So as I mentioned in my last post, Miriam and her son Thuur are visiting our offices this week from Holland.

We kept Miriam pretty busy yesterday filming video tutorials and posing for a catalog photo, so we decided to do something a little more low key today and film Miriam and Thuur out and about in Portland. First we headed to Multnomah Falls.

Thuur got some amazing shots of a hummingbird. I’ll have to see if I can borrow a couple and post them for you.
Then we snagged lunch in downtown Portland at Veganopolis. Thuur’s vegetarian and I’m vegan, so Veganopolis was a perfect choice. It was delicious! We’d planned on doing more sightseeing downtown, but today was unseasonably rainy so we decided to wait until later in the week.

Those of you in …

We were expecting 35-40 people last night including our staff so imagine how surprised we were when 83 of you showed up! 3 more knitters and the fire marshall might have crashed the party!!
We’re so glad you could all make it!! I know the event was pretty early in the evening- the library closes at 8 and it was the only venue I could find that wasn’t already booked with wedding rehearsals or yoga classes! Thanks to all of you who came straight from work or skipped dinner to come out and meet Miriam. We hope you had as much fun as we did.
For those of you who couldn’t come, we took lots of photos and Alison and Kelley recorded some video of Miriam’s talk.

First she explained how she got so darn fast and the process of applying …

It’s time for us to begin our yarn planning for 2009. We set aside a day or two to focus on all of Tina’s numbers analysis, customer suggestions and any other new, exciting ideas we have for improving our yarn lines.

I am still absolutely thrilled with my little Flip Mino. After about half an hour, I realized that it might be fun to videotape a bit of our planning party. You can get an idea of how our collaborative efforts work. Bob just shakes his head but there is a method to our madness. We stick to one yarn type (lace, for example) at a time and work through all of the styles.

First, some lace planning.
Then, some sock yarns. We tend to get a bit animated when it comes to yarn color selection. Socks are such reflections of personality.

In case you were wondering about …

What a difference 0.75mm makes!!

I fell in love with the Woodland colorway in Palette that Melissa came up with for the Autumn Rose Pullover by Eunny Jang. I thought I’d better be a good girl and do a gauge swatch. Good thing I did! I started out on US 0 (2.00mm) needles because I always knit fingering weight socks on this size needle. My swatch was so pathetically stiff and dense that I gave up half way through. I checked with Melissa, and she knit her swatch on US 2 (3.00mm), so I tried that but was seeing daylight between my stitches. So, I went down to US 2 (2.75mm) and came up with the perfect (for me, anyway) swatch! 0.75mm hardly seems like much, but it sure made a huge difference in the results!
I’m really excited to start this pullover now – it’ll …

I’ve been on 2 camping trips so far this summer, one in Powell, Idaho in June, and one last weekend at Loon Lake. I thought camping required a different kind of knitting, something easy and brainless that you can knit at dusk around the campfire or early in the morning when the sun is up but you haven’t had your instant coffee yet.
I’ve got an ancient laptop at home and no wireless connection at my house (gasp!), so when I want to check my e-mail or browse Ravelry on the weekends, I have to haul my old laptop to the nearest coffee shop with wireless. I hate the strap on my current laptop bag, it digs into my shoulder, so I usually just drop my laptop into a tote and go, which isn’t the best idea. I know my elderly laptop deserves better.
So when …

Okay, I know I just blogged yesterday, but I am so excited about Sheldon and our new Facebook page, I just can’t stop myself. It’s been tough keeping him a secret for so long!
This little turtle stole my heart the first time I saw him on Knitty, so when Ruth Homrighaus and Brooke Higgins agreed to partner with us to create new outfits for Sheldon exclusively for Knit Picks, I was practically giddy with excitement. Every morning I’d come into the office hoping I had an update on Sheldon and maybe a photo or two of his shells-in-progress in my inbox.

The final patterns are so SO cute. Brooke designed what we’re calling the “career shells” (Is beach bum really a career? Sign me up!), and I’m floored by her talent and creativity. Katie and I had so much …

While not strictly knitting related, this is still pretty darn rad. You enter the URL of your blog (or you can cut and paste any text you want), and Wordle will create a “word cloud” using the words you use most in your blog (not counting or, and the…) and then you can customize the colors, layout, and fonts. The more frequently you use a word the bigger it is in the word cloud. This is what you get when you paste in the URL for our Knitting Community. Who knew we blogged about laptops so much?
Make your own at http://wordle.net/. <

Have you seen all the new samplers that we’ve added in the past week? So much temptation! Usually I’m pretty good about only buying specific yarn for a project, but I couldn’t resist the Spring/Summer Kettle Dyed Essential Sampler. Those rich jewel tones are my colors, and even though my sock yarn stash is huge, it’s full of multicolored yarn that isn’t nearly as versatile as semi-solid yarn. My sampler arrived on Tuesday all wrapped up in its tidy package with the patterns. Kerin did a great job writing all these patterns. My absolute must-knit is this Busy Bees pattern. Bees are a favorite theme of mine, and I really like the different elements in this sock. I don’t think I’ll knit mine in gold though, since that’s not a color that would match my wardrobe. Grasshopper and Spruce are the main …

I’ve gotten out of my solid-color-pullover slump, but now I’ve fallen down the cardigan-with-patterned-yoke rabbit hole. I got a copy of Norah Gaughan’s Knitting Nature, and it has a pattern for a sweater coat with a colorwork yoke done in a fractal pattern. Here’s the image from the book:

I’m making a bunch of adjustments, though. I’m just going to make a standard-length cardigan, instead of a full-length coat, and I’m converting the pattern to knitting in the round so that I don’t have to do purled colorwork on the yoke. I’m also substituting yarn, since the original yarn (Reynolds Odyssey) is a little too spendy for me.

The body is Wool of the Andes Kettle Dye in Timber, and then I’m going to do the yoke background in Auburn with the fractal pattern in Oak. One warning: I did …