The 2010 Winter Olympics are coming to Vancouver, and I’m stoked!

1 - I have auditioned for the Opening Ceremonies as a hoop dancer, and blogged about it over on my hoop site.

2 - Lauren, aka Lolly, and her husband will be staying with us! I read her post on Ravelry asking about Vancouver accommodations (since all of the hotels have been completely booked by the organizers already), so I did a bit of research to find out what the city bylaws said regarding part-time B&B status.. and it turns out that they’ve recently been amended to allow people like us to rent out one room to a maximum of two people during the Olympics. Woot! There are more knitters in the 2010 Olympics group on Ravelry looking for places to stay, so if you’re in the greater Vancouver area and have a suitable space, go get connected!

3 - Dale of Norway has apparently gotten the go-ahead to do an official sweater design for the 2010 event. I’m not sure if I’m likely to knit their design, but it will definitely be inspiration for the stranded colourwork sweater I AM planning to get done for this winter!

In non-Olympic knitting land, I’m planning to take my microphone to work with me today, so I can finish recording Episode 9 of Christa Knits inbetween classes.

I have also completed my Laminaria-inspired top, and am in the final stages of finishing a ponchette for summer, knit in the indigo-dyed slubby silk I brought back from Japan last summer. Pics of that to come, but here’s the Laminiaria top:

Thanks to Francesca of Three Bags Full for taking the photo. I was modelling a shawl knit in Indigo Moon’s yummy laceweight silk, and I’ve never felt so glamourous!

Click on the Laminaria tag below to see all of my posts on this project!

Download and listen to Episode 8 now.

“Juggling” is the first episode I’ve produced since June 2007, and it is all C’s fault! (okay, not quite… )

In this episode:

Patterns:
(all links lead to Ravelry)
Adult Surprise Jacket
Baby Surprise Jacket
Shalom
Veronique
Cambie

Other mentions:
Three Bags Full blog
Habu
Stitch Cooperative (sorry for the name botch while I was recording!)

2009 Year of Goals participants:
Candi (rav) (website)

Elizabeth (rav) (website)

Jenna (rav) (website)

Eleanor (rav) (website)

Leave a comment here, or join the discussion in the Christa Knits group on Ravelry!

I had forgotten the joy, the wonderfulness, the excitement….

Maybe you know it: when you sit down to record your podcast, get all the settings right, have notes at hand, sip some water, and then hit the little red button and start talking? And then, after a great stream-of-conciousness flow of verbal glory for 30 minutes or so, you stop recording, hit the save button… and it crashes?

Yeah, that joy

That was last night, around 8:30pm. Another half hour, and I had located the temporary files Audacity had saved during recording, downloaded a crash recovery program (didn’t work), updated to the beta version of Audacity (with auto-recover), finished cursing, and was back at it.

After another 10 minutes of fiddling with the settings, I resumed recording, stopped and saved often, and got the job done.

Tuesdays are my day of admin work: I have 4.5 hours between knitting classes, and if I take my laptop with me, I can park myself in a nearby cafe (with free Internet, woot!) and work uninterrupted for most of that time.

On today’s work list: edit the audio, get it uploaded to Libsyn (my host, who pushes it out to iTunes and everywhere else), post it on here and Ravelry, and then switch gears and do some work on my next submission - involves steeking a bit of knitting that didn’t work in its current location but will be the glorious base of my next design, teaching myself to crochet bobbles, and getting a start on the writing for the package.

If I still have time after all that, then I’ll do some more website tweaking.. but since Wednesdays are also a major day of work-at-home time, it won’t be a big deal if I don’t get there.