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.)
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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