Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Hello Visitors!




Hi everybody! I've been having a constant thrill lately. I subscribe to Statcounter, which keeps track of visitors to your blog. I look at it occasionally, when I'm feeling lonley and unloved. The 50 or so daily visitors always cheer me even if they don't comment, its nice to "meet"them here. I can click a line which displays the national flags of all my visitors, and a map view with little exclamation points to mark their spot on the globe.
Last week, all of a sudden there were 156 visitors before breakfast. I felt like the White Queen (who has imagined as many as 6 impossible things before breakfast). What it was: my favorite Craft site, the ultra-groovy WhipUp mentioned my Knitted Olive Tutorial! I was honored and bursting with pride. Wait Wait! It gets even better. I mentioned my Gruesome Knitted Eyeballs for Halloween in the "what are you making forum" and a little later, on Halloween they included my eyeball photograph and the link.

The snowball effect ensued: the cool Craftzine Blog pictured the eyeballs, some place in France has a link, Rachels Kniting Room, a yahoo group mentioned the olives and the eyeballs The place that hands down, brings the most visitors is Knitting Pattern Central, thousands of people know about this great place, patterns for everything, and all the links. To think I'd been missing this amazing resource! Knitters Review listed my Little Arrowhead Lace Scarf pattern. The latest place to list the eyeballs, which will make lovely cat-toys and stocking-stuffers by the way, is in Sweden! Hej då!

And a big thank you to everyone who links to me too! I'm kind of slow and disorganized in my linking, but if you email me I'll be sure and include you eventually! I hope to alphabetize them too...but that may prove to be too much for this Luddite.

The map above shows where some of my visitors hale from; the more exotic ones (to me, not to them) are Kazakhstan, Iran, Brunei, Slovenia, Guam (but I know who that is!) Venezuela, South Africa, Tasmania, not to mention the great place names in the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But then I'm one of those people who likes to read the Zip Code book.




Since most of my readers are knitters, here's a glimpse of how to make a knitted hat into a tam! I wash the old thing, (this is one of my first, using genius-math-wiz-kaleidoscope-loving, Mary Rowe's wonderful Knitted Tams Book). I block the fuzzy thing on a 9" Russel Wright Iroquois dinner plate in Ice Blue. If I want a 10" circumference I use one of his Steubenville plates, Bean Brown is my favorite, but it broke, so I use Cedar Green.

Thanks for stopping by!

create your own visited countries map

14 comments:

Daniel Yuhas said...

Hi Mary Jane! I'm totally addicted to my sitemeter, too... I posted my knitted squid on whipup and had the same thing happen, tho not to such instant fame! I use it to keep tabs on my out of state family, too... and thanks for your awesome eyeball tutorial - I'm using what you taught me to knit a grub for my god-son for xmas!

Eliza said...

oh! congrats on all that publicity! That is wonderful!

I just changed over to statcounter and I can't stop looking at where everyone comes from either. it's rather addictive.

I didn't realize that I hadn't linked to you on my blog. I will change that immediately!! :)

Gudrun Johnston said...

Yes I was rather thrilled with statcounter when I first got it...it still astounds me how this internet thing connects us to so many people in the world! I love seeing not only where people live but what link brought them to me! It'd be nice if more left comments too!

kat coyle said...

i agree it's fun to see all the visitors from far away lands. when i get some free time i plan on making some eyeballs for my son. he will love them.

Julia said...

Congratulations Mary Jane!!!
Great to see you getting the recognition you deserve.

santos. said...

oh man. at first i thought there was a little red dot on the edge of that map that represented guam, but it turned out to be lint on the screen. guam's so small it doesn't even register!

mary jane said...

Hey Santos! Guam does registar as a little exclamation point when I look at the stats! The most mysterious one is due south of Accra Ghana, right on the equator. Nothing is there, no islands, nothing...It must be what my friend Petula says, PIRATES!
pirates, knitting eyeballs!

Petula Darling said...

That hat is adorable.
Congrats on the fame - you deserve it! I saw someone just yesterday wearing a hat made from a Mary Jane pattern.
How cool that Santos reads your blog. The scent of green bananas has caused me to announce on a couple of occasions that our next vacation destination will be Guam.

Anonymous said...

I love the tam, thanks for the great tip on how to shape them after finishing! We loved your eyeballs too! :-)

Anonymous said...

And how about the ones in South Africa, who are not from SA but from Portugal :))
Just kidding...loved the olive tutorial, thanx,

Sonia Luisa

mary jane said...

Oh Sonia Luisa, do you live in SA or is that where your server is? My server says I'm in Illinois, close to Chicago, but I'm really in Maine!

picperfic said...

HI Maryjane! Love that tam! I am eager to knit one just so I can put my 9inch wedgwood heirloom plate in it!

Connie said...

I'll add my congrats on the publicity too! This is my first time commenting, but I've been reading for several months. Found you by way of Kat Coyle's blog.

Love your beautiful color sense. Alas I can only admire from afar as I'm hopeless with fair isle and intarsia. Someday hopefully!

mary jane said...

Again thanks for all the comments! I have so many new places to visit. And Connie...Hello!...with your skill in lace knitting, fair isle should be a snap. Come to my house and I'll show you!