As for me, I’m going to try and crochet even more than usual this month (though, I’m not sure how I’m going to do that yet…)
This morning on my commute to work I started making another Diet Coke Bottle Cozy, mostly just to see what the pattern would look like with striped yarn. I finished it at lunch, and here it is!
In other news, I finished the Ladybug blanket!
A close up of the face:
I ended up crocheting a separate black wedge and sewing it on for the face, as the colour changes on the big circle really weren’t working for me. Sewing the spots on was quite annoying as well… I’m going to have to find a better way to do that. Not that I plan on making this blanket again, but I’m sure this sort of technique will come up in something else.
So, back to NatCroMo: Learn to crochet! Crochet something new! Learn a new crochet technique! Crochet in public! Talk about crochet! Sing about crochet! But above all… CROCHET! ^_^
I know this won’t come as a surprise to everyone reading this blog, but Bell sucks. I’ve had the misfortune of being a telephone customer of theirs, as well as a customer of Bell Sympatico. For anyone who pays attention to this sort of thing, my opinion is: don’t use Bell unless under threat of death.
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…)
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…
My mom wants to give that Ladybug blanket as a gift in March, so I thought maybe I should finish making it, or something. So, I brought it with me to my last Crochet Guild meeting, figuring that I’d get a good chunk of it done.
Unfortunately, my original plan for making this circle pattern was to count to the number of rounds I’m on, 12 times, to make sure I get evenly spaced increases that aren’t all stacked on one another (and thereby making a dodecagon and not a circle). As it turns out, it’s difficult to count while chit-chatting. I ended up putting the blanket aside and working on other things (of *course* I brought other yarn. Whose blog do you think you’re reading here?).
Obviously this is the sort of project that needs attention: no chit-chatting, no subway, no work, no television. As it turns out, I don’t have enough time like that in my schedule between now and March. What to do?
Well, I came up with a solution, but only because of a totally unrelated conversation on Ravelry recently. We were talking about the chainless foundation, and whether or not it could be used in projects that don’t start with a plain, all-one-kind-of-stitch first row (turns out it can… more on that later). Anyhow, someone was having trouble seeing where to insert the hook to make the next stitch, and someone else suggested she put a stitch marker in the chain stitch so that she could find it more easily.
Huh.
You know, I *never* think of using stitch markers. I’ve ignored them in every pattern I’ve made that called for them, mostly because I haven’t needed them. I know what various stitches look like, I can see very clearly when they change into other stitches, and so often the stitch markers are there so that you don’t have to count three or four stitches every time. To me, it’s not worth the annoyance of using stitch markers, just to save a second or two.
But, because of that recent conversation, I did think of it this time. And look!
That’s 12 evenly spaced scraps of yarn. I am now crocheting and watching TV with abandon!
(P.S. I’ll be teaching my Crochet Guild how to make Crochet-on-the-Double hats at the next meeting, on Feb. 20th. If you decide to come check it out, bring a 6mm, double-ended hook, and some worsted weight yarn in two colours with you. I recommend a ball of each colour you want in Bernat Satin, but use what you want. There will be some hooks at the meeting, available to buy, but I don’t know how many they’ll have.)
So, I was working on Maddie’s present on Christmas Eve. That’s nothing!
I made these dishcloths for my cousin on Christmas day!
(As an aside, I think this is my favourite way to wrap dishcloths: just a pretty bit of ribbon and tie in a bow.)
On Boxing Day, Mom and I went up to Michaels to see what was on sale (hint: yarn was!), and to use the gift card I got from my brother and his family (he’s the one with the daughters… clearly, they know where the handmade goods come from ^_-). We also went out to Mary Maxim in Paris, Ontario.
Because I was running dangerously low, I bought some more yarn. Including some in a lovely teal colour that you’ll see more of tomorrow, some wine coloured Bernat Satin Sport (I know, I usually don’t use this, but the pattern I have in mind needs something a bit thinner than my usual), and some dark blue Satin…
… which I used to finish Dad’s present. You may remember this picture:
I made the hexagons for this blanket in about 3 days. It made an excellent subway/work project. That is, until it was time to sew them all together. It took *forever*. I think it will be a very long time before I decide to whip-stitch motifs together again! Watch for future posts about experimenting with joining methods, coming soon. Very soon.
Anyhow, here is the blanket when Dad received it:
(Check out the sweet stockings my mom had made over the years, there on the right)
And here it is finished, and going extremely and accidentally well with that chair that I forgot my parents had:
I’m particularly happy with the borders. I’m never happy with the edges on hexagon motif blankets. Two of the sides are ok, kind of a ripple, but the other two are very boxy-looking. I don’t normally like experimenting with presents (we’re just ignoring the original present idea right now) but this turned out really well, I think!
So, let’s have a show of hands: how many people think I’m going to keep adding border rounds on that blanket every time I visit?
Christmas Eve day was a hectic one around here. I went to work in the morning as usual (grumble grumble), but it was only a 3 hour shift (totally, totally worth it). The afternoon was spent trying to finish gifts, wrap gifts, and pack for the weekend, all the while being sure I was forgetting something.
Dad picked us up around 4pm and we loaded up the van and spent some quality time in a festive traffic jam. I was madly working away on Maddie’s gift as we drove. (I wasn’t the one driving. I really really hope that part is obvious!) It started getting dark, so on the dome-light went. It still wasn’t done by the time we got to my parents’ house. I knew Maddie was going to be there when we walked in, and I showed some real forethought by carrying her unfinished gift in a see-through bag. I managed to sneak it by her anyway.
Off to church we went, where I worked on Katie’s scarf (to match her yellow hat) before the service started. Everyone got a good laugh at my expense. :P
After church, it was back to my parents’ house. My regular bedtime is around 8:30pm, but I didn’t have to work the next day (grudgingly, no doubt…) I stayed up late. To 11pm. I got the blanket done, though!
On Christmas morning I told all of my handmade-gift-receivers that if they didn’t want their faces on the blog they should hold their gifts in front of them.
I’m totally switching gears on a project. I’m not going to get into too much detail here, but I will one day. At any rate, I’m in full Christmas Gift Making swing and thought I’d try something new today.
I’ve got a need for speed and I’m going to blog about it!
I’m making a blanket for a rather tall individual. I decided on a hexagon pattern (I haven’t made one in a while!), and this is what I got done last night while watching Castle:
I only just noticed this morning that the first hex looks kind of Settler of Catan-ish. I’m thinking of maybe switching up the sizes of the tan-middles… we’ll see.
I’ll update this post tonight with how much I get done today. Wish me luck!
*****
Look!
That’s 14 finished hexagons, all ends woven in except the last one… I’ll probably use those to join them.
Here’s a closer look:
I’m back to watching Castle again, and making some Granny’s Daughter squares. It’s just the first round of a regular granny square (*3dc ch2* 4 times).
It’s bigger now:
(Colours are a lot closer to real life in the first picture.)
And it is officially the First Finished Christmas Gift of the Year. Let’s have a round of applause!
I also made this, which the always lovely Roopurt is modeling for us:
Here is a close up:
I used a single ball of yarn I found in my stash that was unlabeled. I’m pretty sure it’s Astra but they don’t seem to have this colour anymore (even though it looks like this colour is the featured picture… weird).
To make this kind of scarf, you make a base chain approximately as long as you want the scarf to be, then do 2dc in each chain on the first row, and 1dc in each dc for the following rows.
I wanted to see if the “no base chain” foundation row method would work for this… and it did! It’s a bit complicated to write out, so I’ll save a tutorial on this for another post. If you simply can’t wait for that, do a search for it on Youtube. It’s pretty neat!
My last post left a question unanswered: what was I doing while waiting for that white yarn?
Well, it started with these:
which I figure will end up being a small blanket, 4 squares by 5 squares, maybe. Each square is roughly 8 inches.
Then I made these (because who finishes a project before going on to the next one anymore?) :
And some matching solids:
Which is actually the same colour (and dye lot!) as the dark green in the previous picture. Cameras are weird sometimes, aren’t they?
The current plan is to arrange the green ones 5×7 like this:
Where any empty spaces will be filled by solid dark green motifs.
Once I see it all laid out, I’m going to see if all of that dark green needs to be separated with some light green borders, or something. We’ll see!
Here are all of the squares arranged by doneness:
Top and bottom right, and bottom middle: finished
Top left (two piles) : need the ends woven in
Bottom left: ran out of yarn while making (and how annoying is THAT?)
Finally, here is the pattern I used!
Note: use an appropriate method to reach the right stitch height for each round. I used the no-turning-chain-dc on the dc rounds, and ch2 for hdc, and ch1 for sc. I didn’t note any of this in the pattern because it’s easier to memorize it this way. ^_^
Start with magic loop, or ch1 no-turning-chain-dc, or whatever your preferred method.
Rnd 1: 12 dc
Rnd 2: 2dc in each dc from previous round (24 dc)
Rnd 3: *2dc in one st, 1dc in next st* 12 times (36 dc)
Rnd 4: *1dc, 2dc in next st, 1dc in next st* 12 times (48 dc)
Rnd 5: *1dc, 1dc, 1dc, 1dc, 2dc in next st* 12 times (60 dc)
Change colours here if you want.
Rnd 6: *1sc in each of 10 sts, 1hdc in next 2 sts, 5dc in next st, 1 hdc in next 2 sts* 4 times (76 sts)
Rnd 7: *1hdc in each sc of previous rnd (10hdc), 1dc in each of next 4 sts, 5dc in next st, 1dc in each of next 4 sts* 4 times (92 sts)
Rnd 8: 1dc in each st, 5dc in the middle stitch of the 5dc on previous round. (108 sts)
To make it bigger, repeat Rnd 8 as many times as you want. It will add 16 sts to your count each time. If you want a bigger circle in the centre, well, you’re going to have to finesse the pattern a bit.
If any of you try this, want to let me know if there are any errors in the pattern? Thanks!
It started back in the spring. My Mom has a friend who likes ladybugs, and when Mom was flipping through a crafting catelogue and saw a pattern for a ladybug afghan, she asked me if I could make it.
I took a look at the picture and agreed, though I told her not to buy the pattern. Now, normally I don’t condone depriving a designer of well earned money, but I seem to be having this problem with a lot of crochet patterns in that, I look at them, and most of the time I can figure out right away how it’s done.
Honestly though, a ladybug is just a big red circle with little black circles on it. I already know how to crochet a circle, so how hard could it be?
At the time I couldn’t work on it. Big On Bloor was coming up, and I was focusing on making things for that. Then the summer was taken up with the move. I suggested to Mom that she wait until Bernat Satin went on sale; I’d figure out how much I’d need, and she could go buy it.
Bernat Satin did go on sale, at the exact time when I couldn’t buy any of it (go two posts back to see what I was up to that prevented the yarn buying), but Mom did get some red and black Satin. She bought it just before leaving on her vacation.
When Charles and I were camping out there (again, go see the post about our move; you won’t believe it!); I was getting a bit tired of working on that yellow project that I had kept in my work bag during the move, and was the only yarn I had out; I decided to grab the two bags of yarn Mom had bought for the ladybug blanket.
I had no clean clothes, but I did make this:
Then it got bigger:
Here it is, bigger still, enjoying the nightlife:
Here it is today, with some black for the face added in:
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever crocheted a blanket in the round, mostly all in one colour, and all the same stitch, over, and over, and over before. If not, let me tell you: the farther along you get, the less fun it gets. I was blowing through a ball of yarn a day on this, which meant 16 inch diameter the first day, but only up to 24 inches the next day, then 28 inches… now a ball of yarn is just barely making it all the way around! Just endless rounds of dc… constantly counting for the increases… *yawn*
Understandably, I’d put this down for a while.
I picked it back up tonight and wondered how I would know where I’d left off. I’d done a small part of the latest round. (See how it starts with the black, then ends with red shortly thereafter?)
It turns out I needn’t have worried because apparently I’m brilliant. ^_-
First, how to crochet a circle in dc:
Start with your favourite way to start working in the round. With me, I ch-1, then did the no-turning-chain-dc, followed by 11 dc into the first ch.
When making a flat circle in dc you need to add as many dc’s as you started with to each round, so, round 2 was 24 dc, 2 dc in each of the previous round’s stitches.
Round 3 needed 36 stitches, basically a repeat of *1dc, 2dc* around.
The pictures I’ve seen of crocheted circles always struck me as odd, and I finally realized why: people tend to put their increases in the same spots every round, and what you end up with isn’t a circle, it’s a dodecagon.
I decided that, with this project, I was going to try moving my increases around, but still evenly spaced within a round, and see if that helped. It seems to be working so far, anyway.
For the rest of the rounds I was counting stitches. Basically, you count to whatever number the round is 12 times(so, if you’re doing round 6, you count up to 6 then start again). The trick is deciding where the increases will go. For example, I might do: 1-23-4-5-6, where stitches 2 and 3 went into the same stich in the previous round.
So, back to this evening: I laid the blanket out on the table (as seen above) and counted the rounds. It turns out the round I’d started before putting it down before was round 35. Good, now I know what number to count to, but where did I put the increases?
Let’s take a closer look at that black, which is the beginning of the round:
I hope you can clearly see how, counting from right to left, you count 3 single stitches, then 4 and 5 in the same stitch. Ok, so I know I’m counting 1-2-3-45-6-7-8…. up to 35.
But, oh man, where did I stop? Let’s take a look:
Like I said: brilliant. Clearly the last stitch I made was #5 in the pattern. So the next one will be 6, then 7 and so on.
Except that I’ve spent the evening blogging about it instead of actually working on it. But that’s ok, I found this:
“Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way.”
Truer words have never been spoken.
Sunday, August 30, 2009 started early for us. Up at 5:30am, I headed over to the Always Open convenience store to get some milk and a coffee for Charles. It was moving day, and mostly everything was packed; we didn’t want to have to move an entire kitchen’s worth of food, so the coffee-making supplies were packed and when we ran out of milk on Saturday, we decided to rely on the nearby convenience store, whose name really bears repeating: Always Open.
When I got there, I saw this:
(This is a story of epic proportions with lots of pictures, read on under the cut!) (more…)
March 2nd, 2010 
mio 
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