Savannahchik Knits is asking for knitting tips. Quite a few really great tips have been submitted. I need to try this Russian join that everyone’s talking about. It’s turning up in more places than polonium-210! (That’s a little KGB joke for ya there.) And of course there’s this great money-saving tip:

I own many dangly beaded stitch markers that are fun to use and almost can be considered knitting ‘jewlery’. However, I have found that when I’m lace knitting my yarn seems to catch on everything: row counters, stitch markers etc. So to help with that problem I tie little markers made from scraps of sock yarn or lace yarn. My yarn doesn’t catch on them and if one slips off the needles it doesn’t fall into the couch cushion – it sticks to the knitting. No more looking for dropped stitch markers.

This blog has taken quite a charitable bent, and yet I still haven’t posted a picture of my last hat donation. You know how it is in an arctic country! The turn-crank on my camera is frozen. I’ve put it in the refridgerator to heat it up a bit, so hopefully the crank will be thawed by next week when we get our monthly day of sun.

This morning I found a blog post on 10 Creative Ways To Help Charities For No Money. (I wonder if he’ll donate part of his Google Ad revenue this week; he’s sure to get lots of hits this time of year!) I’ve come across quite a few ways that are easy, and I want to share them with you. I’ll start with the knitting content first!

• There’s a neat option on eBay where you can donate anywhere from 10-100% of your profits on an auction to charity. It’s called Giving Works, and I think I’m going to try it out. I’m a huge pack rat, so I’m going to try to get rid of some things and donate the profits to a cancer or parkinson’s foundation. And here’s where the ingenuity comes in; I’m going to auction off knits! Only super chunky ones, so I can finish them in 2 hours and get a whole batch done in a week or so. Then off to the auction house, sold maybe for $10-15 a pop, and hopefully at the end of it all I’ll have a few hundred dollars to donate. I’m kinda excited about this. What do you guys think?
• From now on I’m using GoodTree instead of Google for all my searching. For every search you make, a little bit of money is donated to the charities you specify (you can set your charity selection on the homepage). And it leverages Google, which means that you won’t lose any of your favourite Google functions by using GoodTree instead. For Firefox users, you can even add a GoodTree engine to your search bar.
• I don’t shop for groceries very often (maybe once every two weeks), but when I do, I’ll be paying more attention to cheap items that I may not be so interested in, but are a great price. I’ve signed up for email promotions at my local grocery stores (no frills, A&P, and Food Basics), and every time I go shopping I’ll check their flyer for hot dealz. One of my housemates set up a food bank box yesterday (we had a Christmas party and people actually brought donations!) so every time I shop I’m going to put at least two things in the box. My only fear is not being able to carry everything home with all those extra cans in my bag…
• Charity Click Donations simply require you to click a button so it can display ads at you (and of course the ad revenue goes to charity). There’s a bulk donation site that can handle a few of these sites at a time. You can set one of those pages as your homepage and every time you open your web browser you’ll have donated a little something to someone who needs it. My “homepage” is actually a set of sites that open up in individual tabs; if you don’t want to see that page every time you open your browser (and you have tab functionality) you can set it as a second or third tab and then you only need to see it when you want to. (I suggest you look at each ad at least once; some ads actually record whether they have been displayed or not, so if you don’t display them, the charities don’t get any money.)

If I can manage it, my next post will contain a picture of the hat, as well as a final list of all the entrants to the pretty in pink contest. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about it! I’ll be drawing the names within the next week or so. Grad school applications are due in ten days! Eek!

I’ve been using eBay for a few years now, and it’s really great for finding things like yarn, antiques, patterns, etc. Lately I’ve been looking for a Playstation 2 (I’m addicted to [[Dance Dance Revolution]] and I can’t just go over to my friend’s house every day and steal her TV for an hour), and sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it to watch all these auctions because they all top out at $110, and at that price I might as well buy it new. But I’ve found a trick, and I want to share it.

Misspelled Auctions and Fat Fingers are both websites that search for common misspellings of words on eBay. For example, using these sites I’ve discovered that lots of people apparently think it’s spelled “Playstaion.” Because less people are going to find those auctions (because unlike Google, eBay only finds the exact word you’re searching for) those auctions are less popular and tend to go for a lower price. And I get a “Playstaion 2″ for $80! Now, whenever I want to buy something I search on eBay and then back that up with a misspelling search. I’ve also got misspellings for “Herc’s Adventures” running as a favourite search, so whenever a correct or misspelling is posted, I’m notified immediately via email.

Here’s another tip I found while searching for eBay hacks: Lastminute Auction is a search engine for cheap, last minute deals. It confines your search to auctions ending within the hour, and under a buck. I’ve seen some really neat knitting patterns show up on this site.

So I was walking along, minding my own business today when I ran into a housemate of a friend of mine and inadvertently convinced her to give me a pink cotton/angora sweater for me to tear apart for yarn. She was headed off to the Value Village later this afternoon and I asked her if she had any sweaters, and voilà! Jackpot!

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MY LOVELIES! I have missed you. This past weekend we had our annual homecoming celebrations here at Queen’s University, and this time we managed to avoid flipping over a car in our excitement. I spent the weekend eating pancakes, drinking Glenlivet and socializing, which prevented me from knitting, blogging and studying. Fortunately, I managed to do lots of things this morning that I can now tell you about.

1. I found this delectable rustic scarf pattern done in basket and seed stitch. I have a weakness for seed stitch, as well as a weakness for items that don’t require blocking, so this scarf is les genoux de l’abeille (the bee’s knees).
2. I finally bought those 9 skeins of Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca & Silk for my mom’s sweater. I was hesitating for a while, acting the penny-pincher and trying to find a sale, and my procrastination actually worked this time! I managed to find a store that charges $9 instead of $11 per ball, offers 10% if you sign up for their newsletter and free shipping over $75, which means that it cost me $72.90 for the alpaca & silk. A $4 ball of Plymouth Suri Yarn (55% Suri Alpaca / 45% Extrafine Merino) put me over the $75 threshold, which means I saved at least $40 in total. Yay! This is going to be the best sweater ever.
3. I’ve been working on a little somethin’ somethin’ that I’ll finally get to talking about today or tomorrow, as soon as I finalize all the details. I’m really really excited about it! Keep your Bloglines pointed to this blog for future details.

I’m keeping this as a list for myself and I figured some other Canadian folks could use this list, too. Here is a list of online knitting retailers that ship to Canada (as well as their Canadian shipping prices in US dollars).

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Here’s another idea along the destashing/restashing via Flickr line: Check out all the Flickr photos tagged with “destash”. A surefire way to find destashing items that may or may not post to a central pool.

Destash & Restash is a Flickr group that lets you advertise your yarn and sell it as well as buy yarn from other folks. It’s not really the “rock bottom prices” you’d expect, though; pretty much average. (Unless the prices include shipping, and in that case I’m in!)

Another blog that’s been around for a little longer is DeStash, and it has the same premise. It’s a little more established, so there are wider yarn possibilities. It’s worth it to keep track of both of them.

There are piles of tutorials out there that teach you how to make your own knitting needles, but they’re all for straights and I prefer circulars or DPNs. It’s simple enough to make DPNs (sharpen dowelling on both sides, sand), but I wasn’t sure how to go about making circs. Well, now we have this: A DIY circular knitting needle tutorial!

Lord, bless the internet for it is good.