start of week two

Well, I've started my diet with a bit of a rocky road. As it turns out, last Monday I started my diet, and last Thursday at the last minute, my brother and SiL have invited us over for dinner to celebrate them selling their house. DH & I were careful in monitoring what we ate and at what volume, and I think we were pretty good about it, although it was hard to calculate our points on things like dessert, which we didn't have a lot of but we also didn't make, so I've no idea what went into it. So, I've a feeling that our points were thrown off a bit because of that. But, we also spent this past weekend at my parents-in-law's place, so the diet went thru a loop there. I like my inlaws a lot, but they tend to always try to feed me, so it was difficult to keep telling them that I'm on a diet and I can't have more food, and they kept trying to give me more food. Eesh.

As it turns out, DH lost about a pound this past week, but I gained two pounds. Go figure.

So, this week there should be no distractions. In fact, if I'm lucky, there should be no diet-distractions until Easter.

I did get my yarn last Friday, so I've started knitting my top for this summer's wedding. This is it so far. It's hard to tell from the picture, but it is a very dark blue. I'm using Cotlin yarn from knitpicks in the colour Plantation for this one. It's a really easy knit, and at the rate that I'm going, I should be able to finish this one plus a black one as well for the wedding. The top is called Vintage Love Summer Top (ravelry link & pattern) and is made from the top down. I can't wait to have it finished! Although I can't model it until I've lost the weight I need to; there's a good chance that I'll have this top done before the weight is lost. Nonetheless, it'll be a good distraction to keep my hands busy knitting instead of snacking, and it'll give me the motivation to stay on track with this diet so I can fit into it for August!

day one

DH & I have officially started Weight Watchers today on our own. We're both keeping track of what we eat in notebooks we picked up over the wknd, and charting out how many points we can both have.

When we weighed ourselves this morning, DH was a bit disappointed that his pre-breakfast weight dropped him down a point group! So, instead of him being able to have 24-29 points as he originally thought, he's down to 22-27 points. His weight this morning fit him in the new point category by just a pound.

I, on the other hand, am in the 30-35 point range. So, I've got a way to go to catch up to DH.

I've decided that the best approach to this diet, this time, is to create both immediate and short term goals. Immediate goals are for right now, to make the short term goals seem a bit more attainable. Long term goal of course is to get down to my ideal weight, which is going to be very far away, realistically.

So, my immediate goal is to lose 10 lbs, which isn't too far away and I think should be easily attainable within the short term. Short term (but not immediate) goal is to be small enough to fit into the top I mentioned yesterday. The yarn for that hasn't yet arrived, and my brother's wedding is 5 months away, so I've plenty of time to work on that.

Already 2 meals down - breakfast and lunch - keeping track of my points and water intake. I've just started but already I feel like progress is being made.

going on a diet...

Well, this summer (August) my brother's getting married. (yay!) I've decided that what I want to do is knit a top - or more specifically, knit 2 versions of the same top - to wear to the wedding. DH has been asked to be one of the groomsmen, and I've been designated as a greeter.

The problem is, I'm larger than the largest size available for the top I want to make, even though the largest size is a 3x. I am 3x sized, but that really varies from one brand to another. Bustwise, I'm actually 1.5" larger than what's asked for in the pattern. It wouldn't be difficult to just add a few stitches to accomodate my size, I've done that before. But what good would that be, really?

I've always been overweight, ever since I was little. My weight has never really been an issue for me, I've never been teased for being fat or anything like that. I was always fine with what size I was. Because I was never really one of those 'girly' kind of girls (obsessed with clothes, make up, etc) then fitting into little cute outfits was never much of a concern for me.

What made my weight an issue was when I started knitting for myself, and wanting to knit sweaters. Even though a lot of great patterns come in my size, buying enough yarn to make these largest sizes can get expensive, even if I go the more economical route.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to knit a sweater for myself and not have to buy more than 10 balls of yarn?!?

So, I've decided to put myself back on Weight Watchers, I've still got all of the points calculators and work books from when I last did it a few years ago, but didn't stick to it for too long. I've joined the weight watchers group on ravelry. My goal is to knit this top (ravelry link) twice, and I've ordered some knitpicks yarn in two colours.

The top two sizes are for a 48" bust and a 52" bust, and it looks like it's a negative ease top... so I want to fit in the 52" bust size comfortably. If I can get myself down to a 50" bust or so, that would be great. That's my goal for August.

DH wants to lose a little too, although he really doesn't need to lose a lot, but he's going to do WW with me for a bit. :) We'll officially start on Monday, which will give us plenty of time to lose the weight we want to for August!

I'll be (hopefully) blogging and knitting to help me keep on track with this diet. It'll motivate me to stay on track, get my projects done, and blog on a more regular basis!

new blog ... charity baby blankets!

Please check out my new blog that I just started yesterday. :)

Since DH & I are in the process of adopting, we've also taken in some foster kids. They often get into the system in an emergency situation, and with very little to start off in their new (albeit temporary) homes. I've gone into a bit more detail on the new blog about the whole situation, but the point is, smaller children (babies, toddlers) often not having their blankies with them. That's why I decided to contribute what I can, and I hope that fellow knitters and crocheters can help out and follow suit.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

a couple posts & articles worth reading

If anyone has chatted with me lately - and by lately, I mean the last year and a half or so - they very well know my opinion about the state of etsy and how poorly I think of what the site has become.

I had a shop on etsy for years - since they started, practically. I had one shop, initially, and then opened a new shop there.


At one point, @ least 60% of my sales came from alchemy requests (for sweaters, large projects, etc) and I easily earned a few hundred dollars every few months. Since alchemy closed down a couple years ago, I've lost that revenue.

Also with treasuries: Treasuries were limited to 333 at a time, and they expired after 2 or 3 days. This allowed for more obscure items to be featured, and being in one was a much more coveted spot. Nicer treasuries were being made, and a lot more handmade was being featured on the front page. This isn't happening any more, since treasuries have now changed.

Chat has closed down. So everyone who was using the chat room for help no longer gets help from fellow etsians. Also, many people had a few sales a month from the chat room, which was also lost. This was the last straw for a lot of people.

There isn't a week that goes by, it seems, where etsy isn't making DRASTIC and disfunctional changes. Not to mention all the resellers, wholesalers, manufactured goods from China, trademark & copyright violations and fake vintage that isn't being policed. This blog post details a few of the most recent changes, that happened after I left.

Etsy claims that it's because of a lack of staff and money, and yet there are many reports from reputable sources that state that etsy's revenues are in the millions of dollars.

If you still make handmade, or support handmade, please consider a move to zibbet. I don't work for the site, but I have moved my shop there over a year ago, and it was the best move I've ever made. There is a free account option, and the staff who run that site do a FANTASTIC job at customer service as well as supporting handmade. It is still a relatively new site so it does need a little extra promoting, but keep in mind that etsy was the same way in its early days.

A lot of this post has been inspired by this article published in business week magazine, originally linked via regretsy. It's amazing how etsy has managed to get on the nerves of so many handmade artists, and the site still fools itself in thinking that it can fool non-etsians that it is a supposed handmade site.

queue the owl cup cozies!

I think that out of all the (meager) patterns I've designed, the best and most popular one to date is my owl coffee cup cozie ... so far 393 made on ravelry and 921 in queue, to date.

For some reason, though, I've gotten mildly obsessed with checking out its queues more so than any other design I have. The highest number of queues in a day has peaked at 10, over the last 180 days (back in September) and peaked at 5 in the last month.

It's a given that this is a small project, and many have posted that it's a great, easy way to learn cables.

I would love to have another day of queues peak at 10, or even beat that record. I've no idea how to have that happen, but it would be stellar. Valentine's Day is a week away... I wonder if this would make a great gift for that occasion?

where things come from, and where things go...

I've had this on my mind for a while now, so I apologize in advance if this blog post seems a bit scattered.

I've been in etsy and zibbet for a while now, buying and selling and frequenting the chat rooms etc; there has consistantly been an issue of handmade vs wholesalers, supplies & "handmade" that come from China, etc that people have issue with.

And yet, disturbingly, their supplies all come from the very places they claim to loathe.

Then the holidays roll around. Not just the December holidays, but other gift giving events like birthdays or whatnot. There's the buying-from-big-box-stores issues, vs handmade. Big Box makes their revenues for that quarter, and yet handmade still stays in shop. Same sellers complain about how they dislike Big Box Store, and yet their supplies come from there. And, did they lead by example by avoiding Big Box and buy entirely handmade that season? Not likely.

But this is nothing new. It has been going on for years. One just musters and shrugs at it all and hopes that the next holiday is better than the last.

Then, though, I come across articles like this one in regretsy - not so much complaining about Big Chain X stealing the ideas of indie artists and not giving them the credit (at the very least) that they deserve, but then go off to make a ton of money off of it. All designers, all big name retailers do it.

Yes, it's irritating that they do it, but what's even worse is that people will buy it. And if not the item(s) in question, they will still buy from these big retailers, which is equally as bad, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.

I know that if there are any comments to this thread, there's bound to be a few that will say, "Well, there's a recession on, that's why we shop at Big Box Store." ... or ... "I don't like Company X's business practices, therefore I'm not one of the people you're venting about." (Meanwhile half of their closet is filled with Company X's things.)

The best excuse that I have heard in the past, and from fellow handmade online sellers, is "I'll buy once I have paypal money to buy it." Which means, if we're perfectly honest, it's not going to get bought. The comment may be well intentioned, but it's really something we've gotten into the routine of saying. 

We all know, both the person hearing (reading) it as much as the person uttering it, that it's really not true. For some reason, there are a lot of people who view 'paypal money' in these forea as money that's not really there, it's somehow 'extra' or 'invisible' money that's just floating out there in the interwebian universe. Supplies bought at Big Box X comes from our bank accounts. And yet supporting handmade only comes off of the bare minimum we make off of what we've made.

Here's been my thinking, when it comes to gift giving (for whichever occasion): I know I have 'x' number of dollars to spend per person. How much that is may vary from season to season or year to year, but I know ahead of time what that 'x' amount is. People's birthdays don't change from one year to the other, neither does Christmas. I can budget for those pretty accurately if I put in a fiber of effort into thinking ahead for the next month or so. The varying amount of 'x' doesn't solely rely on what's in my bank account, but ALSO what's in paypal and whatever other accounts I may have. Because, despite it all, what I have in my paypal is still not only money, but money I've earned, just like the money I have in the bank.

From there, I can budget what I can buy for whomever for whatever the holiday is. Naturally, I want to buy an appropriate gift for the recipient, because at the end of the day the gift really should be what they want more than what I want to give them. There's not much sense in gifting something to someone that's just going to collect dust in a shelf or turn into closet insulation. And yes, often their gifts wind up being Big Box Store items, or Company X gift cards etc. But, can I squeeze in a handmade gift here and there? It's always budgetable.

A lot of people in my family tease me for starting my Christmas shopping early. I'm one of those weird people who has my Christmas knitting done by June or July - why? Well, because wool has its best sales, I've found, in January thru June, so that's when I buy it to make whatever holiday knitting I'm going to make. I may as well have it knit while what I want to make is fresh in my head, and it gets put aside until December.

Plus, I've worked in retail for so long, that I refuse to go to the mall in December. I rarely go to stores and malls to begin with, so if I happen to be in a mall in September or October, and I pass by a store where I see a potential gift that I know someone will like come xmas, it gets bought then and there, assuming of course it fits into my budget to do so. That way two birds are killed with one stone so to speak: an xmas gift is out of the way, and it's one less item that's going to make its way onto my December credit card bill. It just makes sense, doesn't it?

The same goes if I see said gift on etsy or zibbet. I know it's handmade, I know I'm supporting the artist who made it, and if I see it before December - well, all the better, I don't have to worry about said package fighting the holiday rush of the postal service.

So, what's the point of this whole blog post? Well, to be honest, it's more of a vent than anything on my part. I suppose I'm mildly frustrated at the fruadulence of it all. Every dollar spent at Big Corporation X or Sweat Shop Country Y, is a dollar we're taking away not only from our own country, but a dollar that we're taking away from our own handmade artisans.

If you can afford to buy a birthday gift, or a holiday gift, you can afford to buy handmade. Whatever your gift-giving budget is for each holiday, try just for a year to spend at least a third of it on handmade, or better yet at least half. Invest in quality. It's always best to have less but have quality, than to have lots which isn't. Before your next shopping trip to Big Box Store or Trendy Company Brand Mall, research what you're buying into. We live in an internet age, it'll just take a few minutes, trust me, it'll be easy enough.

Whether we like it or not, what we financially support is who we morally support. Keep that in mind.

ah, the issues of copyrights & selling FO's...

So, I suppose this is more my venting than anything, but bear with me nonetheless.



I've a few patterns that I've designed, most of which are available for free but still my designs nonetheless, to which I specifiy that they're for personal use only and not for resale. This does mean, on my end, that I tend to search etsy, zibbet etc to see if that's actually happening, that there aren't people selling my designs.

On occasion, there will be someone selling an FO from one of my designs, and I politely let them know what's what and the item(s) are usually taken down with no issue. That's fine.

But, recently, I did find an item in question, wrote to the seller, and even though she did take it down, her defense to allowing it for sale was a) she designs patterns herself and doesn't care if people sell the FO's, and b) "It's not like you are selling on Etsy." (her words.)
 
REALLY? What difference does any of that make?
 
First of all, whether you allow people to sell finished items from your own designs (free or purchased) is your decision as a designer, since you hold the rights to that pattern. Each designer does. Just because you allow sales from your patterns doesn't mean all designers do.



Secondly, whether I have an active shop on a site or not, doesn't matter. If you don't have the right to distribute something, then you don't have the right to distribute it! A designer does not need to have an active store on every single selling site to enforce their policies on their designs.
 
If you wind up selling something made from someone else's design, and you honestly didn't believe you were doing something wrong, it's ok to admit that and just take the item down when the designer specifies it. But, to respond to a designer and not only admit that they've done something wrong, but to also try to justify it by suggesting they can do what they want because the designer doesn't sell there, well, that just doesn't hold water.
 
Anyway, vent over. Hopefully there's some clarity seen by this particular seller, and she'll rethink when trying to infringe on other people's original ideas.

A Knitter's Night Before Christmas

I thought I'd share this poem - titled A Knitter's Night Before Christmas, it's absolutely brilliant. :) Check it out and leave a comment, it's wonderfully written!

CT$ progress

I'm progressing nicely with my CT$ fundraising... just passing the $30 mark, and getting to $35 isn't going to be a problem I don't think by the 28th.

I've decided, with whatever extra CT$ I receive between now and then, I'm going to put it to some benificial use. There are a few charity possibilities to put it towards. I can donate excess $ towards Canadian Tire's collection already in store, for whatever it is that they collect money for. I also know a friend whose daughters were actively in Girl Guides growing up, and she still has friends who have daughters going through Guides, and some of these girls manage to go to camp (thanks to the generosity of their cookie sales, I suppose) but can't afford tents - so buying a tent at CT using the extra $ I get (plus of course paying the balance myself, no problem) and donating it to a girl who gets to go to camp would be awesome. Alternatively there's also shelters that always accept donations of whatever, so excess CT$ can purchase something that then can be donated there as well would come in handy too.

Anyway, there's an endless list of possibilities. I'm of course still collecting the CT$, for the google eyes previously mentioned 2 posts ago, so check that out. Alternatively, there's also my facebook fanpage for my shop: www.facebook.com/KnitsYoursKnotMine - check that out, there's a listing somewhere there, posted recently, for earrings available only through my fanpage in exchange for $5 in CT$ (1 pair) or $8 in CT$ (2 pairs).

On the condition, of course, that the CT$ is received before June 28th... and with Canada Post maybe or may not be on whatever strike they're on, who knows how much slower the mail will take, but let's hope for the best nonetheless.

ETA: Thanks to friends and ravelry purchases of google eyes, I was able to raise just under $42, so that's pretty cool! Thanks to everyone who has contributed!