I’ve talked about gauge before. I hope we all know now that even if you get gauge with one dye lot, you might not with the next. Different colours of yarn sometimes have different gauges, even if they are otherwise the same yarns… even in variegated and self-striping yarns (I’m looking at you, Bernat Baby Coordinates White)

The other day I made this:

It’s for my cousin; she likes handmade dishcloths and her kitchen colours are blue, green, and yellow.

I also made this for her:

(it’s actually more blue than grey in person… it’s supposed to look like denim)

And then this green-and-cream one:

I finished that last one on the commute home and it wasn’t until I stacked it on top of the other two that I noticed this:

All three dishcloths were made using Bernat Handicrafter Cotton, each with a 6mm hook, each exactly the same pattern.

Luckily, gauge doesn’t always matter. ^_^

(P.S. this post documents the first finished Christmas gifts for 2010. That’s right, you heard me!)

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*

The culprit? My Diet Coke. Normally I drink pop in cans, but at my work we are not allowed to have open containers of liquid near our workspace (I work with really old books and expensive computer equipment) and bottled drinks need to live on the floor. (I work in a very dark environment too… this will be important later!)

Well, I’m home today due to my bum knee acting up again, and am kind of stuck in my chair. I felt like crocheting something and the closest yarn to me was the Bernat Handicrafter Cotton I was using yesterday to make dishcloths. I had lots of odds and ends, especially of bright colours, and so my Diet Coke cozy was born:

With those crazy colours there’s no way my drink will get lost on the dark floor in the dim room!

The back:

The top:

At the top of the cozy I did a round of mesh, basically *dc, ch1 (skip a stitch)* repeat, to make holes to weave in a bit of a drawstring. The drawstring itself is mostly just 1 sc in each base chain, except on the ends I did 2 sc in each base chain, to add a bit of a twist.

The bottom:

The bottom is actually a circle (the shape of the bottom of the bottle makes it look a bit like a wonky-pentagon). 12 dc, followed by 24 dc, then a round of sc in the pattern of *sc, sc, 2sc* repeat

I tried to get a close up of the stitch pattern in this pic:

After a round of 1 dc per stitch in the base, I started a pattern of *dc sc* repeat, and in the following row *sc dc* repeat, so that sc goes into a dc and dc goes into a sc.

I made the mistake of measuring this as I went with a bottle of Diet Coke I was actually drinking, which means that the sides of the bottle were sweating, and it made the yarn wet every time. Crocheting with wet yarn kind of sucks! (Which, if you’ll recall, was one of the major motivators for making this project…). I finally got wise after a few rounds and found an empty bottle nearby (What? We’re in the middle of a garbage strike here. Of *course* there was an empty drink bottle next to my chair. lol)

Here it is empty:

I’m going to have to make another one of these, as I usually have two bottles with me. I’m thinking of doing some sort of spiral pattern…

I bought this:

I’ve only had a short amount of time to play with it, but so far I like it! It’s spiral bound, which is awesome. All craft books should be spiral bound, because there’s nothing more frustrating than having the book close on you mid-row!

I tried out some of the crochet-on-the-double stitches it has, and got to thinking: would the short-row dishcloth pattern work in this technique? (No, there’s nothing about short-row COTD in this book… that I’ve found, anyway.)

This is what I came up with:

(I’m not happy with that big line of blue at the join… I’ll have to remember that next time and use the other colour for the bind off.)

I made some changes to the original pattern. I only did 10 stitches instead of 15, and after the first row, I picked up 2 stitches extra each time. I ended up needing 8 wedges to get all the way around, though, so it’s more of an octagon. I’m not sure if the extra wedges are due entirely to using the COTD technique, or if it’s because I picked up two stitches each time instead of just one, but there you have it.

Ideas for next time: alternating sides with the colours in each wedge, which would make both sides the same; binding off with the white; trying more stitches.

Thoughts: This is totally do-able. The shorter rows are kind of annoyingly fiddly, so if I were to make an entire blanket using this technique I’d either make waaaay bigger motifs, or I’d just make one giant octagon blanket. I think it might be cute as motifs with squares added in to make the geometry work.

To make up for using blue and white instead of red and white like I should have (what? I used my patented “use the yarn within reaching distance of where I’m sitting” colour choosing technique. I totally can’t be blamed for this! Besides, what is more Canadian than being cold? And what colour is more cold than blue? Q.E.D.), I’m going to include some of my favourite “You know you’re Canadian when…” jokes:

You know you’re Canadian when you understand the sentence, “Please pass me a serviette, I’ve spilled poutine on the chesterfield.”

You know you’re Canadian when you’ve had to design a Halloween costume around a snowsuit.

You know you’re Canadian when you’ve ever had to plug your car in overnight.

You know you’re Canadian when you’d trust your children in the care of a grown man in tights playing a flute to a chicken.

and finally,

You know you’re Canadian if you know that Casey and Finnegan aren’t a Celtic band.

Who knows? Maybe my next post about this book will have, you know, something actually FROM this book. ^_^

*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. ^_^