Carousel Hat: Free Knitting Pattern

I like milestones.  I'm not as good at remembering every anniversary (baby's first haircut? no clue!) but thanks to the Happiness Project I keep a diary, and I remember things I would not normally be able to readily recall.

For example, one year ago, on July 25, 2013, I sketched out 8 designs to take to the upcoming TKGA event in Oct 2013. I was able to knit up samples for 5 of them and 2 were purchased by Coats & Clark (you might know them through their yarn brand, Red Heart).  By February of this year I had completed the samples to send to Red Heart, along with the patterns.  And so the waiting began.  I admit, I am not a terribly patient person. Every few weeks I would go into the craft store and check the labels of the Red Heart With Love yarns to see if either of my patterns had shown up, knowing full well that the turnaround time for such things is many months.

On Saturday, I got a message from my friend Pat, who shared with me her friend Julie's new pattern on Red Heart (oh, my, goodness!  This sweater!!!) and I thought, let me check the new releases.  As I had done many times since Feb, I chose the yarn type and "knitting" on the free patterns page and scrolled through, but this time I stopped when I saw this:

The Carousel Hat as shown on the Red Heart website. Can you handle the cuteness?

This is my hat!!  And they found the most adorable model to show it off! 

I would say my patience paid off, but, like I said, I wasn't very patient!  Regardless, it's up on the site now and I'm very pleased.  I think it's kind of nice that the publication of the pattern is almost a year to the day since it was first just a sketch in my notebook.  Quite a milestone!

Now I'm off to go check and see if they've published the shawl pattern yet.........

Lovin on Bloglovin

I know y'all think I'm some kind of tech-savvy goddess, and there are days I suspect that this is an accurate assessment.  Then there are other days when I want to move to a remote wilderness completely off-grid with no internet, phone or satellite. 

Just kidding.  I can't see myself EVER wanting to live like the Unabomber.  Not even on the really bad days.  We can safely just stick with the tech-savvy goddess part and then I'll go charge my phone in the air-conditioned comfort of my suburban, wi-fi enabled, electric-powered home.

One secret I have found to being tech-savvy is to cheat a little.  There are so many things that I come across in my social media travels that leave me as confused as a cow at a new gate.  Sometimes I dig deeper and try to solve the mystery, and sometimes, well, I just wait it out.  I skip it altogether, with or without solid plans to return to it later.  The cheating bit I mentioned comes when I stumble across the answer and then, Lo and Behold, I am tech-savvy without ever having spent any real effort on increasing that savvy.  I literally fell over it on my path, picked myself up, dusted myself off, and said, "Hey! I now understand this concept and can share it with the world!"

For years I wondered (but not too much) about "RSS feeds".  It sounded great and useful, but for the life of me I couldn't tell you how to partake of such a thing. Somewhere I read that an RSS feed would give you updates from blogs, but how to set up such a thing was never explained in easy words with few syllables.

Today, as I took a morning stroll down a social media woodland path, I found the answer. 

To the question: RSS? How in the world do I use that??

The answer is: Bloglovin'

Bloglovin' is what you need, and you need it now.  You know how you've got your Facebook feed and you log in and there are the people you've friended, sharing their latest corny Friday joke (if you're friends with me on FB, you know what I'm talking about).  Bloglovin' is like FB for blogs.  Anyone with a blog you enjoy reading (and you have no idea how much I hope this is one of them!) can go on your list of blogs.  Then when you go to Bloglovin' and log in or pull up the handy app on your mobile device, you get a news feed of blogs.  You can even "like" them! 

Part of what makes Bloglovin' great is that you can enter any blog in the search box--not just those using a certain platform.  So you can follow folks on Blogger, Wordpress or even me.  Also my friend Stacey, who cracks me up and is an amazing cook, my friend Dianne, whose blog posts always leave me feeling the peace of the countryside around her farm and about a gazillion knitting blogs, for lots of fiber-y inspiration.

It's easy to find blogs you're already reading and add them to your feed and you can also get suggestions of new blogs to discover, on a multitude of topics.  Add as many as you want to follow then whenever you sit down to read, you will have all the new posts from all the blogs on your list, all in one place.  It is as simple as it sounds, without a lot of buttons to push.  I think I have discovered the Next Big Thing in social media--that one thing that will keep blogging alive and relevant.  See? I told you I was a tech-savvy goddess.