With the 15 yard mini-skein, the pattern was these Blooming Flowers, in 3 different sizes (barely blooming, blooming, and the cephalopod-esque fully bloomed) – the 15 yards is enough to make 6 or 7 of them!

By threading a pipe cleaner (or 2) through the flowers, and wrapping it around ribbon, the flowers can be turned into a necklace (like above), a headband (like below, or like this), a bracelet, or whatever else the maker can think up!

Another option is to turn 2 (or more!) flowers into a pair of earrings, like these:

Each club package included everything needed to make earrings like those, which means members could also choose to use the parts to try out my 2-bead earrings tutorial (like the ones below), or make any other kinds of earrings with the 2 earwires, 2 headpins, 2 eyepins, and many assorted pairs of beads included in the package!

Or, another option for members is to use all those parts to make a collection of beaded stitch markers!  Turning each headpin, eyepin, and earwire into a stitch marker means you get 6 fancy-pants beaded treats for your knitting!  Aaaand, the other pattern can provide a place to store them:

To accessorize your keys, bag, or whatever you clip it onto, the Robot Monster Pouch is sized exactly to hold a tic-tac case, which can be repurposed to store stitch markers, or anything else that fits!  The case wasn’t included in the package, but the googly eyes were:

Everyone got a bundle of 4 pipe cleaners and a piece of ribbon, and a little (recycled) baggie filled with all those jewelry-making parts, a keyring, a hook, and lots of beads…

… mostly from Knittn’ Kitten, many of the beads are either vintage (like these 50’s glass chevron beads) or czech glass!  Pretty!

Oh yeah and the yarn!  Recycled dyed is 56% nylon, 40% angora, 4% lambswool fingering weight – used to be a bright fuschia color, overdyed with blue, purple, and red to make a less bright purple shade.  I named it Dedicated Follower of Fashion.  The spun yarn, Fashion is Danger, is a lambswool/angora/rayon blend with a shiny silver strand running through, spun and plied with vintage lurex metallic thread and a variegated thread.

And a complete club package:

Don’t forget to sign up for the last club kit (only a few days left till the 1st) – August’s theme is Games and I’m way excited about it!!

A little (semi-embarrassing) background info from a couple weeks ago… I was trying to be super good, learning how to grow things successfully, reading about how to prune tomato plants, and I misunderstood some things because I don’t know what I’m doing yet (hey, this is my learning year, misunderstanding is to be expected), and I WAY over-pruned.  Once I realized what I’d done wrong, I feared I’d seriously damaged the plants and either killed them completely or majorly affected the time it would take for tomatoes to start appearing.  So when I saw these three tomatoes today while watering - 2 on the middle-sized plant, one on the biggest plant – I was ecstatic!

And then, the pickling cucumber plant I added (into this raised bed) less than 2 weeks ago…

…has three of these little future-cucumbers appearing already!  Yay!!  Extra exciting after learning a bit about pickling, and getting eager to try it out!  (By the way, all these photos were taken super close-up with a micro lens – all these little future-foods are bitsy right now!)

Aaaand, the carrot seeds I planted at the same time are starting to sprout!  Hooray for carrots!  Yumyumyumyum!

Lastly for the foody goodness… the California Wonder pepper plant I added at the same time as the cucumber is flowering – not doing quite as well as the other guys though.  That blackness around the bases of the stems is worrying me… the photo on the left was taken the day after planting it – all green – then the new photo on the right was taken today:

Then there’s my herbs!  The yard came with a pretty stocked herb planter when we moved in – healthy looking sage, oregano, some dying thyme, and what I think is tarragon, but I’m not sure since there’s no tag and I’ve never cooked with tarragon so I don’t know what it smells like… what do you think?

And just yesterday I discovered some mint in another part of the yard, so that’s rad… then soon after we moved in I planted some rosemary and sweet basil.  A few weeks ago, the sweet basil seemed to have been totally killed by the horrible cold streak we had in June, but now it’s come back to life!  Then I added African Blue basil at the same time as the cucs and peppers, which I totally love!  I don’t want to put any effort into anything that’s not edible, so when I saw that I could have a basil with pretty flowers as a bonus, I went for it!  Side note – the photos below (left = today, right = just after planting) are a great demonstration of the difference between shade vs. harsh direct sunlight:

One last thing from my yard – these narrow raised beds are empty now (were filled with dead things and weeds, which I got rid of yesterday) and I could totally use them for something new, but what?  Any suggestions for things I don’t already have, small enough to fit in here (width is around 8ish inches), not too late in the season to plant?

And some extra bonus photos, snapped for fun while walking around Lents Park awhile ago…

These are some awesome looking plants that I liked – no idea what they are:

Ok I’m done!  Happy gardening!

9th – Spent the day doing some cleaning and unpacking, and finally crushed these dried herbs into jars!  I let them dry for longer than I was supposed to, because I didn’t have jars to put them into, so hopefully they’re ok, probably not the best though.  The whole process was a lot of work for that tiny amount of dried herbs, so I might be using them fresh from the garden most of the time instead of doing this…

10th + 11th – I forgot to take a photo on the 10th, the day my parents came into town, so I snapped this shot the next morning of some of the boxes they brought with them – since we have a house with lots of storage space now, they loaded up the car with these plus several more boxes and bags full of all kinds of stuff from my childhood, artwork all through high school and college, etc… When I have time to go through it all, it’s gonna be so much fun!  Their first full day here, we all headed up Mt. Hood to the Timberline Lodge – we met a dog in the parking lot who was awesome and named Bruno, then we saw this painting in the lodge! Ok, not the exact same dog, but it looks just like him…

12th – The next day of their visit was pretty nuts – I had to teach a class in the middle of it, Pete had to work all day, so I had breakfast and a little pdx exploring with them in the morning, then we went our separate ways and they headed up to the zoo.  By the time we all reconvened in the evening, we were all super tired from long days, and we tried playing Taboo for awhile… our brains were all so wiped out that we all were terrible at the game, it was pretty funny.  Anyway, also, see those rings on the table?  My dad gave me those, which belonged to his parents – family story is that the bigger (non-gold) one was made by my grandpa during the war, from a nickel!

13th – The next morning was Waffle Window for breakfast!  One of my favorites, for sure, and now it’s my mom’s number one favorite breakfast spot in the world!

14th + 15th – While they were here, we took a trip to my local nursery (which is HUGE, by the way!) and I got some new plants for the garden, to try out during my learning time – the more experience I pack in this summer, the more I’ll know how to have an awesome veggie garden next year!  I got a pickling cucumber plant, a California Wonder pepper plant, carrot seeds, and an African Blue Basil plant!  So when I was reheating some leftover pizza, I grabbed some of the basil, and some oregano too, from the yard and threw that on there – oh my gosh best leftover pizza ever!  And, these days started my club-making, lots of unraveling!  (the color in this yarn photo is super inaccurate)

16th – I was having some trouble making my club plans fall into place, so I took a brainstorming walk, browsed craft supplies at Jo-Ann, and headed to Lents park, where I wandered and brainstormed and found this table in the shade to sit down with my sketchbook.  Perfect plan, totally worked!  Sorted out all my issues and got the elements all planned out on paper!

17th + 18th – Taught a class in the morning, did some birthday shopping for Pete on Mississippi (after lunch at the carts), and headed to Scrap and Knittn’ Kitten for some club-related supplies (like recycled mailing envelopes).  Of course, I got much more than club stuff!  Oh Scrap, I can never leave without a huge box full of goodies!  Also stopped at Twisted for this skein of yellow bulky Lanaloft – love!!  The next day, after working hard on club patterns all day, we got to hang with birthday girl Elif and Vivian for some birthday drinks and pizza…

19th – Club package sorting this month included these gorgeous vintage 50’s chevron beads, found at Knittn’ Kitten – I wanted to buy all of them, in all different colors, but I limited myself to these three bags.  Enough for all club members, plus plenty left over for me to play with!  I already made 2 orange ones into a pair of earrings a couple nights ago…

20th + 21st – These two days were Pete’s days off, before his birthday, when he had to work, so we treated these days as his “birthday weekend” and did all kinds of fun stuff, like breakfast at Genie’s, watching a weird zombie movie, him playing video games while I taught a class…. He decided he wanted to have an Angel “party” – this was modeled after a Buffy “party” we had back in October, which meant we bought an assortment of junk food which could vaguely relate to the Buffy-verse (like garlic toast and monster candy, since it was Halloween season this was easy to find).  So we found what we could – Devil Squares, parmesan+garlic Cheese Its, Twizzlers (blood colored), and I drank red wine (like blood) with a bunch of orange juice mixed in – instant sangria!  It was a fun Angel party!  Oh I know we’re supernerds, I know.

Oh then the next day was a little more of a real party – we ate pizza and homemade pesto crazy bread and played games with our buddies Star and Grant, fun times!  We tried out Huggermugger – holy crap that game is tough!  Star and Grant are not just word lovers, but crossword puzzle makers(!) so they did much better than Pete and I did, and before playing this I thought we were both pretty good with words too!  It was fun though, just made me feel dumb, hah… oh yeah and I drank Busch Light, that was silly…

Well that was a wordy post!  These photo-a-day posts are kind of like a diary for me – a glimpse into my life if you want to bother reading it all, but you can also just skim over the photos and leave it at that.  Coming soon… interested in a garden post? You’ll probably be getting one!  And, oh my gosh it’s taking me what feels like years to get this mitts pattern finished, but that’s my next top priority, so you’ll soon(ish) be seeing not just a new pattern, but a new technique!!  Soon, I promise!

Starting with crafty stuff, this granny squares book is pretty darn sweet, and while I don’t really care about that little knitting book, I LOVE the yarn+needles charm that came with it!  It will be turned into a necklace for sure:

Some of the nice cotton blend loops to go with my vintagey potholder loom I scored at a craft swap awhile back… and a big chunk of houndstooth fabric – maybe big enough to make an awesome dress, if I can figure out how to make a dress…

Sweaters to unravel and dye, as always:

I started collecting lace for a home decor project I’m planning, but now I’ve been brainstorming about a different project that some of this might be used for…

I love collecting awesome glasses and mugs!  This is another recent find…

Pete’s always looking for games for trivia mystery prizes, and scored these the other day – I am so keeping pop culture trivial pursuit and celebrity taboo! And, has anyone heard of/played huggermugger?  Looks maybe fun…

And onto the clothes!  I love this wraparound dress – it’s a size smaller than would normally fit me, but it magically fits perfectly, and it has pockets! wooo!  And then this weird-ish summer cardigan thing – not good for most weather, being super warm angora but short sleeves, but it’s soft and cabley and has crocheted buttons and I couldn’t resist!

These two tops are both dress-like but too short for me so I wear them with jeans or with a skirt underneath… giant purple houndstooth is rad and that grey+black one totally looks like yarn and/or cables!

And one of my best thrifty finds of all time: dug up at the Bins, meaning it cost probably around $3-4 (pay by the pound)…

Check out the label on this coat!  Made in England, in the 30’s?!  Awesome, perfect-fitting houndstooth wool, sure to be worn every day next winter!

And those are just my favorites!  Happy thrifting!

Oh hey, I forgot to tell you last week that my Brimming with Color hat pattern is now available to all!  When I first blogged about it, when it was released to Twisted’s club members, I thought I couldn’t release it until October, but their policy changed, so it’s out now, yay!  (on ravelry)

Speaking of Twisted, I don’t think I ever mentioned here that my connect-the-dots stitch sets and my Double Scoops ice cream headband and earmuffs kits are there!  So, if you’re local and you like supporting awesome yarn shops, you can check out my stuff there, yeah!  (They also sell some of my absolute favorite yarns ever, like Brown Sheep and Malabrigo and Noro and Imperial Stock Ranch and Alpaca with a Twist…….)

And since this was a quickie post, I’ll throw up a few photos of my tomato plants!  The weather was harsh when they were starting out (the reason for the brown on the leaves, maybe?), but I think they’re doing ok – I don’t know anything about gardening though… They are mostly green and the bigger two have flowers, and the smallest one looks like flowers are coming soon, so I think they’re good!

The biggest/oldest of the three:

And the medium sized and smallest ones:

I am going to be SO freaking excited if/when actual tomatoes start appearing!!

22nd – A couple nights before this, Pete and I did karaoke out and had so much fun, so we broke out our ps3 karaoke game we’ve had forever but rarely play, and we totally rocked out in our living room! It was superfun!

23rd + 24th – We hung out with Star and went thrifting and to trivia at Zach’s, where Zach was excited to tell me about the Corona on special that I could get instead of my usual PBR.  I hadn’t had Corona since college in San Diego, so I got one for old time’s sake… and felt very silly about it… Anyway, then the next day I forgot to take a photo, but I did take a photo booth shot of this top I got at Goodwill the day before – love it!

25th -  It was a certain little foofhead’s birthday today!  Our 2-year-old kitten:

26th + 28th – These were sick days, during which I had the energy to make cold brewed coffee for the how-to I did, and not too much else, like take photos-of-the-days…

1st – Enough energy to knit on this hat, and I even remembered to photograph it:

30th + 2nd -  A couple of food shots… sick food (plain wheat pasta with olive oil) on the 30th, then by the 2nd I was feeling better enough to make a yummy wrap for lunch:

3rd + 4th – Tired of sitting on the couch, I worked on the library a bunch!  Yes, we still have a ton of unpacking to do, after having moved in over 2 months ago (we’re busy people!) so I unpacked all the CDs and rearranged things so that the library started looking more like a real room and less like a big storage closet.  On the 4th, we hung out with our buddies in St. Johns and saw some faraway fireworks from the bridge.  This photo actually makes the fireworks look much closer than they were (but it was fun!):

5th -  Spent most of the day working on my mitts design – after gathering all the feedback from my testers, I decided to make some kind of big changes, so I now have to re-test pretty heavily myself.  I’m really happy with how the pattern is turning out, but I probably won’t be able to complete it till after my July club goes out, which means an end-of-July release… man, this pattern is taking forever (I started this design in March)…

6th + 7th -  More knitting and design work, along with lots of Netflix Instant watching… Then a weekend day with Pete – we had lots of fun times out thrifting and eating and game playing, and in the middle of the day we did a wee bit of housework and Pete pruned the crap out of our hydrangea in the front yard!  I wish I’d taken photos of it before, though it was looking a bit weird – I think due to the weather lately, it’s been blooming all uneven, so lots of the flowers are still green, and many of them are already wilting.  We know nothing about plants, so maybe this is normal and we’re supposed to be pruning often.  Anyway, it was taking over our ramp to the front door and our driveway and everything, so Pete cut it all back out of the way, and put some of these flowers in a vase on the table… within 5 minutes Banzo was trying to eat them, so I snapped some photos and we threw them all out, so sad…

8th -  I did a ton of back yard work – mowed and pulled weeds mostly, but the yard still needs lots more work to look decent… in the 90-something degree heat, I discovered that when the doug fir tree is shading part of the yard, it’s a drastic difference in temperature and totally nice to be outside under the shade, so I ate lunch out in the yard for the first time!

I also got the little air conditioner up and running yesterday – so nice!  I’ve never lived in a place with any kind of AC, such a treat!  Between that and our multiple ceiling fans and movable fans, this summer will be so much more bearable than last!

My parents are coming into town tomorrow to hang out for a few days, so it’ll be a bit vacationy for me, fun times!  Sure to be lots of delicious Portland food involved, yay!  Happy weekend to you!

January’s Afterthought Earflaps and Pinwheel Earmuffs (original blog post):

February’s Argyle Cuff and Bolt (original blog post):

March’s Cabled Frame and Camera Patch (original blog post):

April’s Fruit+Veggie Scrubbies and Mini Produce Bag (original blog post):

Sorry if I sounded all advertise-y but I’m sincerely excited about releasing this ebook!  I really love a lot of these designs so I’m happy for the exclusivity to be over and now anyone who wants them can get them!  Yay!

You can find and buy everything on my site here, or on ravelry here.  Happy knitting!

Along with the coffee instructions, you’ll also find a pretty wordy interview… be warned, when I’m asked about my business and stuff, you can’t shut me up!  So head over to day 10 of the Midsummer Day’s Dream blog festival – and check out the festival home page to see all the projects for all the days (including some free knit and crochet patterns, recipes, and more!).

In other news… did you know this year’s Tour de Fleece has started already?!  My, how time flies!  I’m taking the year off, sadly, too much going on, but I did participate the last 2 years – see my posts about 2009 and about 2008, or the flickr sets, for some inspiration perhaps?  It’s such a fun way to spin a bunch with a huge group of people all spinning right along with you, yay!  (Head to the ravelry group to get involved!)

I’ve been meaning to mention this since the Summit of Awesome, where I met the creator of this amazing new website – unanimous craft!  From the site:

Unanimous Craft is a tagable, sortable index of resources for crafters, artists and indie business owners. We submit our favorite resources and welcome the community to do the same.

It’s still super new, and the awesomeness of it is dependent on how much it gets used… I haven’t been able to spend any real time there yet, but I plan to for sure, and you should too!

I got an email from 9-year-old Hannah pointing me to this video she made about Hats for Hunger – seems like a great charity to know about if you’re looking for a place to donate hats, or want to buy some hats for a good cause, or especially if you have kids in your life who might be into loom-knitting (or regular knitting) up some hats for the cause, since it’s all run by kids!  Pretty rad!

And one last thing to tell you about – Google voice has recently come out of beta so an invite is no longer needed to get an account!  It’s a great service (watch the video to learn about it) and I now have a new number that I can share publicly since it’s all screened and stuff…  (971)-leethal will reach me via phone call or text! Yay!

Well I’m finally almost not sick anymore, and catching up slowly on everything after a couple weeks of rest… oh, my poor blog, hopefully I’ll be seeing more of you!

So, the two major things you’ll notice on the blog and on any page within leethal.net are the new headers and the new drop-down menus.  There’s also a new link to a search leethal page in the blog menu to make that easier – there has always been a search bar on the leethal.net home page (since the new site went up about a year ago) but now there’s an obvious place to click here on any blog page, hopefully helpful!

Anyway, I’m really excited about those drop-down menus!  A lot more work than I’d expected them to be, with my limited understanding of css and javascript (code is from here), but so totally worth it!  Now you can basically get to any page within leethal.net from any other page!

And, the headers… those were a sudden burst of inspiration that happened right after the summit last week… I love headers that look crafty and real (like here and here and here for example) so I made mine kind of as analog as I could – these are the photographs I took that got edited to become the header, with different photos plugged into the frames for each leethal section:

And then, there’s some new content!  Finally, photography prints are now for sale in the leethal shop!  I put together these photo trios and matted prints way back over two years ago, and had many of them for sale on etsy for awhile, but etsy and I don’t really get along, so I’d been planning this update for quite some time… There will be further updates to this section, as you can see eluded to on the page, but for now – affordable artwork, trios of 4×6’s or matted 8×6’s for $15!

Other more minor update – I separated my knitting patterns into ebooks and single patterns, since there’s kind of a big difference, and I have more ebooks coming soon, so it seemed like a good idea.  You can still browse through them all together on the same page, but now in 3 separate categories: ebooks, single patterns for sale, and free patterns.  Oh, and I keep forgetting to say here – my ravelry designer page is now viewable to non-ravelry members!  So, that link is in the patterns drop-down menu also, for easy clicking.

And gigantic update #2 – brand new leemeredith.com!!  This one was a loooooong time coming, always pushed down on the to-do list, until finally I had a burst of inspiration from somewhere and just went ahead and built it!  My superold photo portfolio that used to live at leemeredith.com still exists (in major need of updating!) through this new page, but now this page makes a heck of a lot more sense to who I am now.  Through this home base, you can click over to leethal.net, do stuff! blog, photo portfolios and shop, my twitter, my flickr, me on ravelry, bad movie bingo, me on blip.fm, and more…

And after some extreme coding frustration, I was eventually able to get my blog’s feed (and twitter and flickr feeds) to show up in the drop-down menu on the page, yay!  I don’t know if it was worth the effort, but I wanted to make it happen and I did, so I was happy about it!

Oh, if any of this stuff looks super different (bad) on your screen, or doesn’t work or something, if you could let me know what browser you’re on and what the problem is that would be excellent – I’m on a mac with firefox and safari, so I’m just hoping everything works out fine in other systems…

Ok that post was much longer than I thought it would be… hope you enjoy the new stuff!

So, the story of the Summit in photos and links… Got there Wednesday to sign in and pick up this fantastic program bound inside a custom made journal, with plenty of blank pages in back, love it!

Also got a swag bag with this excellent knit swatch poster and lots of fun buttons and cards and stuff:

Then I stitched up my name tag – since I arrived a bit on the late side, I kept it simple, just some embroidery on felt:

On that first day, I attended a couple of great learning sessions – Getting Press for your Business with Kari Chapin and Christine Ernest, and Green craft: sourcing materials and business practices with Becky Striepe, Stephanie Weber and Christine Claringbold:

Then Pete joined up since it was his day off and we ate with a bunch of rad crafty people…

(photo of us by Christine) At the welcome party that night, we got to screen print our own Summit tees – so cool!

Day 2 was the longest day – 5 sessions of awesomeness!  Since I did just learning sessions on day 1, and I was going to be teaching on day 3, I decided to make day 2 my fun day of making, so I chose to attend only workshops!  First up, Encaustic Painting with Bridget Benton!

I knew absolutely nothing about encaustic painting going into this session, and was SO glad I decided to try it out!  Holy crap it was fun!!  The photos above and below show other workshoppers working on their pieces – here is a photo of me working on my painting by Hello Craft, sort of.

And my finished piece!  Still hot and super foggy, then cooled:

Next was Mighty Ugly: Challenge Yourself to Make Some Ugly with Kim Werker!

The above photo is by Susan, and here’s our “class photo” by Kim (or someone holding Kim’s camera actually, since that’s Kim in the middle there):

My mighty ugly creature!

And below is Vanessa’s fabulous preppy creation, Blane (or is it Blaine?), and Heather working on hers:

After Mighty Ugly was Glass Etching with Amanda Siska, which I was super excited about since I’ve been a fan of Amanda’s work for some time!

Above is another etcher using the dental drill, and the photo of me etching above is by Hello Craft.  So, we got to use that dental drill to freehand etch, which is how I made this glass:

(You can see other views here and here, and Amanda shot it before round 2 of etching, before I added more details and made it look less kindergarten-drawing-y.)  And then we also got to make vinyl stencils and use a faux etching paint stuff, which I used to make this candle holder:

Next up, Craft Throwdown Hour with Kim Dorn and Christine Ernest! It was fun, but super stressful, making things with a 15 minute time limit – first a Viva Las Vegas themed towel (photo of me making it below by Hello Craft), then a garden themed headband, and last was mythical creatures themed bunting, which I forgot to get a photo of…

The crazy flower headband was definitely my best out of the three objects, but it was not well put together – I want to fix it and turn it into something wearable…

Last for day 2 was Book Making with Mark Montano – I chose this one because I’m a huge fan of Mark’s books, so it was fun making something instructed by him:

I was bummed out by the details of the project though – this book-making project could be so easily done with 100% recycled materials, but instead we made the books with new scrapbooking paper, new cardboard, and new copy paper… Oh well, now I know how to make my own books (with ALL recycled materials!) at home on my own:

That night at home, I finished prepping for my classes, including making a new light box (since my old one got destroyed and tossed in the move) – here’s a photo of everything I made throughout the Summit!

Day 3… first, I taught Photographing your work with your own camera (photo by Hello Craft):

Then I let my brain rest a bit by sewing up a Cup Glove with Becky Striepe – fun!

(Above photo by Hello Craft) Here’s my glove… I really enjoy hand-sewing, I should do it more often!

During lunch, we got to hear Mark Montano speak about his career path (I didn’t know he started out in the fashion world!) and tips for success and stuff (like: no days off and no tv without multi-tasking, both things I already do!)… Then I taught my learning session on Publishing your own patterns, which I think went super well!  Hooray for self-publishing!  (below photos by Susan and Hello Craft)

To end the awesomeness, we all gathered in front of the Kennedy School to take a class photo!  The actual photo isn’t up yet, but here is one Kim took while we were getting set up…

And the photographers shooting us (shooting me shooting them, silly!)…

A few last notes – having the Summit take place at the Kennedy School was GENIUS!  It was so great to have free good coffee whenever we needed it, good catering, the built-in hotel for out-of-town summiters, and bars and restaurants right there in the building where everyone could hang out together at the end of each day.  And, I love that now I can say I was a teacher at the Kennedy School!

Hello Craft is planning to do the Summit of Awesome every summer, in a different city each year, I believe… so if they take it to anywhere you can get to next year, I recommend so highly that you go!!  As we all agreed, it was total summer camp for crafters!