Jananas

We spent the weekend at the cottage. Its my last weekend before starting work tomorrow (eep!) and Jason just finished up his mid term school break, so we headed up north to rest and relax and celebrate. Jason is a very understanding mister – we stopped off at the Black Lamb in Port Hope to purchase my first spinning wheel. I got a Majacraft Little Gem, and that she is!

We hung out in the basement (a fluke of the grade of the lot) and watched movies and tv shows – Arrested Development, The Thin Blue Line, Keeping up Appearances, The Empire Strikes Back, The Highlander, and more. Jason painted miniatures and I spun to my little heart’s content. I also had fun playing with my niddy noddy, which is a strange little contraption that lets you measure how much yarn you’ve spun so that I can know tell you meterage and not just weight of fleece used.

I also spun three skeins of yarn. The first is some lime green/gray from pencil rovings I found in the basement at Romni. The second is from a bunch of random batts I made at Lettuce Knit using a package of random leftovers. I didn’t know what else to do with ‘em, so I spun them into on ball of very random yarn. The last is spun from 4oz of dyed rovings I picked up at the Black Lamb – its my Easter yarn.

I also had some fun playing with dye. I dyed almost a half pound of merino/nylon rovings, plus some bulky weight yarn. I love bright colours, which should be pretty apparent from the following picture. The front three are a combination of teal, violet, and aqua blue (with a little rose pink thrown into one piece of roving, just for good measure). The back four are a little bit of everything. If the last yarn above is Easter themed, then these rovings are the little kids version of Easter eggs – bright greens, violets, yellow, pink, blue, and white to balance it out. I had a tonne of fun playing around with the dye and it was a good learning experience. I can’t wait to play more!

Oh, and I read two books. I’m up to 28 books for the year, which is more than halfway through my total goal of 52 for the year.

What did you do?

I’m proud to say that I managed to finish and block my lace shawl before the closing ceremonies. It is still laid out on my study floor, as I’ve been too busy doing other stuffs to bother unpinning it.

I have to say that I didn’t think that it would be quite this big once it was blocked. I’m really bad at estimating size when going from circular needles with stitches all bunched up to a final, blocked lace piece. I guess that this shouldn’t be that surprising given that it took four balls of silky Malabrigo (in the Archangel colourway). In fact, I ran out three rows from the end!!!! THREE! I finished off in some black alpaca that Jason’s sister had sent me. Tracking down another ball of the Malabrigo just seemed silly as I wouldn’t have used it all up and so would have had leftovers. I guess I’m more practical than a perfectionist when it comes to knitting.

And since I finished, I’m proud that to post the above little image to show that I won gold in the 2010 Knitting Olympics (meaning that I completed!). Yay!

The Daily Knitter is a website that drives traffic by offering a free daily knitting pattern. They also have a repository of free patterns, plus some exclusive patterns and articles. They drive traffic to their site by offering free patterns and earn revenue from advertising based on that traffic. My personal experience is that they are doing that at the expense of the designers.

Back in September my Basic Ear Flap Hat Pattern was picked up as one of their free patterns of the day. I was pretty excited because it meant a) traffic to my site, b) more exposure for the knitting pattern, and c) more people knitting my hat. Free patterns of the day are on the site for the last two weeks (backwards from today), however I kept getting traffic for about four months. All of a sudden in January it just stopped. Nadda, nothing.

I sent their editor a first email in January asking (nicely I might add) if the pattern could be listed on their repository of free patterns. No response and it wasn’t added. Apparently it was good enough for their free pattern of the day, but not good enough to be listed. At this point I’m a little annoyed, but hey there could be a million and one reasons why the editor didn’t respond back. So I sent another email early in February and again, no response and the pattern wasn’t added. Now, I’m really irritated – six weeks is reasonable time frame to expect a response.

This is a shitty way to treat the pattern designers. In my case, I wasn’t even asked if I was okay with them listing my pattern as the free pattern of the day. At the time I was glad for the increase in traffic but once that traffic died away but the benefit to their business continued, I was peeved because they continued to profit from using my pattern.

Here’s how I interpret their business model – they use daily free patterns to entice people to come to their site daily, driving their stats and generating ad revenue. Every new free pattern helps drive their business – so while I received a finite increase in traffic, the benefit to them from using my pattern continues long after any benefits to me (the designer) stopped.

Behind that, though, are the people writing the free patterns that the Daily Knitter is the goodwill of the designers whose patterns they use to drive traffic. In an era where reputation and trust are important, why would you risk that over something so minor?

Really, is it that difficult to add all patterns listed as ‘free patterns of the day’ on your ‘free patterns’ pages as well? Is it that difficult to respond to an email from a person whose design you’ve used (and therefore profited from)? I would think that it would be in your best interest to maintain a good relationship with your designers so that they’d be more willing to contribute to your site in the future (and thus increase the value your provide).

Daily Knitter, I think that you’ve behaved poorly and I certainly won’t be recommending that anyone use you.

Edit (March 10th) - the pattern has been added back to their listings. I’m not 100% if it was just that they finally read through their emails and there was simple a system error that I was caught in or if they came across this acted. Regardless, the email I finally got back was pleasant and friendly and the pattern has been added back. WIN!

As the Olympic fever winds down, I’d like to say that I’m pretty proud that I didn’t watch any (except for about 30 minutes at a friend’s place where it was on the in background while we played some Catan). Its not that I’m not proud of how well the athletes did, its more that I don’t think that all the pressure to be perfect and to shave milliseconds off a time is healthy. I don’t think that the nationalism is healthy. And I know that listening to the commentators will make me want to scream – I have enough frustration in my life right now that’s outside my control without adding something I know will irritate me.

Instead I spent my time knitting and spinning and interviewing and reading. Instead of living vicariously through someone else, I lived my own life.

And it included some pretty awesome moments like the one pictured below. Where my newly Canadian dog napped on his Fraser tartan blanket with his nose just barely touching his favorite bone (generously given to me for free from the local Portuguese butcher around the corner from my house).

I took a class this week at The Knit Cafe offered by the lovely Edie Kim on how to dye yarn and rovings using cake decorating dyes (i.e. non-toxic so you can use your normal cookware!). I won’t fill you in on all of the lovely little secrets, but you’ll get a general idea of the process. First up, I tried my hand at some rovings that I had – I figured that they’ll be more fun to spin with when there are pretty colours than when they are plain basic white.

First step – soak the fibers so that they’ll open up and accept the dye better.

While this was happening we started to get the dye baths ready. We did simple immersion baths. First up, yellow!

Next up, red! This looked really red in the pot, but once the yarn and rovings were pulled out and rinsed it was more of a bright, bright pink.

Finished product! My second attempt at dying was using some superwash merino sock yarn that I’d picked up a while back. We used teal and a rose pink, for a nice popsicle bright yarn. I also dyed over part of the rovings with the teal, all in the name of science and experimentation!

I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with the sock yarn as I don’t really enjoy knitting socks. However, I am super excited to spin up the rovings and see what happens to the colour changes (and how deeply the dye penetrated in – should make for some interesting variation).