Saturday, August 18, 2012

The Internet is a Powerful Tool

Hello, everyone...what a fun knitting week this has been!  Quite honestly, it's been a fun week in general.  I mean, I started the week by winning seven bucks in that $352 million PowerBall lottery.  Might not sound like a big deal, but dang if I could not win most of my money back from the tickets and feel awesome about it at six in the morning.  Free Chinese food!

So then, on Tuesday I decided to finally do my multi-week Knit Tips Tuesday I have been dreaming of doing.  I am not a sock-knitter, as all of you know...I mean, I DID complete one sock.  The thing is that a lot of my readers ARE sock-knitters, and another large handful of them WANT to be sock-knitters.  I thought it would be fun to break down sock-knitting for the timid, the meek, and the ADHD who need to compartmentalize.  I wrote an article for examiner.com about the components of a sock, and then stated that the following week, we would be starting a tutorial knit-along.

Here is the article:

http://www.examiner.com/article/knit-tips-tuesday-all-about-socks-part-1?cid=db_articles

I posted the article on Ravelry, Twitter, and Facebook as always, and then something truly interesting happened.  I was scrolling through my feed on facebook when I ran across the following post on Knitty.com's profile:

http://knittyblog.com/2012/08/never-knit-a-sock-join-the-sunday-swing-along/

Big deal, right?  Only that the editor of the premiere online knitting magazine got wind of what I was doing, with a pattern that appeared on her website, and told everybody about it.  So my number of subscribers literally doubled overnight.  Oh, and 1,100 clicks later, I'm making money on examiner.com this month.

I usually hit that threshold on about the 26th of the month or so.  To hit it before the month is half over, well, to me it's a bit of a big deal.

Well, then I went into panic mode and realized...sheesh...that now I had to knit a pair of socks!  The good news is that my plan was to make it a five-week tutorial, so I don't have to finish it by Tuesday.  I did, however, start it.  The pattern I'm using is the Sunday Swing from Knitty.com's summer 2009 issue.  I bought a skein of Lorna's Laces Solemate during the Chicago Yarn Crawl at one of my favorite yarn stores, Windy Knitty.  It's just fabulous, no two bones about it.

Ooh, AND...now that I'm an expert (meaning, I've done it more than once) at making a slideshow on examiner.com, I will be putting together a slideshow every week so readers can see what the heck I'm doing.  I am holding this big fat hunch that at the end of a month, I will be seeing photos of a bunch of knitters' finished Sunday Swing socks...sweet!

Hopefully, mine will be one of them.  Here is proof that I have casted on and am all set to indulge in this gorgeous stuff:


Oh, Lorna's Laces, how I love thee.  Also, thank you for your support, Ms. Singer!

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