The Good: The scarf challenge is coming along well! I finished scarf 4-of-5 on Friday and have begun scarf 5-of-5, to be finished this week during broadcast.

I also have a couple of scarves I completed during broadcasts over the summer, so in addition to the five scarves I complete in October, I’ll also be donating the previously-made scarves to charity Warm Up America. I’m excited that a few other viewers also took part in the challenge, and are donating items they’ve crafted to organization local to them.

Now I just need to make sure I finish scarf five by Halloween. 🙂

The Unexpected: I decided to do some bonus streams this week to test out some possible other times to broadcast. I ended up doing 3 extra broadcasts – Friday morning, Saturday night and Sunday morning. I wasn’t really sure what to work on during the weekend streams, and not wanting to be working on scarves 24/7 while on camera, I opted to work on a fingerless glove pattern from the Weekend Knitting book by Melanie Falick.

I was able to finish the first glove on Saturday night and worked on the second glove for Sunday’s broadcast. Instead of sewing the seem to finish the gloves, as the book instructed, I used a Russian Grafting technique to join the live stitches with the picked-up stitches. I was extremely happy with the results, and hope to tweak the pattern to create a longer wrist edge to cover the forearm.

And A Mistake: I’ve been using loyalty bots Revlo and Mikuia on my Twitch channel. Mikuia announces viewer’s “leveling” within the chat window, which is a representation of how active users are in chat. Revlo provides “points” to viewers while they engage in chat; and offers broadcasters a platform for their viewers to redeem their points for rewards — in my case, viewers can redeem points for hand-made items.

I’m still learning how to use both of these bots, and on Monday night, I made my first big stnank. I reset the Current Leaderboard in Revlo. In theory, this shouldn’t have had an impact, but it did. It wiped out all of the points my viewers had earned over the past two weeks. Oops. Luckily, I’d done a very quick cut/paste job of all of my viewers’ points before experimenting with the reset feature. I did write Revlo to see if they had the ability to restore points, but in the end, I had to create a .csv file from my raw data and re-upload the points. Not the end of the world, but this experience definitely made me realize the importance of keeping backups of bot data.

It’s important to note: The support folks at Revlo were very responsive to my questions. Even non-support emails are reviewed. I’d written an email suggestion about a reporting feature and a backup option and received a kind response from Alex about my ideas. I think it’s really awesome that Revlo is willing to connect with their users and take the time to respond to emails. That says a lot about their commitment to customer service.

The week: While my daily viewing numbers were down a bit, I ended the week with positive stats on Twitch and Twitter:
* 418 Twitch followers total
* 152 Twitter followers total

Next to-do action items: Make a decision about using Patreon, and come up with more reward options for my viewers in Revlo.

We’re cruising full speed into November, which includes National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo (write a 50K word novel in the 30 days of November!), and a Five Hat Challenge to benefit Warm Up America. Lots to come in the days ahead!