out in code on graph paper so he couldn't figure it out. I've only worked on the little seaming I've done when he's not around or when he's in the other room playing video games. Here's my progress so far:



Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Worsted in Wonderland Heather, Red, Chestnut, Daffodil, Oyster Heather.
G/6 4.25mm Crochet Hook

Ideally, I'd like to finish by his birthday in May. I'll need lots of time to seam the 252 squares together, so I figure I should have the squares done by mid-April at the latest. That gives me 12 weeks to crochet 123 more squares. Totally do-able (so I say now...)

Have a wonderful weekend!