Purling Sprite

Bounce!

A weekend project is hard to come by around here, but lookie, I have a finished project! I present you Bounce by Wendy from Knit and Tonic. She released the pattern Thursday night and my fingers quickly pushed the mouse and I was set for the weekend. A quick trip to the stash room and I came up with 2 skeins of Katia Jamaica in number 4010.

I would have finished this cute thing by Friday night if it hadn't been for my lack of attention while watching the movie Deja Vu. I realized about two inches into the work that I twisted my stitches when joining in the round...instead of a nice circular skirt, I was knitting a mobious skirt! Not much damage was done to the yarn, just my ego...and I did get to watch a second movie so I was able to recoup the lost time (still, you would think that after knitting so many circular things that I would have paid more attention, but I had my eyes riveted on the movie-happenings).

Overall, the pattern was sensational! I had a blast knitting it and seeing the colors of the yarn develop. The pattern is an A+, well written, just like Wendy's other patterns. And most importanly, my little Benny loved it! She is looking forward to seeing our neighbors tomorrow to show it off!

Pattern Specs:

Pattern: Bounce by Knit&Tonic

Size: 2yr

Yarn: Katia Jamaica: 1 skein and a few yards of second skein

Pattern deviations: I didn't have any elastic, instead I crocheted a long chain and added two beads at each end. I then threaded the long crocheted chain through the ribbing area (around the 3rd row from cast on edge).

And here are some other shots of her wearing the little skirt, she tried bouncing a few times just for the camera :).

New Typepad Features

For a few months, I have been nagging Typepad to add a couple of new features to our services and yesterday, I was surprised to see that one of my requests was made a reality--it is not perfect yet, but it is getting there.

You see, I have been eyeing many of my bloggy friends WordPress blogs (some of which have recently made the jump to WordPress). They all have one thing in common: a clean homepage and all their "other" stuff on navigation links at the top of the page--just like it should be on a website.

Anyways, I nagged to typepad about the lack of this great feature and finally, we have our own Pages (of course, I know that they didn't do it just for me, but I want to trick my mind into believing that, hehehe). However, there is no capability yet to have them in little navigational buttons like on WordPress, so a little more waiting for that and probably more emails to the typepad center :).

Another feature that I would love to have is a pop-up menu for the Archives--it would clean up the page very nicely!

So, now, you will find a section on the sidebar called "My Pages" under that section, you will find the different pages that are part of this blog, such as: Tutorials (for loom knitting), My Patterns (for Loom knitting), Loomy Links (links to many places that talk about loom knitting) and more to come.

My goal is to try to clean up the homepage of the blog so it is easier to navigate and more pleasant. If any of you know any CSS and know how I can change the Archives into a drop down menu, please let me know :).

Now, if you are a Typepad user, go and type up some Pages for your blog, it is so much fun to have some new features to play with :)