The Sweatshop of Lovers Blog

A couple weeks ago I shared PT’s plans to move to NYC. Things have been moving pretty fast since then; he is packing up and driving east Friday already. It takes a ton of guts to quit a safe but unsatisfying job and pack up all your belongings to start new in a city you’ve never live in before, and I couldn’t be more proud of him. Despite how much I’m going to miss him.

But in the mean time we are doing all the fun things PT wants to do before he leaves the city. The PT Chicago Bucket List.

PT and ME

Biking around the lake in matching sun glasses.

Douche Lunch!

Faron Douche Lunch!

Eating Douche Lunch – where we go to a douchey bar and eat douchey food with douches!

PT Pizza

ME Pizza

Making our favorite foods, like these delicious pizzas. Mine is caramelized onion, corn, pineapple, artichoke heart, mozzarella and Parmesan. PT’s is all that plus bacon and olives.

And yes! I portioned. Because I can’t be a fatty and find a new boyfriend.

Left on the list? Just a lot more eating. Handlebar, Margies; all our favorite places. It will be a fun week! Then PT will be off to NYC and I will be holding down the fort, and probably unable to go out to eat ever again because of my new live-alone budget.

If you were moving, what would be on your bucket list specific to your city?

Designer Victoria Smith came up with a great way to discover new blogs and see what is inspiring people all over the blog world with Blog it Forward – a chain of blogs all talking about what inspires them as designers.

What is fun about being a knitter is you can find inspiration in so many different design areas. From fashion to textiles to home goods to yarn to necessity.

A Trip to KnitPicks.com

A Flip Through Vogue Knitting Magazine

Pretty Dresses, like Nadinoo's

Ravelry

Hot Ladies Rocking DIY

Pretty Much Anything Zooey Deschanel Does

Yarn and pretty dresses. That is Allyson in a nutshell. And I’m cool with it. What inspires you?

And please zip on over to The Sweetest Occasion tomorrow to see what inspires her.

Thanks to everyone who entered my Red Gold Tomatoes Giveaway! Y’all really wanted that huge can of goodies! It was really fun reading all your silly comments here, and on facebook and twitter.

I’m happy to say the winners are:

Lynn at The Actor’s Diet

Becca at The Nutmeg Knitter

How fitting it is that a food blog writer AND a knitter win!

Thanks again to everyone who entered and I look forward to giving out more huge cans of stuff soon!

Huge Can of Tomato-y Goodness

Make sure you zip over here and enter to win this huge can of tomato-y goodness from Red Gold Tomatoes! I’m picking both winners tonight and will announce them tomorrow.

When I got back from my brother’s wedding this weekend I was greeted by this:

Very Large Can of Tomatoes

I should have put a cat next to this can to show you how big it is. It’s the size of one of those holiday popcorn tins. LARGE!

And it was full of this:

Lots of Loot!

Two recipe books, a tin truck (that my brother’s baby is going to love!), two magnets, a soup recipe fold out, a coaster, a refrigerator clip magnet, and a media kit CD about how Red Gold Tomatoes are all grown in the Midwest and started as a family owned business.

Tomatoes!

And, of course, some regular sized cans of tomatoes.

Veggie Pasta!

Right away I whipped up a version of my Veggie Pasta Recipe with the Basil, Oregano, Garlic Red Gold Tomatoes, and it was seriously excellent. I didn’t even season the pasta sauce! It was all in the tomatoes already.

My only complaint, if I get to complain about any aspect of a huge tomato can of free goodies, is  with the recipe book. While all the recipes look very easy and use few ingredients and look like they come together very fast and are all pretty healthy, there are only a few vegetarian options. I will be changing them up to make them vegetarian friendly in the future, for sure, but I’d like to give that heads up!

And so, without further ado, the kind people at Red Gold Tomatoes have TWO of these gift cans to give out to my readers! Holla!

Leave a comment to enter! Tweet this giveaway, citing @sweatshopoflove in your tweet, for another entry.

That huge tomato can is already full of yarn, safe away from my kitties, and my tea cup is resting on a tomato coaster right now! And yours can, too. You’ve got until the evening of Sunday, March 14th to enter. I’ll announce the winners Monday morning!

Good luck!

I mentioned before that my brother Adam and his girlfriend Emily were having a baby. I knit the DinoSweater for Nolan, who is due in June.

Well they decided last week to get married today! So I’m jetting off to Michigan to be there. And by jetting I mean renting a car and driving.

While I’m on the topic of relationships, PT is moving to New York City at the end of the month for work, which spells disaster for our relationship.

If someone told me a year ago that I would be sitting here writing a blog about how PT and I broke up and my brother is getting married/having a child, I would have lost my shit. I really hope that I can look back at this a year from now much happier than I am at this moment.

I keep thinking about the story that Ethan Hawk tells in Before Sunset or Before Sunrise, one of them, about the happy people who win the lottery or are paralyzed. After that initial shock they go back to being happy people; either happy in a wheel chair or happy with millions of dollars. And angry people who win the lottery or are paralyzed go back to being angry once they get over the change, too.

I know I’m a happy person. I’m a happy person who has just been getting kicked in the face a lot lately.

I’m rolling with it pretty well, I think, since that is the only option. I’m going to put on a pretty dress and watch my brother get married and drive back to Chicago and teach some knitting Sunday morning. And then that would have happened.

I can’t wait for baseball season to start.

I get comments all the time from students and friends about the frequency of my blog posts. I usually just shrug and giggle and say that it’s part of my job! I know some people struggle with keeping up with their blogs and ask me how I do it.

Here are 10 tricks I use to keep blogging:

1. LOVE What You are Writing About

I love knitting. I love teaching knitting. I love writing patterns and planning classes and talking to other people who love knitting. It is easy for me to sit down every day and write about something I love so much. But if you aren’t passionate about your blog theme you won’t keep up with it. Find something to write about that you love and that permeates your every day life.

2. Take Pictures

When I have pictures on my camera I instantly have blog posts. Write about your pictures! I take pictures of my projects, my food, my kitties. Pictures are great catalysts for writing.

3. Read More

Other blogs, books, magazines, news online. People are always saying ridiculous things, taking ridiculous studies, publishing ridiculous books, wearing ridiculous things; all of which can be turned into fun blog posts. Like my Jersey Shore post, and my Ode to  Joseph Gordon Levitt.

4. Don’t Write Yourself Out

I have an unhealthy love for Ernest Hemingway and would do absolutely anything he told me to do. One of this biggest writing techniques was to not write himself out. Always stop writing knowing what happens next. This helps motivate you to both make time to write again soon and to think about your writing when you aren’t writing. It’s easy to translate this tip into the knitting world – I try to make my project posts extend over the course of many blog posts. I knit more and write about that project again.

5. Sit and Do It

I went to school for writing and had to do a ton of it for multiple writing classes. I would think I had absolutely nothing to write about until I made myself sit down in front of my computer and start typing. Sometimes I would type nonsense until words formed, then sentences, and before I knew it I’d have fully flushed out stories. Some days I sit down with a blank blog page in front of me with no idea where it’s going, but I start typing anyway and usually funny, publishable nonsense comes out. Win!

6. Take Risks and Do Things

I’m not a naturally just-do-it kind of person. I have to force myself to leave my house, to do things, to take risks, and find people to play with. I do it because it’s good for my life and good for my blog. If you don’t do anything you won’t have anything to write about! If you don’t do anything you won’t have anything to talk about with strangers and you will be boring. I run around acting crazy to make my life better and make my blog better.

7. Carry a Notebook/Keep a Google Doc Open

This is another left over writing school tip. Sometimes sentences just pop into my head that can be turned into great blog posts when I have a chance. I keep a Google Doc at the ready for these sentences and blog ideas so that when I have time to come back to that idea I don’t have to rack my brain trying to remember it. In writing school we called this a ‘notebook’. The idea was to carry said ‘notebook’ around with you, along with a ‘pen’ so you can write these ideas or observances into the ‘notebook’ and look back on them later. You know, like a Google Doc!

8. Establish Relationships with Your Readers

I like you guys. I like talking to you! I like your comments. I get sad when blogs I like don’t update. Like Eat Me Daily. What the hell, Eat Me Daily? I like to think that we have a pretty good thing here. I would hate to let you down. I like being a part of your life! We’ve got a good thing going! Holla!

I make it sound pretty easy, don’t I? Because it is for me. And when it isn’t easy I come back to these tricks.

No need to go get that writing degree now! I just saved you $100,000.

Every woman, at some point in her life, should take a pair of scissors to her own head.

I Start at the Top

I’ve never gotten my hair professionally cut. I went from having my mom cut my hair to just doing it myself.

How's it Looking Back There?

I use to have really long, curly hair. Three summers ago I just cut it all off myself. It was one of the most liberating things I’ve ever done. I wasn’t hiding behind my hair anymore. I couldn’t hide behind anything! It was just me and my face.

Oh God.

It is terrifying, though, every time I do it. My brain is saying, ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!’ But I keep telling myself, ‘It’s just hair! Nothing bad can happen!’

CLEAN!

When I’m done cutting it always looks terrible. It’s greasy from touching it so much and flat and I feel like I look like a boy. I think about how people won’t be able to tell that I’m a girl.

Short and Cute

And then it dries.

Real Cute.

And I look like a girl.

Right?

A cute girl. Who didn’t just spend $60 on a hair cut. Who just balls-ed out on her OWN HAIR! Crazy/scary/amazing/stupid/kinda hot.

You know when someone asks you how you are and you answer, ‘Imgoodhowareyou?’ without thinking? Because it’s annoying when you ask a stranger how they are, just to be polite, and they give you a long list of things wrong with them.

But you know when someone asks you how you are and you stop to think about it awkwardly without meaning to?

How am I? God. I’m… well, I’m… Things could for sure be better.

It’s a hard balance to strike here between knitting and me. Most of you are reading this for the knitting. But I’m knitting the knitting, but that doesn’t necessarily give me license to talk willy nilly about the nuances of my life.

Papa's Obit

I have been pretty business oriented lately. It’s been easy, what with the launch of the knit kits and all my classes and the crazy amount of knitting I’ve been doing these last few weeks. I haven’t been searching for things to write about.

But how am I?

See? I was doing good before this. I was spelling words wrong on purpose for effect (MAD SKILLZ! HOTT!) and talking to y’all with a fake southern accent for person-ability’s sake.

But I kind of just want to be laying down on the floor most of the time. I didn’t really want to watch the Super Bowl. My last conversation with my grandpa was calling the winner (we both said Saints) and hoping it would be a good game (which it was). He would have loved that game. High scoring and lots of crazy plays.

I’ve been wanting to talk to him about it since it ended. It’s the first big football game we haven’t talked about since I started really liking football. Eight years?

And here I am, crying and crying and typing and crying.

I’m sad. But when your whole body focuses on one feeling it kinda clears the way for clearer focus other places, too. But then you don’t really have energy to do anything about how you just figured out you need to cut some people out of your life, or rearrange your closet to make it easier to find the clothes you wear all the time instead of needing to dig around the clothes you wish you would wear all the time to get to them.

Or how all you really want is to be taken away by a stranger who doesn’t know about how sad you are. Somewhere you would never go, like Cancun. With just a bikini, huge sunglasses, and a big hat. And your knitting bag.

Thank you all for entering my Madison Cowl and Hand Warmers kit giveaway! I say this every time I have a giveaway, but this was our biggest response yet!

The winner of the Madison Cowl Knit Kit is Katie! Who said: “Red, Gray, Blue ahhh decisions, I LOVE them ALL!! I think red is my favorite. The cowl would go wonderfully with my black coats!!!”

And the winner of the Madison Hand Warmers Knit Kit is Beth! Who said: “Happy Blogversary! It is one of my favs and I already have it in my RSS google reader. I like the hand warmers, my self.”

I’ll be emailing both of you right now to get your info.

Thanks again to all who entered and stay tuned for more fun Madison Knitting Kit info soon!