Ask and Ye Shall Receive

Apparently all it takes is a little bit of kvetching on my part and some of you decide to come out of the woodwork. Hello, new readers! (or perhaps you're old lurkers?) I know there are more of you out there, however.

How do I know, with such certainty? Because I've been playing with my new toy, Google Analytics. J directed me to it when I commented to him that I was curious how people were getting to my blog (I didn't mention the bit about no one commenting and wondering if anyone was actually visiting the site, but that was part of it). I keep reading on blogs that people have found that visitors have come to their site as part of a random Google search, usually some really bizarre phrase. Well, my new toy doesn't tell me that, but it does give me a report of how many people are visiting the site and breaks down that number into how many are new and how many are returning visitors, gives details on how vistors are getting to the site (for instance, from Google, the Sockret Pal blog, or Jen's blog), etc. My favorite is the info it gathers on where visitors are geographically. One report shows a map of the world with pinpoints for where visitors are, and another lists number of visitors by country. As I would expect, most of my readers/visitors/webstalkers are from the United States, but there are a handful from Canada as well. Most surprising? The visitors from Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and Kuwait. (Do people knit in Kuwait? I thought it was pretty hot there.) Fascinating! I hope that if you're one of these international visitors you'll leave a comment and share some international knitting content!

And to get back to my own knitting content, great progress was made on Lady E last night. To refresh you memory, here are the progress shots:

After two skeins ...

and after four skeins ...

And now here we are back to present day, most of the way through the seventh skein. You see on the right what will be the eight and final skein. You ever have that experience where you're knitting and knitting on something and you don't seem to be getting anywhere, and then all of the sudden the thing is huge? That seems to be what happened here. I kept measuring it and it never seemed to get any longer than about 26 inches -- and then suddenly last night it was something like 54". I figure that once I finish this skein and use up the last one, it should measure in the mid-60s, and a good blocking might get it to close to the 70-72 inches I'd like it to be. That will leave me with four untouched skeins and I'll have to come up with something interesting to do with them. A large French Market Bag to hold WIPs? A felted pillow for the couch? Slippers? Share your ideas -- I'm sure you've got some.

J is finally home now after being stuck in Chicago this afternoon. I've finished the ribbing on his second sock, so it's all smooth sailing from here (aside from the fact, of course, that I won't be able to work on them this weekend while he's around). Maybe I'll even get in a second pair of socks for him in the next two weeks!

Lady E calls ...