Moving around!

Hello friends! Just a quick note to say that I am knitting, just not really photographing much and forgetting to talk about things in general, but more importantly, this week’s Friday Finds and all other posts from here on out will be located at www.threadpanda.com. That’s right, this panda has her very own domain now.

I’m still tweaking some things—it’s completely, sadly missing a links list, for example—and will be undergoing some cosmetic changes in the next few weeks as well, but I can’t wait any longer and I wanted to share the news with all of you! So please, update your bookmarks if you have them! This site will remain live indefinitely, but all new content (and all old content as well) will be over at www.threadpanda.com.

If you subscribe to this blog via the email list, please provide some feedback—do you like receiving the emails? The new site has an option for RSS feeds, if that’s more your game. I don’t think there’s an easy way to migrate the current mailing list to the new site, unfortunately.

So that’s that! I’d love to hear what you all think of the new site over at www.threadpanda.com!

Hobbit-y Friday Finds

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Happy New Year to you all! First Friday of the new year calls for something a little extra special, don’t you think?

You probably all realize that I’m a big nerd and that I’m in love with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, so I dedicated this week’s Friday Finds to Tolkien-inspired patterns. YOU’RE WELCOME.

  • I like to pretend that Antoniya Petkova’s Magnificent Dragon (£4) is Smaug in disguise. Yes I do.

  • You can crochet all of the hobbits (free) thanks to Sammi Resendes’s pattern. I love the little leaf on the cloak!

  • Erica Jackofsky’s put together an entire collection of Tolkien-inspired patterns in her A Hobbit’s Journey eBook ($18). I especially love Ori’s Cowl, Rivendell Shawl (pictured), and the Lord of the Eagles shawl.

  • If you knit Josie Mercier’s Pocketses (CAD$4.50), be sure to not get stuck in any tight spaces that might send the buttons flying.

  • Smaug (free) by Frau Morag are dragon-scaled socks. Perfect for wearing on an adventure.

  • Claire Ellen’s There and Back Again eBook ($14) features three fantastic sock patterns, including the beautiful textured Gollum Socks.

  • Take your devotion to new levels with Diana Stafford’s One Ring Scarf (free). This reversible scarf features a double-knitting chart with the Elvish inscription from the Ring.

  • Andrea Krüß-Anders’s Doors of Durin chart (free) is another double-knitting chart. No, I am totally not planning to work all of these (plus the following chart) together into something.

  • True story: My new cell phone case with the Tree of Gondor should arrive any day now. Less protective but equally awesome is Emma Schurman’s Tree of Gondor chart (free).

The Hobbit photo comes from TGDaily.
All project photos are taken from the individual Ravelry pattern pages unless otherwise noted. No copyright infringement intended.

Contest Winner Week 4

Very belated today—sorry about that! I was running around New York City and didn’t have a chance to run the random number generator.

This last winner is…

Screen shot 2012-12-31 at 5.12.46 PM

Marion! Marion, I’ll be in touch with you about your prize pattern soon—remember, you can choose any pattern that’s available online for under $7—your prize does not have to come from last week’s Friday Finds.

Thanks for playing everyone, and I hope you have a wonderful New Year’s Eve.

Year in Review: 2012

Goodbye 2012! Overall this year pretty much balanced out between good times and less good times, but the back end was definitely overloaded with crap, and created situations that are unlikely to improve any time soon, so I’m not particularly looking forward to 2013.

Knitting-wise, this was an incredibly productive year. Without planning to, I knit six garments for me that worked out (and one that didn’t). And as you saw in the last Sweaterday post, I’m a little more than halfway finished with another one.

My creation

This is the first year I’ve churned out this many sweaters since the original launch Sweater Odyssey a couple of years ago. And this was mostly accidental. I’ve got a good amount of yarn queued up to knit a few more sweaters and cardigans next year, which is awesome, because sweaters get rid of a lot more yarn than socks do.

I did knit three pairs of socks this year, in addition to six shawls/scarves and a few hats (one of which still needs to be sewn together, oops). Quite a few baby projects were made for a few babies who debuted this year.

Oh yeah, there was that Loki scarf too.

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I had a goal to not buy much yarn to help save money for my trip to Paris, and while in general I did pretty good with that—didn’t really impulse buy much yarn—I did keep buying yarn to knit those sweaters. And I knit them up pretty much as soon as the yarn appeared. So that’s good. But next year, I really need to buckle down and knit from my stash and not add to my stash via my own means (meaning, if someone sends me yarn as a gift, obviously I will accept it and love it, and I can buy yarn for other people, but I can not buy yarn for myself). I have a ridiculous number of pattern + yarn-in-stash match-ups and I need to work through the queue.

So my two knitting goals for 2013 are:

  1. Knit from the queue. I only finished around 25 projects this year (partly because the Loki scarf did take up a bit of time—I figure next year I could knock out about thirty projects, depending on the size and complexity). I have about 140 patterns matched to yarn in my queue. I’m set for a while.
  2. Don’t buy yarn. I obviously don’t need any yarn. I have enough projects to keep me entertained from here to the next apocalypse without fail.

Pretty simple, really! Here’s hoping I can stick to them. Are you making any crafting goals for the new year?