The last time I did something like this, I filled a “bin”, meaning, one of the plastic bins I was using to store my yarn. I figured if I could take the yarn out and put it back in in the shape of a hat or scarf, then I could cart the whole thing off to my parents’ house and I’d have stash-busted not just the yarn, but the bin!

Brilliant plan, except Mom doesn’t seem to want the bins. I got that original bin back and it is now holding Christmas decorations. Mom traded the plastic bin for a cardboard box (left over from our move); I think it’s so that she can just take the stuff over to the charity in the box and leave the whole thing there.

So, this time around I’m going to skip the middle-m… er… middle-container, and put the warm goodies into a cardboard box. The one I got in the mail recently seemed like the best bet, so here it is!

And this is what’s inside so far:

I’m still stash busting, and I’m concentrating on the black yarn. I’ve got two bins full of black! I’m using the odds and ends left over from the last batch of hats for stripes and the like. Also, the hats are bigger this time; they’ve asked me to make bigger hats for older kids, so I’ve gone up a loom size and I’m making the scarves slightly longer. I might throw in some Crochet-On-the-Double sets, too…

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*

Here are the hat/scarf sets using the scarves from before:

Two strands of Bernat Soft Boucle:

Orange Patons Melody:

Black Patons Melody:

Green and Variegated Patons Melody:

(I didn’t realize it when I made the scarf that that was the last of my Apple Green yarn. Luckily I had a variegated that had that green in it!)

Purple Patons Melody:

And some new ones!

Purple and black Patons Melody:

Red and black Patons Melody:

And a magenta scarf to match a hat I gave Mom ages ago:

Whew! What have we learned? Well, when I get on a roll, watch out! ^_^

It was when I went to make the matching hat that I realized I had only been able to get one ball of that colour. This is what I had left after making the scarf:

I don’t have any variegated yarns with this colour in it, so what to do?

Find a colour that goes with it! (Those who know me know that this is not my forte…)

I think I did ok…

Here I am casting on a light pink:

Not a bad set, really:

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…)

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Have we met?

(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.

Almost finished! It just needs a few more rounds for the border.

I really wish I could get an accurate picture of the colour on this blanket. It’s something to see! I’ll try to take the finished picture outside and see if that helps.

I stopped at the store on the way home from work today and picked up some scissors that are not only awesomeness defined, but I think they’ll allow them on the plane in my carry-on, too.

“The children are right to laugh, these couldn’t cut butter.”

And the big news:

I finished something last night! I am now the proud owner of a double-thick short scarf. When I got home from work today I thought to myself, “What would be the best background for a totally black scarf picture? If only there was an abundance of whiteness that also represents the function of the item…” Stupid snow.

One finished project down, a few hundred left to go…

*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. ^_-