Yeah! I got everything to work on an external server as well, as you can see from the URL. Phew, so many things I had to do all over again and half of the time I was clueless. The biggest hurdle was the picture gallery on the sidebar. The practice was quite different from the theory, but now I am ready to launch the site.
I still have most pages with information on the knitting course set on invisible. Those I saved for a real launch to which I will attach a celebratory moment including a bite and beverage.
In the meantime I also worked on advertizing the site apart from facebook. This will be my business card / flyer:
Ordered with that company that also advertizes on TV: “250 business cards for € 3.98!”. Right! Then the mailing costs another € 7.- and if you upload your own image the price doubles as well. You can see how I messed the picture up a at the bottom, because I didn’t get the dimensions right, but I figured no one would notice once they are printed at that small size of business cards.
Finally I got around making the header for the site I am building. After walking around with this idea in my head for weeks, it turned out the way I hoped it would. It is an existing font called KG Always a Good time, found on the 1001 fonts website. After first printing “breien in oost”, I traced the outlines of the letters with a marker, then changed some details that I didn’t like and filled the outlines with a ”yarn-structure”. Next I scanned the drawing and spent an impressive amount of hours colouring the yarn structure inside the letters, almost pixel by pixel.
I had hoped that I would be able to use the same font for all other headings on my site, but the fonts that can be used on WordPress are limited to another font source only. Well, I also spent impressive amounts of time searching all the available WordPress themes, to see what they can do and what not. More can be done when you pay for an upgrade, but I don’t think upgrading will allow me to use the font of my choice. And I prefer to create the whole thing without spending money anyway.
New theme
The theme I used before – Vostok – was and still is very pretty, but its navigation possibilities are limited and it doesn’t have features like a sidebar or multiple columns. So I switched to this theme called Visual. I like the way it presents the blog posts and the menu shows very clearly . Unfortunately I had adjusted the colors in the logo to the Vostok theme and had to adjust some of the colors again. The next challenge will be my attempt to make the site bi-lingual, Dutch and English. And I will have to move the web site to a self-hosted place so that the domain name will be breieninoost.nl. Apart from that I am done with the design and I hope to focus on content soon. It will be about knitting (and some crochet as well)!
The book I referred to earlier – Useful handicraft – arrived in the mail and so did the scanner. Now I am able to show some of the stuff I have been taught as a little girl. The 10th edition copy I got is from 1965 and the year I learned knitting must have been 1968. The book only addresses girls, and the teacher was obviously female as well. While we were doing needlework, the boys were taught how to play chess!
There was no such thing as You Tube in those days, so this is how the teacher was supposed to teach us:
Casting on
We will start now with learning how to cast on. The teacher has two thick wooden needles and very thick wool. Each girl has a ball of cotton plus two needles. For the time being we don’t need needles, as the children first need to properly master how to wrap the thread around their fingers. The teacher first demonstrates a few times and then lets the girls go along as follows:
Measure a length of yarn and hold this point between thumb and index finger of the right hand.
Put he index finger of the left hand under the thread, which is on the side of the ball of yarn, put middle finger and ring finger on top and the pink under again.
The thread that we are still holding in our right hand, should be wrapped around our thumb and then we place it between ring finger and pink, over the pink. We keep our hand slightly bent, the loops on thumb and index finger over the first phalanx, thumb and index finger almost together.
First Projects
Are you still there? No wonder so many of the girls developed a dislike of knitting. The projects we embarked on weren’t all that exciting either. In my memory my first product was an egg warmer – a little hat to keep you egg warm !!
The book’s first project is this must-have needle booklet:
And here below the notorious doll’s dress. I asked my teacher if I was allowed to adjust the measurements as this one wouldn’t fit any of my dolls: not the Barbie nor the baby doll. But she wouldn’t hear of it. So it got buried in my little suitcase with useless projects.
The YouTube way
For an easier way to learn knitting -besides following a course or workshop – here are a few really easy-to-follow instruction videos by Twirre, owner of crafts storeHandmade Heavenin Amsterdam-East. It is all in Dutch but the images are self-explanatory.
And here are the links to the next three classes. Besides binding off these are all the basic techniques you need, everything else is just different combinations of these four.
In case you are thinking that I am just wasting my time browsing the internet, no, this is all about practicing how to insert images and link them properly. But what a marvelous website I ventured into this time! The patters are $ 3.00 each and the proceeds are for abused,homeless, & high-kill (huh?) shelter animals. Ah, well..
Most of them are for free when you don’t use them commercially and it is really easy to download and install them.
You can search with great tags such as: chunky, vintage, 1970s, art deco, and on and on. T0he categories are endless.
What is even more exciting is the possibility to upload your own font. I want to make a font of my own handwriting! I haven’t tried yet how easy or difficult that is, first need a scanner probably. I ordered one, it is supposed to arrive soon.
Today I got distracted when searching for the type of cotton yarn they gave to us in school back when I was first learning. I was wondering if there are still stores that sell yarn that is not very cool, 100 % natural, utterly beautiful but extremely expensive?
Yes, there are. I found a beautiful small shop, family owned since 1891 – 122 years. They have a webshop, where they are selling Durable cotton in every imaginable colour at € 2.60 for 50 grams only !
Day 2: I learned about the content of the kitchen sink button which enabled me to insert headings. I learned that I shouldn’t just copy and paste from Word, very important! And I learned how to link the posts to facebook, which I did to a small group of friends. I hope you appreciate this. The blog itself is public now, no need to restrict access, but until the self-hosted site goes live, no need for wider sharing yet.
Hip
Knitting is hip again! Wool and knitting stores are popping up across Amsterdam. Norwegian designers are creating home-knitted christmas decorations, knitting artists are wrapping lamp-posts in colorful knitted fabrics, throughout the country knitting cafes are abounding and on the internet you can get literally get lost in knitting blogs:
Knitting is okay! You can make your own clothing without involving underpaid textile workers locked in factories that are a fire hazard. It is sustainable due to the quality of self-made clothes, which is far superior to the stuff you buy at shops like H&M for a few Euros. Knitting yarn can be re-used, you can make fun things out of leftovers. And if you use natural materials from an ecological source you can’t get any greener!
As you know – or don’t know – I am going to develop a knitting course, to be given this fall in the East part of Amsterdam and I created this blog to practice making the website for this course: breieninoost.nl
This post is my very first attempt to publish something on-line. I am going through the WordPress instruction video, but am a little impatient and want to see results!
I think I also prefer learning by trial & error instead of going through all the instructions. I guess it will have to be a combination of both..
While I practice, I will keep a record of my experiences in this blog – until the real website goes live. There are a lot of new things to learn. I have made a start with collecting materials for my site:
images of self-made knitted materials
other types of illustrations
text for the site, in English and in Dutch
links to woolshops, other knitting courses and social knitting media
One illustration sample:
Useful handicrafts
This was the book that teachers used for handcrafts classes in primary school: “Useful Handicrafts”. Although I went to school in the sixties, the style and content of teaching was totally fifties – very old-fashioned. I found and ordered a copy of this book on internet and can’t wait to hear it drop in my mailbox! It will bring back memories of dropped stitches, sweaty needles and a mean teacher.
