Where did the swag bags come from, then? Well!

I’m working from the list of donors on the KAL blog, and doing some educated guess work, so I may not be totally accurate here… if you know better, please tell me, and I’ll fix it! (ETA: fixed the things mentioned in the first comment!)

Let’s start with:

Two balls of my very favouritest yarn, Bernat Satin, from Spinrite!

(My crochet guild is working on arranging a bus trip up to Listowel to see the fine people at Spinrite. I can’t wait! Also, while I’m on the subject, keep your eyes on the top bar of this blog; I’m planning a “yarn” tab)

Next is some superwash merino from Diamond Yarn:

Then there are a couple of sets of knitting needles. The wooden ones are 19mm (!) and are from the Purple Purl, and the 4.5mm needles are from Romni Wools:

A handful of books from Simon and Schuster:

There were also coupons in the bags, from the Purple Purl, Mary Maxim, and Knit-o-Matic

Here is the t-shirt I won:

And the bags it all came in:

(The black one was this year’s bag, the white one was from last year, and it had the t-shirt in it)

Thanks again to the TTC KAL folks, and all of the donors (a full list of which you can see on the TTC KAL blog)

I can not wait until next year! I’ll try to remember to post about it in time for people to sign up and come along (you know, instead of the night before… heh)

I’ve always liked the look of entrelac, but because I really only knew how to knit and purl in knitting, it seemed beyond my reach. Naturally, I turned to crochet.

In my searches, I came across a lot of mentions and tutorials on crocheting entrelac using Tunisian crochet. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the examples had only half of the equation: the fabric was made up of little squares, but the stitches all ran in the same direction. Even though the fabric was created by making one square at a time, the finished look was pretty much the same as if the crocheter had just changed colours mid-row a lot.

There were some examples where the stitches ran in opposite directions, though, and even though they still don’t have that “woven” look to them, I still wanted to know how to do it. I couldn’t find a tutorial anywhere!

For months I worked on this problem (though, not steadily… that would just be wacky!), and came to the conclusion that the only way to do it would be to learn how to crochet left-handed.

Seriously. I’d get my base-row of tiangles and be stuck. There didn’t seem to be a way to make the first row of squares and have the stitches go the other way.

They say you should never give up, but I did. It seemed that the only way I was going to be able to make myself an entrelac scarf (or blanket, or hat…) was to learn how to knit entrelac.

I found this entrelac tutorial and started by going to YouTube and looking up everything it mentioned that I didn’t already know how to do.

I made up this little swatch:

And that taught me the increases and decreases I needed to know.

Then I dove in!

And then again with some variegated yarn:

I’m not 100% happy with how it looks, I think I’m making a mistake when picking up stitches, but I’ve got the general feel for it now. (If you knit and haven’t tried entrelac yet because you think it’s too hard or complicated, it’s really, really not. You should try it!)

Of course, the way the universe works is, when you give up on the new way to do something and settle yourself in on just doing it the old way, suddenly the answer comes to you!

Now, I haven’t tried this technique in a Tunisian entrelac swatch yet, but I think it’s the answer to my question: how to do Tunisian crochet backwards!

(I’m putting the tutorial under the cut, because this post is long enough as it is)

I started with 10 stitches, and did 3 rows in the usual way:

Then slip-stitched across, just like when you’re binding off. This was just to get the hook to the left side of the piece:

Turn (this puts the yarn on the wrong side… I need to play with this a bit)

Now flip the piece up so that you can see the front and insert your hook into the second vertical bar (you may want to count bars the first time you try this, just to be sure. I counted 9 from the end)

Then yarn over and pull a loop through.

I found it easiest if the working yarn was above the stitch (but since you’re working upside down, it’ll be below your hook) like this:

then lay the yarn over the hook and pull the yarn through

Do that for every stitch:

then work the loops off in exactly the same way you’d normally do it

It’ll look like this from the back:

And this is it from the front:

Here is the 3 rows worked normally and 3 rows worked backwards, looking at the front:

I then slip-stitched (working into the right side of the piece, which was tricky, but worth it, I think) across to get the hook back to the right-hand side of the piece and worked 3 more rows in the normal way:

This is the back (there is a ridge of slip stitches between each change of direction, you can sort of see them)

Now, I don’t know if you noticed, but you can tell which row was worked backwards because of the way the vertical bars stack. It sticks out in this swatch, but I don’t think it will be as obvious in most applications, and I don’t think it really matters when applied to Tunisian entrelac, as the sections worked backwards will be worked at a right angle to the sections worked the normal way.

You can make a really neat looking fabric using this technique combined with short rows. More to come on that!

Why? In short:

- they have stolen money out of my bank account (by doing something they *specifically* claimed was impossible) then wouldn’t give it back until I involved my bank

- they’ve cut off my phone service for not paying *someone else’s* bill, and even after it was proven that was the case they still wouldn’t reconnect it, and still wouldn’t even after we proved that it was, in fact, their fault that it was possible at all

- they’ve sold me a service that didn’t exist (which lead to me having to pay the cable company an extra hookup charge since they had to come to my house twice)

- and most recently they failed to fix a connection problem. For two weeks. They claim to have made 6 appointments for techs to check out the problem, but we only saw 2. Each of those techs “fixed” the problem, only to have service go back down within 24 hours. (They also both complained bitterly about working for Bell!)

So, what’s a gal to do during this internet outage? (Did I mention that the internet wasn’t working at work either because of a computer virus? *yanks out hair*) Well, I certainly didn’t plan any part of my wedding! (Whose idea was it to keep our notes about it in a Google document? Oh wait, that was me…)

I crocheted, naturally! I also loom-knit.

You all remember Mom’s sorority’s charity thing with the kids hats and scarves right?

Check it!

The plan is to fill a bin with these. The current count is 23 complete sets (I took this picture before finishing a few of them… all of those hats in front of the pile have matching scarves now, plus there is another set not pictured… and a blue hat I still need to make a matching scarf for…)

I also made quite a few dishcloths. And a crochet-on-the-double hat using Bernat Soft Boucle (that still needs sewing up), and blew through a few more balls of red on the Ladybug blanket. I’m woefully behind on motifs, but expect to see a rush of those soon, as I’m in another motif swap. ^_^

A possible conclusion from all of this might be that having no internet access can be really good for my crafting! Another conclusion might be that having no internet had the potential to drive me so crazy that I needed that many projects to distract myself with just to get through it…

*eye twitch*

Those of you playing along at home have probably already guessed that they’re still packed! Though, in our own defence, we have finally started to unpack a bit; we’ve found all sorts of useful things, such as clothes, the power cord for the television, and the dishes. No batteries, though.

After much deep and profound brain things inside my head, I decided that we should probably just go ahead and buy some more. The blog was waiting, after all! And it’s not like there’s any such thing as “too many AA batteries”, right? Charles was going to pick some up on his way home from Union Station, where we parted ways; I was off to Hamilton.

While in Hamilton, my Mom told me that there were a couple of “under the bed” storage boxes, well, under the bed in the guest bedroom that were probably mine. I had no idea they were there. We looked inside, and low and behold:

The good news: Charles forgot to pick up batteries.
The bad news: these were not the batteries I was thinking of when I thought of the ones that were packed away. No idea where those are.

Other interesting things I found in the box:

A crochet page-a-day calendar

… from 2007…

And a knitting book:

… that I don’t remember buying, but clearly got it long before I really learned how to knit. Wishful thinking, or psychic vibe? I’ll leave that to the philosophers…

“What do you mean, you’ve learned how to knit??” you ask? Well, first of all, shame on you for not following me on Twitter; if you did, you’d already know about this! Secondly, I thought it was about time.

Longtime readers know that I’ve tried to learn how to knit a few times before, but with little to moderate success; but I was unhappy with how slow it was. I had heard that there were several different ways to knit, and thought that maybe if I tried a different way I’d be more successful. Off to youtube I went, determined to learn how to knit while holding the yarn in my left hand (just like how I crochet!).

Success! I knit a few uninteresting stitches, tried out DPN’s (and was doing alright until I accidentally started going the wrong way…). I tried two colours; and then cables, and then tried this:

That’s after only a couple of days of confident knitting. Booyah!

Er… except the sides flop over…

… but I think I can fix it with crochet. :D

But knitting and crocheting overlap an awful lot. Knitters use a crochet hook to pick up dropped stitches, or add a decorative, or structural border to their pieces. Crocheters use knitting needles for making broomstick lace.

In my mind, though, the true crossover, the merging of the two crafts, is found in Tunisian Crochet.

You use a hook, so it is crochet, but you work all of the stitches onto to the hook, like you would with knitting. Most importantly, though, there is something called the Tunisian Knit Stitch, which creates a fabric that looks a lot like stockinette stitch. The back looks less like the back of a knitted piece, but to the uneducated eye… well, who looks at the wrong side of an item other than die-hard yarn crafters?

Why is this important?

Well, over the last several years I’ve been making hats and scarves for charity. I make the hats on the Knifty Knitter knitting looms, because it’s easy and fun. I’m doing the e-wrap stitch, which produces a form of stockinette stitch, but the stitches are all twisted.

Here’s a hat in progress. It looks blue, but it’s actually a lovely royal purple colour:

The problem I’ve had in the past is that making hats has always been more fun than making the scarves. Flat panels are certainly possible on a knitting loom, even the round ones. You simply wrap the yarn around x number of pegs, then turn around and wrap the yarn around the pegs until you’re back where you started. The problem arises in that knitting curls. If you only use twisted-knit stitches, which are by far the easiest and fastest to make, then you get a scarf that curls so much you might think it was supposed to be a long tube!

The solution to the curling problem is to add purl stitches, which are also quite possible to do on the looms, but they slow me down a lot. There’s also “planning” and “paying attention” to be done, which, frankly, makes it ill-suited to working on during my commute, which is when I normally work on this sort of thing.

Charles’ sister Beth sent me a large tunisian hook a while ago, and now that we’ve moved I’ve finally had a chance to really test it out. It looked like it’d be about the right size to work with the hat yarn, so I tried it out.

The tunisian simple stitch is lovely, and I use it a lot, but if I made the scarves with that they wouldn’t really match the hats. The answer? The tunisian knit stitch, of course!

I made this number, modeled here by the always lovely Roopurt, today on my commute home. I started it at St. George Station, and was weaving in the ends while waiting for the bus at Kipling Station.

(7 stitches across, Patons Melody, soft rose colour, no ball band)

Here she is in the scarf I made on the way in to work, and finished on my lunch break (sleepier in the morning, the double-stranding slowed me a bit, and I was squished in my seat because it was busier) :

(7 stitches across, Bernat Soft Boucle, two strands, dark brown, light brown)

Here’s a scarf and the hat next to one another:

(just imagine how alike they’d be in the same colour!)

So, I’ve found a fun and easy way to make matching scarves. You’d think my problem of uneven numbers of hats and scarves would be solved now, right?

(3.5 scarves, still waiting on that hat to get done…)

.
.
.
Have we met?

That’s my niece, Katie, I’m talking about, and I couldn’t be prouder! She recently had a birthday party with all of her friends, and they raised over $200. Then they set up a food and drink stand (I hear there were cupcakes!) where they raised another $100.

I’m amazed at what she’s accomplishing! If you feel like you’d like to contribute to her run, here is the link. You’ll find pictures of their efforts there, as well.

This isn’t her first stint at giving, she has also made a scarf for Mom’s sorority’s children’s charity work (it was yellow, her favourite colour, and made on a Knifty Knitter loom with Patons Melody yarn. I’m bursting, just bursting!)

In other news, here is my progress on the Catan blanket:

Tally:
3 brick – done
3 ore – 2/3 done
4 wood – 1/4 done
4 sheep – 2/4 done
4 grain – 2/4 done
1 desert
18 water

Ok, back to work for me!

(There wasn’t a lot of sun today, so this indoor picture will have to do. The actual colour is a sunny yellow.)

Next, I finished off the yellow hat from the other day. Here it is posed by my lovely assistant, Roopurt:

Is it just me, or have I been making a lot of the same things lately?

I was eying the stash yesterday. I was thinking that I should probably make some hats and scarves, but wanted to try something new. What would two strands of Bernat Soft Boucle look like, I wondered.

So I made these:

And these:

(Don’t adjust your monitor, they’re out of focus in person, too.)

I go through phases of charity crafting, and I think the reason for this is because I don’t have any real goals for it. I had been using the “go until the yarn runs out” method, but that’s clearly not going to cut it anymore. So, I came up with a point system. One point each for hats and scarves, and three points per baby blanket. My goal for February is 25 points. Here is a screen shot of the spreadsheet I made:

(of *course* I invented this entire system just so that I could make a colourful spreadsheet!)

On a related note, I discovered today that my obsessive need to buy yarn (especially when it’s on sale) appears to be genetic. I e-mailed my Mom last night to tell her about how well the Soft Boucle was working out and she e-mailed back today saying she’d gone out this morning and bought two more skeins of it, with plans to buy even more (she has coupons!) and as an aside asked if I needed any more baby yarn for the blankets. This explains my yarn stash a bit, I think!

I was working on this at work today:

One of my co-workers asked what I was making, and when I told him it was a hat, he said that I’m always making hats and should make something different for a change. (Maybe I’ll bring in a baby blanket to work on tomorrow.)

That same co-worker tipped me off to this article from The Walrus magazine about CAPTCHAs. It’s a fairly interesting article, I think, but what really got me excited appears in the seventh paragraph.

I’ll wait while you go read it.

Surely you see the error: I CROCHET!!! *shakes a fist*

I’ll forgive them this time, though. The crocheting I was doing while scanning was crochet-on-the-double, and that can look a lot like knitting to the muggles.

*counting on fingers* “Hey! I’m eight and a half today!” *looks at tv* “is it supposed to do that?”

Obviously, I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation at the time (give me a break… I was only eight. And a half!).

Back to the point: I like to do something fun to commemorate the day. In the past I’ve had frosting for dessert (instead of a whole piece of cake). I’ve taken a half-day off of work. I’ve watched 15 minutes of one sitcom then changed channels and watched 15 minutes of another sitcom and pretended the were the same show (sometimes this make the shows funnier… sometimes it just shows you how similar sitcoms are…).

This year I’ve decided to take stock and show all of you my half-finished projects.

Baby blankets:

Red/Orange Crochet-on-the-Double using Bernat Satin:

Yellow/Green Crochet-on-the-Double using Bernat Satin:

Green blanket using Bernat Baby Coordinates:

The start of a strip for Blankets For Canada using Bernat Softee Chunky (which I seem to be allergic to… it’s ok, I wear gloves while working with this yarn now!) using a Knifty Knitter long loom:

Not baby blankets:

My Halloween costume not finished for 2008, maybe it’ll be ready for 2009? The costume was to be a Crazy Cat Lady. I was going to make (and buy) toy cats and sew them on my housecoat, then fill my pockets with these little kitties, which would then be thrown at people. Awesome, I know. I used Bernat Satin for these.

A green purse, using Bernat Satin, abandoned due to an inability to sew the two pieces together properly. They have the same number of stitches on a side, so I’m not sure where the problem was. I’ll try it again when I have time.

And finally, a yellow dishcloth, Tunisian stitch, using Bernat Handicrafter cotton.

This last picture reveals one of my favourite yarn crafting tips: Slurpee cups make excellent yarn barns. Put the yarn in the cup, pull an end through the hole in the dome, then put the dome on the cup. The best part of this system: you now have an excellent reason to get a large Slurpee!

My more observant friends will probably be thinking to themselves, “That can’t possibly be all of her half-finished projects”. Well, it’s true. There is the scarf (I haven’t worked more on that since you saw it last), the yellow and green baby blanket (OCD won, math geek blanket pattern planned for the next blanket), and the ripple baby blanket at my parents’ house. Dad’s Christmas blanket is in the planning stages, so I’m not sure if that counts or not. In a non-yarn vein, I have a couple dozen un-decorated magnets on my fridge that are waiting for pretty pictures and flat marbles to be glued to them

Annnnd…. I only glanced around the apartment for about five minutes to find the projects shown here. There very well may be many more projects hiding in boxes and bags and in closets. Let’s try not to think about those. ^_^

This green section is the point of no return. If I finish it off with three rows, then I’m stuck with that pattern. If I do 6 rows, I can do the math sequence suggested by Beth. It’s OCD vs. Geek! Who will win?

Who are we kidding? OCD wins every time. On the up side, it also make me have to make one in the math pattern. That’s just too cool to pass up! The other up side is that I get to plan it out and do it on purpose. Huzzah!

Naturally, I’m not only working on one project right now. The blanket is my work project. It gets worked on at lunch and maybe on the subway, if it’s not too crowded (right-o!).

My home project is a quick little scarf. You see, I have a scarf already. It’s a long scarf, and it’s quite pretty. But it’s a bit unwieldy sometimes. I’ve been in a short scarf mood lately, but without a short scarf.

I have a plan in mind for a really nifty scarf, but it’s going to take a while to execute, so what to do in the mean time?

Why, make a fast and easy short scarf to work in the mean time!

I wanted something that will match the hat that I’m going to make for myself, so Patons Melody on a Knifty Knitter loom it is! Well, scarves made on the looms with just a straight e-wrap stitch (my fastest stitch on the loom) tend to curl, and I didn’t want that. My solution: I’ll use the small blue loom and go all the way around. That way I have a scarf with double-thickness for extra warmth!

There goes the “fast” part of the equation! I’m not sure how my logic let me believe that a double-thickness scarf would work up fast, but there it is.

And here’s the scarf in progress!

I know it’s a bit of a departure from my usual “It’s dreary out, let’s go nuts with colour” attitude, but no worries… the hat will make up for it. ^_-