Category Archives: Love Knit
The inevitable happens
My knitting now has it’s own blog, Ms. Yarnaholic’s School for Wayward Skeins. Come say hi.
Thing is, Yarnaholic Confessions, my geocities site that Yahoo! is pulling the plug on, has been around since about 1999. This is seriously going to screw with my site’s Google juice. You cannot even begin to imagine how many sites have linked to it during the past 10 years. (sigh)
Reset your bookmarks folks!
Did you enjoy this post or find it helpful? Spread the word!
Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine
WordCamp2008 Israel: The Leftovers
Forgotten Things:When Hanan Cohen set up the WordCamp Israel RSS aggregator following the blogs of those registered, I went looking specifically for blogs that were hosted here on WordPress.com and came across this neat site that explains step-by-step in Hebrew how to set up a WordPress.com blog, Eden Orion’s “How to set up a blog in WordPress“. Very much needed and really useful. (Just be aware that WordPress.com is holding its collective breath waiting for the latest update to WordPress (2.7) to be implemented on WordPress.com sometime very, very soon. This will immediately outdate all the “under the hood” screenshots, but the basic info is still the same.)
Another fabulous resource for both COM and ORG users, in English this time, is the post that Lorelle wrote following her presentation at last year’s WordCampIsrael. If you haven’t read it yet, or even if you have, go read it.
Unexpected Surprises: After WordCamp2008 Israel was over, it was fun browsing other people’s summaries and reviews of the event. Many of the presenters have already put up their slideshows on their sites and it’s good to catch up on part of what I missed in the alternate sessions. Here are the ones I’ve found so far:
- Good Foundations for Blogging on COM or Blogli and Social Media and Blogging – Miriam Schwab
- Are Bloggers Believable? – Sharon Greenberg (Hebrew link)
- SEO and WordPress – Compucall (site often unavailable; try Google’s cached page)
- Interactive Video Blogging – Kaltura
I like to follow the links that people put in their posts because many times it leads to unexpectedly useful information. This time, however, following a link in someone’s post left me with my mouth open when I found that a WP plug-in developer is was using without permission a copyrighted image from my flickr photostream on their website’s About page. Rather ironic given the nature of the plug-in. (Update as of November 24: the image has been removed following my emailed request.)
Sorry for the lack of linkage to the website in question, but I’m still pondering what exactly to do about it. I’ve been through the copyright mill a couple of times after writing an extensive FAQ about knitting and copyright, but this is really the first time I’ve been on the receiving end myself. Feel free to share your thoughts/suggestions in the comments.
WordTwitterFlickrRavelryQypeCampMeetup: WordCamp is an ideal opportunity to create an event mash-up with my other online activities and I was really sorry that my belated attempts to get together with fellow WordPress users from ravelry’s Yarn&Felafel group didn’t pan out. It’d be really great to have a meet-up at the next big event. If I’m already taking the day off from work and heading into the city, meeting my other online friends is an extra plus. Count on it happening next year!
Duty Knitting
It’s been a strange few days. After being gone from the house for several weeks to various corners of the country, one to work on a kibbutz until university starts next week and the younger to army boot camp, both my sons were home sick this past weekend. Many pots of chicken soup were cooked and consumed in a very short time. The noise level was quite remarkable. I couldn’t hear my tinnitus.
When our youngest was drafted last month we had an arm’s length list of things to buy and, as procrastination is our middle name, there were a few items that were no where to be purchased, one of which was a plain watch cap in basic black. As I have justabitofyarn laying about the house, I decided to knit one for him using The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns as inspiration.
Even though I have justabitofyarn, most of it is 100% wool, which in our house has a very tentative existence until its first washing not done by me. So while wool was the natural choice, 100% superwash wool was the best choice, i.e. sock yarn. Not being entirely crazy, I decided to double the yarn and ended up with something between sport and worsted, and no appropriate gauge to be found in the book. Opting for smaller rather than bigger turned out to be a Smart Idea, but still necessitated casting on three times. After fits and starts it was duty knitting right up to the crown. Thankfully youngest was home to try it on and so I discovered that the hat needed at least another inch and a half if it was going to cover his ears. An important feature in a watch cap. Tink, tink (that’s “knit” backwards, for the uninitated) back the crown and several hours later the cap was done!
Sorry for the lack of photos. No doubt that by the time he’ll be home again the watch cap will be a distant memory and hopefully warming someone else’s head.
Lucky I kept notes.
Ready, Set, Knit! (…Maybe)
It’s true. This is a post about knitting. Don’t blink or it just might disappear. 
Once upon a time, when I had oodles of free time, summer was my planning season for when the weather finally cooled down enough to permit knitting to commence. Unlike my former home in Minnesota, the coast of Israel is warm 10 months of the year and not having central A/C is the biggest deterrent to my knitting year-round. The weather is changing, enough so to get me thinking about picking up my 3 projects languishing in the UFO cabinet. This year I won’t be dashed on the shores by the Siren Song of NaKniSweMo. Oh, no, no, no. I’ll be content to just finish the current lot of projects. (Though I am coming to the belated realization that the Kaffe Fassett “Kill’em Cushion Cover” may eternally be a UFO, as it requires some serious solitude and quiet to work on. I haven’t seen either of those in months/years.)
With one magazine subscription and few online knitting newsletters, I’ve tampered down the constant pull of new projects to a minimum, but the temptation to start new projects instead of turning UFOs into FOs is certainly there. Who doesn’t love to start something fresh?! One-Skein Wonders, which I received recently, could be my Achilles’s heel! (Woo hoo! Now I need to knit a camera cozy!)
Speaking of newsletters, does anyone else think the noise-to-signal ratio on KnittingDaily is nearing the breaking point? When they first started out, it was pretty low. Now I’m sorely tempted to unsubscribe from the newsletter to avoid getting the at least twice to three times a week ads in my mailbox. I think Knitty is much more in tune with its subscribers.
To my delight, I discovered today that Ravelry members blogging on WordPress.COM now have their own group. Rock on!
And to spammers targeting WordPress.COM’s “knit” tag, take note of this important announcement from the fellow who does the clean up http://mark.wordpress.com/2008/01/15/knitting-a-tip/ (Sorry for the lack of linkage.) If you are knitblogging here on WordPress.com and surf the WP.com tag surfer, I can hear you chuckling from here.
