a surprise every time.

Dragons, Gadgets, Hats, and Fish.

2012-01-27T08:40:00.001-05:00

Despite the Lunar New Year not being a part of my family's cultural heritage, uh, at all, we like to celebrate it with a nice Asian-themed dinner and, in my case, some thematic crochet. Last year, I did a sculptural-bunny Year of the Rabbit celebration amigurumi. For Year of the Dragon (which began on Monday), I actually started (and then frogged, the pattern was sort of meh) a dragon ami, and ended up finding a very much non-meh pattern for a crocheted dragon applique instead, and made a bunting instead.

A very difficult to photograph bunting. But fun! By the fourth dragon, I had the pattern memorized, and just...dragoned a long while I watched TV. I did my dragons in worsted weight acrylic yarn, because that's what I'm surrounded by, but they can apparently be done in thread, too, and used as bookmarks, which I might give a whirl. (Thread crochet: on my "to try, with some trepidation" list.) There's even instructions about making blanket squares with one of these guys as the center, which is tempting...

I also made my mom an iPod cozy. Isn't it strange how we'll embark on projects as gifts that we wouldn't make for ourselves? I got an iPod touch on Black Friday in 2010, and still haven't made a case for it. It still lives in a random (shamefully storebought) zipper pouch that I had lying around. For some reason, it always seemed like too boring a project to embark on---crocheting something in the round and not giving it a face? But why?

However! Once I began whipping this up, I was happily surprised at (a) how fast it went and (b) the fact that I was not at all bored. I did this in cotton because it seemed like a better choice, protection-wise, and used the moss stitch for the opening-and-closing flap.

It's possible that I started this Baby Sherlock Hat just becuase I'm crrrraaazy in love with the BBC show Sherlock, which just wrapped up its second series in amazing fashion. I think the first season is available on Netflix, and if you like mysteries and the best.casting.ever, you should definitely give it a watch! Anyway---I finished the hat because I liked it a lot, once I began it. I'm not usually thrilled with the look of crocheted stripes, but this pattern made them work! I already want to make more of these (the colour and button combinations are so much fun to consider!), although I don't really like the way the increases wibble-wobble. If I do make more, I may try to alter the pattern to fix it.

And there's this fishie, who's part of a larger project that will probably surface (pun not even intended) next week. Another recommended pattern, it was fun and easy and would be a great way to practice your crochet, if you're looking to do that---it's worked flat rather than in the round (you make two matching halves and sew them together) and it has increases and decreases and working in front and back loops! And you get this super-cute fish out of it. The style of the increases and decreases creates these really...curvy pieces, so that even before it's stuffed, it's all puffy and 3-D and sweet. I'm not even a fish fan, and I can't stop squishing this guy fondly.

Check out other, possibly more cohesive posts at Finished Object Friday, Fibers on Friday, and Fiber Arts Friday. :D

Wednesday: Books and Hooks.

2012-01-25T11:53:00.003-05:00

Playing along with both WIP Wednesday and Yarn Along this week, here are a couple dauntingly large projects---Uncle Stevie's new doorstop novel (if Mr. King wants to refer to himself as "Uncle Stevie" in his occasional pieces for Entertainment Weekly, who am I to disagree? He really does feel like a literary uncle to me, somehow. When I read his work, I can tell that things like music and pop culture narrative are really important to him, and I like that because hey, I know how he feels) and a cowl so big that it's sort of my Accidental First Sweater.

The cowl (in a yarn that reminds me happily of dragons and sadly looks better on the skein than it does as I crochet with it) is going to have to be partially frogged and reworked so that it's smaller and more useful, but that's going to take some Thought. And I'm getting over a cold at the moment, bleh, so my brain is a little broken in the Clear Thoughts About How to Make a Cowl department.

Fortunately, my brain isn't too broken for reading doorstop novels, and 11/23/63 is pretty amazing so far. While it was a bit odd to start and I wasn't sure how I felt---it's a novel revolving around the Kennedy assassination, and I was expecting like...more 60s information/scene-setting (mmm, historical fiction) than I got at first, but then at some point whoomph, the book just became about the narrator's experience as a human being, and I was totally invested and on pins and needles. I'm over halfway through, and while I'm not as crazy about this one as I was about Under the Dome (I tend to like Uncle Stevie's sprawling big-cast novels more than his first-person-narrator novels in general, I think), I'm obviously enjoying it.

Also on the hooks is, of course, Beth's Owlaway Winner Owl, so here's a beaky sneak peek, but obviously this owl won't be able to make her full appearance here until she's safely at her new home.

So while neither of these particular WIPs will be finished by Friday, I do have some other FOs to share, like the one I was working on when I let PhotoToaster pretentiousify this shot for me. So stay tuned!

Owlaway Winner! And some photos.

2012-01-08T11:30:00.001-05:00

And the random number generator chooses...Beth, of Visions of Sugarplums, with comment number 9! :D

Beth, I've left you a comment on your blog, but if you see this first---please do email me (my email is on my blogger profile) so we can Talk Owls.

And a couple random squees for Squee Sunday (other than eeeee, time to make a custom owl!):

Eating some veggies with a tree stump for a table on a Saturday morning: apparently, being a bear in a children's book is fun. I certainly enjoyed my tree-stump dining experience---I have great plans to bring a thermos of tea and some teacups to this stump sometime, just for the LOL woodland tea party-ness of it all.

I've decided to attempt a "photo a day" project for 2012, and so far, so good. I'm trying not to stress too much about quality, and just let it be a blend of real-camera photos and crappy-iPod-camera photos. It's fun to wait for what feels like the right moment every day to document...something.

So here's the first sunrise of 2012.

And me in the process of shaking some rocks out of my shoes in the bank's ATM vestibule.

Go see some (possibly less odd, or better photographed) squee over at Rip It Good. :)

2012: The Year of More Wearable Projects? Possibly.

2012-01-06T09:14:00.001-05:00

Not that I'm abandoning critter-makin'---I could never---but I'm really enjoying the process of making (and wearing!) non-critters lately. And if I were a resolution maker, one of my resolutions would definitely be to branch out more with my crocheting this year, so I guess I'm off to an okay start with that here.

Above is my finished Tea Scarf, already off at its new donation-tree home. This was another crocheting-while-watching-Homeland (and becoming ever more addicted to/intrigued by it! But I'm trying not to just watch all of it at once. I still have about half the season to go.) project. The pattern is one I'd definitely recommend, it makes perfect distracted-crafting, as it's all just double crochets (and double crochet v-stitches for the ruffly trim), and you get a seriously cute product. Even in yarn that's a shade of pink that should not exist, ever. I didn't take a picture of this aspect of the scarf, but if you wrap it around your neck singly, it gives a sort of Elizabethan ruffled collar effect that has me planning on making one for myself at some point.

I also whipped up a Jayne Cobb Cunning Hat (see grainy screencap of the original hat on Firefly here) for Amineko. This was for a "craft something fast" class prompt over at the Knitting and Crochet House Cup (oh yes, it's time for that again, and I couldn't be more thrilled!), so when I realized that maybe I should have put ear holes in it, I just shrugged and forged on. I'm not sure how well earholes would have worked anyway, since Ms. Neko's ears---while big enough to cause silly lumps---aren't that big, and I don't know how much/how cutely they'd have poked out of the hat. I used this excellent tutorial to make the pom-pom. I'd never made a pom-pom before!

In more House Cup related crafting, I finished a long-languishing bear ears headband, which I started just for the cute factor, but I'm surprised by how warm and functional it is. My house is super-cold, but wearing a hat all day is just depressing, so this is a good compromise. I think more headbands are definitely in my crafting-future.

And one last owl-nouncement about my First Owl of 2012 Giveaway. I'll be picking the winner on Sunday, so please go enter if you'd like to choose and receive the inaugural owl of this year. :) And go check out more finished-and-fibers goodness over at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday!

Wednesday Whatsits and an Owl Giveaway.

2012-01-04T15:44:00.000-05:00

Today's going to be a post-and-run day, so I'll hopefully be able to catch up with all of your excellent WIPs through the linky-thing at Tami's Amis tomorrow.

I've got a few incidentals on the hooks, and even one AFO (Already Finished Object!), which will be turning up on Friday and appears in sneak-peek format above.

Also appearing in finished-state soon: ruffly scarf! Fairly hideous, but that's all the fault of the yarn (random stashy stuff from a giant bag at my grandmother's house, since this is meant for the library's donation tree and thus had to be part-withable), not the pattern, which is fun and fast to work and adorable.

I'm also making up a goldfish (because what else does one do with safety-orange Super Saver yarn?) from this pattern, which is available free until January 8th, if you're in a goldfish kind of mood yourself. The pattern uses a shaping technique I'd never seen before to create these fish-lips, which, now that I think about it, could also be done in red and become the beginnings of an excellent crocheted pomegranate.

And in the very, very beginning stages of "in progress," a skein of so-gorgeous-and-decadant-I-don't-even-know-what-to-do-with-it skein of Malabrigo sock, on the swift and ready to become a ball. I'm semi-lying about not knowing what to do with this one---I have an idea about an Adventure to have with this yarn, and I can't wait to get started. Sadly for my wallet (but not sadly for my brain, which is all jalksdfj;s COLOURS! QUALITY WOOL!! BE MINE!), this adventure is going to require buying more yarn.

But the most important reason for this post is to direct you all to my Year's First Owl Giveaway, which Ms. Daphne the mythologically-inclined owl (note the open copy of D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths open behind her---we went to the library for a photoshoot!) wants you to go and enter at the linked post! I'm offering the First Owl of 2012, who will be made to your specifications, and you have until Sunday to leave a comment there and enter. :)

Squee Sunday - The Year's First Owl Giveaway!

2012-01-01T19:46:00.001-05:00

Which I want to call an "owlaway," for some reason.

Anyway, to the point---being a part of the online-crafty-blogging community through WIP Wednesdays, FO Fridays, and Fibers on Friday (hosted at Tami's Ami's and Visions of Sugarplums, respectively) was definitely a huge highlight of my 2011. Even when I didn't have time or energy or internet access to be blogging, I had you guys and all of your sweetness (not to mention gorgeous projects) in my mind. And you've all been so sweet about my flock of owls! (For whom I will write the pattern/recipe someday. Someday.)

I want to issue a thank you for all of that warm fuzziness by giving one of you the chance to win the First Owl of 2012---to be made custom for you in colours and configuration of your choice! You could request tassled ears like the ones on Barnabas up there at the top, or Marilyn, shown below:

Or maybe you'd like a more realistic, ready-to-deliver-your-mail looking owl like Errol or Hedwig:

Or an owl inspired by sky and clouds!

Or a vampirical tinsel-winged owl!

I'm really excited to make a custom owl for one of you! I've never made one by request before, and my fingers are already itching to go rummage through my stash for the perfect yarns. All you have to do to enter is leave a comment on this entry. You also have to promise to take a photo or two of your owl in his or her new home, because I'm nosy like that. ;)

I'll link back to this post on Wednesday and Friday, and next Sunday (January 8th), a random number generator will pick the winner. Please make sure I have a way to contact you if you win!

I hope all of you are already having a good 2012.

The Final FO Friday of 2011...

2011-12-30T09:36:00.001-05:00

Which makes me feel like I should be doing some whole "Stuff I Made This Year" retrospective, but there's no time for that, so instead, meet the assembled Ms. Amineko.

If you've been thinking of making an Amineko, let me cast my vote for "OMG YES, MAKE ONE!" Easy to crochet, not that bad to assemble (much better than I was expecting!), and just so beautifully designed. I don't usually follow a pattern terribly closely, but I stuck to this one exactly, even down to the face embroidery (because it was just too sweet to try and change), and I think this is one of the more polished-looking things I've ever made, which I'm really pleased about.

I also made her a Lotus of Contemplation from this pattern. (Her next accessory is going to be a Jayne Cobb Cunning Hat. Are any of you guys Firefly fans?)

And the poses are just as adorable as advertised. Uh, even if one happened to have stuffed and assembled this pretty kitty while sitting in bed watching Blue Bloods without a really good flat surface to test the weighted-ness. (Patterns that are well-designed enough to surmount my haphazardness? A++!)

Definitely one of those patterns where I'm already mentally selecting a skein for the next one. (I'm thinking maybe good ol' Red Heart in Marrakesh. Thoughts? I loooove this Ms. Neko in solid, but I'm interested to try working one in a variegated yarn.)

And I've even learned enough about time management and project selection that I had time to make my first ever proper scarf, too. A library I go to a lot has a winter-warm-items donation tree, and I wanted to add something to it, so I picked a fun, mindless-TV-crochetin' pattern and made this up out of stash yarn while watching some of Water for Elephants (meh), the pilot of Homeland (totally hooked, so well done), and a random episode of Game of Thrones. And some more Blue Bloods, which is on in the background of the photo, hah. I was happy to discover that I've gained the patience to crochet into a long foundation chain, and had enough scarf-fun that my second scarf (from a different pattern) is already on the hooks. And mostly finished, in fact, so it will be appearing in 2012!

And here to wave a cheerful goodbye to 2011 is Pepper, probably my favourite owl of the year. (But don't tell the others.) I liked her enough that I couldn't bear to sell her---I actually laughed out loud as I tied on the silly little ear-tassels.

Go say hello to lots of amazing projects at Fibers on Friday and FO Friday! :D And thanks so, so much to all of you for being such a supportive and talented and inspiring community to be part of this year. <3

Cats and Rainbows. My WIPs are a Lisa Frank trapper keeper.

2011-12-21T15:10:00.002-05:00

Here's Ms. Amineko, going along quite nicely, I think. I just have the body to finish, and that can probably be done over the course of an episode or two of Blue Bloods (I have the first season from the library right now, and I'm mostly liking it. Good crafting-to TV.) tonight. Then comes the face-embroidery and assembly, which will be a little more difficult. I'm just lucky that I realized when I'd only gotten six rows into the body (1.0) that ajlksdjflksa THE BODY HAS TO BE DONE LAST FOR OPTIMAL STUFFING OH MY GOD, because the body's beans:stuffing ratio will be dependent on how the legs help it balance! So I frogged and started in on the arms and legs instead, and now here I am at body 2.0, feeling stupidly relieved to have caught that in time.

Also, if you're thinking of making one of these sweeties yourself and the charted pattern scares you, I'm happy to share the discovery of this version, put together by an enterprising blogger waaaay back in 2006. Someday I'll learn to read charted patterns. But not today.

And a couple things that I'm looking forward to getting back to once Amineko is all finished and gift-given:

I got a ball of Blue Moon Socks that Rock yarn as a "sorry you couldn't go to Rhinebeck" gift, and it's a whole "Baby's First Quality Yarn" experience for me. And oh my gosh, I'm in love. First of all, the colours are amazing---this photo doesn't do them justice at all. But it just feels so good to work with. Even working into the foundation chain (my hatred of said process is part of the reason I'm so into amigurumi, haha) wasn't a problem. This is going to be a pair of Fingerless Gloves of Win. Someday. And then I imagine I'll take the rest of the giant, gorgeous ball and roll around with it like a gleeful kitten. And then stalk the Blue Moon website pretending I have money for moooooore yarns.

I also started an Elise shawl,which I'm not sure about yet. Mine doesn't look as open and pretty as all the photos on Ravelry, which I think is partly due to the magic of blocking, but is also due to the fact that I'm not great with sock-weight yarn and a large-ish hook (I think this pattern calls for an H? maybe an I? I obviously haven't worked on it in a while), so my tension kind of sucks. I probably would have already frogged this and started over except that the yarn is sort of hard to frog, so I'm hesitating. I like the colours, though.

Awesomeness awaits you at WIP Wednesday, go ogle all the Christmas-craftin' (and just plain craftin') that's going on!

Small Projects Finish Fast.

2011-12-16T11:59:00.002-05:00

...which sounds like an acronym you'd use in elementary school, like Every Good Boy Does Fine to remember the notes of the treble clef.

So here are my handful of pocket cats, the absolute essence of "small project." The green and blue ones on the bottom were my "commissioned" cats, and went out to their new owner on Sunday.

I've also done a couple small projects from other people's (generous! lovely!) free patterns, like this teeny snowman from here at the Dapper Toad. I recommend this little guy, he's crocheted/shaped all in one piece, rather than making a separate head and body, and now I want to make an army of them in different coloured scarves...

I also couldn't resist (and also want to make more in different colours) this tiny stocking pattern from Amiguria. Another fast, fun, and blissfully-made-in-one-piece project. There are so many possibilities to embellish these things, too, it kind of makes my head spin just thinking about it! I've already started one in more traditional red and white, but got sidetracked by reading Sara Gruen's Ape House instead. (It's been a while since a book just...sucked me in. I'd forgotten how good it feels!) I'm liking this whole..."making ornaments" thing. I'm not usually that big into Christmas-anything, but I've got another tab open searching Ravelry for more patterns right now.

Perhaps adding to my feeling of ornament-making warm fuzziness is that I've been lucky enough to receive some beautiful things from across the pond as a result of belonging to this WIP Wednesday/FO Friday blogging community! I won the lovely skein of yarn from Nat at Misadventures in Craft, and got the amazing card (featuring the sweetest little handknit tree ever!) from Sam at Knitting Adventures. After Christmas, I'm definitely passing some luck and sweetness back into the world with a giveaway here at my blog, so stay tuned for that.

Until then, go check out FO Friday.

Oh! And because it feels wrong to make an FO Friday post sans owl, here's Muir, the naturalist owl. ~~He's one of the few still in my possession, if you'd like him~~. Okay, Muir is sold now, but maybe you'd like to swap me something you've knit or crocheted for an owl of your choice (after the holidays)? I'm sort of dying to swap with some of you guys, if you'd be open to the idea, and I'm mulling over thoughts about that to implement after Christmas, too...

WIP Wednesday, Short and Sweet.

2011-12-14T17:41:00.000-05:00

...And with a terrible photo, as I'm pressed for time and it's already pitch black. (Ugh, winter.)

If you search for "amigurumi" in Ravelry's pattern database and sort by "most projects," the first result you get is Amineko the cat, who is even the star of his (or her) very own book. While I've always admired the cute face and extreme poseability of this fine feline creation, and even regarded it as a kind of amigurumi rite of passage, in my head, Amineko falls firmly in the "TOO BIG!!" spectrum of amigurumi for me.

However (as proven by last year's pony semi-fiasco) Christmas-gurumi are an exception to the "TOO BIG!!" rule, and I have a hunch that Amineko's sweet face and array of meditative and cute poses will make my mom really happy. So I grabbed some good ol' scratchy Red Heart yarn in Turqua (I was tempted by a blue/purple variegated, but I think that Amineko will be better served by a solid colour, although I'm planning a stripe or two on the body, maybe) and started hooking. I wasn't sold on the head shape, or the head to muzzle ratio at first, but this was one of those cool projects where once I stuck some pins in it, I fell a little in love. As usual, there seems to be a definite reason why this is an uber-popular pattern. Even featureless and pinned together, it's cute and oddly friendly and peaceful looking (...that's probably just my vivid imagination filling in the blanks, there...).

I also have a couple random little ornament-type projects lying around, and those, rather than Ms. Neko, will probably be what will show up on Friday. But I can totally finish this cat by Christmas. The fact that she's not giant and needing a mane and tail attached will help!

See other people's presents and projects in progress over at WIP Wednesdays!

The Owl(s) and the Pussycat(s). And Chinese Food.

2011-12-09T15:06:00.000-05:00

First, the FO I'm most excited about---my painted papier-mache cat from almost a month ago. I asked my mom what sort of colour scheme she wanted, and she waffled, so I decided to go with something inspired by Laurel Burch's cats, which my mom loves even though she's not usually into such bold colours and prints. The face turned out a little sloppy because I was using too big a brush and the uneven surface of the papier-mache is a bit of a challenge to begin with, but still so much fun to paint on.

Without much further ado, I'd like to introduce you to some of the owls that have been piling up (and fortunately, selling!) while I haven't had any time or reliable internet access to blog.

Like Ms. Katherine the vampire owl, who took a walk to the cemetery with me to be photographed.

And Shinobi the very cunning and slightly lopsided (that's what I get for working with black yarn. at night. while watching Parks and Recreation.) ninja owl...

And Zoinks the zombie owl, pictured here with his novelty-yarn feathers ruffling in the wind, which I was so excited ended up in the photo!

And Maya, whose yarn (Loops and Threads Impeccable in Folklore) didn't work up as nicely as I thought it would! And this is only some of them! I don't want to owlwhelm you all, so I'll save some for later.

I wanted something smaller and cheaper for the craft fair table, so I devised these pocket cats. And photographed them on top of a tub of French lentils for no reason. A friend's six-ish year old son bought the grey one and---adorably---had his mom email my mom requesting friends for it in blue and green, so that's what will be on my hooks tonight as I curl up in front of the TV.

And last but not least, some Christmas-gift crocheting. More dumplings from this super-cute pattern, and this time I did the soy sauce bottle, too.

Check out other people's finished goodies at FO Friday. :D

Squee Sunday: A Random Photoessay About the World's Least Dramatic Dream Deferred.

2011-11-13T17:13:00.000-05:00

So I guess the first Order of Squee is the fact that all my owls (ten in all, including a couple who haven't been introduced to the internet-at-large yet like Ms. Hedwig above) went to a craft fair with my mom yesterday, and all of them except poor zany, pineapply Shawn got sold! And there are more craft fairs to come, so I have to become an Owl Factory over the next few weeks, I guess.

But before I get down to the owlin'...

It probably won't come as a surprise when I say that I was a weird kid. (Was?) One of my many quirks was my strange obsession with this papier-mache book, which I would pore over all the time and wax poetic to my mom about wouldn't it be cool to make one of these SNAKES? or a CAT? And yet somehow, I just...never actually did any papier-mache. (I wasn't very craftily-inclined as a kid, so that's not too surprising.)

I unearthed the book a little while ago and decided it was high time to fulfill my childhood dream. A few weeks ago, I made this silly spider (one of the first projects in the book!) to be part of my Halloween decor.

And oh my gosh, I was in love. Just the process of sitting on my kitchen floor at like, 8:30 in the morning (don't ask) and smooooothing flour-pasty newspaper strips over a stuffed-and-shaped plastic bag was so meditative and relaxing and then it actually dried (...I wasn't sure. It's really humid here and sometimes that ruins projects.) and painted up like a dream, despite its overall amateur lumpiness. I knew I wanted to make more.

So this weekend, it was cat time. I've always been a Cat Person, so I was pretty stupid-excited about this. I sat down with my exceedingly gorgeous model:

And got to stuffing-and-taping to try and get a nice sleeping-cat shape. (This particular sculpture---I feel weird calling something this haphazard a "sculpture"--- is going to be a sleepy-zen cat for my mom, as her hobbit-gift for my birthday. She's big on the "giving other people stuff on your birthday" thing, much like Mr. Bilbo Baggins.)

This is a terrible shot, but I love the shadow!

The next morning, I shifted everything over to a non-carpeted surface (hello, kitchen floor again...) and got working. Process: still amazing. Although this one was a little more difficult than the spider due to the ears and tail, which required fiddlier little strips of paper and more fancy wrapping.

Gloriously gooey.

And today, dried and covered with some gesso as I try to decide how it should look. Do I make it a splotchy grey-and-white replica of my cat? Make it whimsical and teal with spiral-spots? ...Paint it black to hide the flaws as much as possible? Whatever I end up doing, I'm happy (squeeful, in fact) that weird-kid-me was totally right about how much fun this papier-mache business is.

Hallobjects.

2011-10-21T11:58:00.001-04:00

Today's yet another post-and-run type day, but I had to introduce you to the Owl of the Week---Bruno, Zombie Owl 2.0. I initially envisioned him as being like...creepier than Petunia, and even gave him differently sized eyes to try and channel that weird-cute aesthetic, but I think it tipped over onto the "cute" side more than I was expecting. Look how inquisitive he looks, like he's tilting his little decaying head and hopefully chirping brains?

And an only-semi-FO. When I saw this "Scary Blackberry" Kool-Aid in the supermarket (and I hope they still have it, because I would so get more while it's still around for the season!), I couldn't resist. I dyed a little bite of yarn half in the blackberry and half in a combination of pineapple (which smells amazing) and blue-lemonade, and added a dab of Wilton's orange for extra Halloween-ness.

I started swatching it into a little basic amigurumi circle because I had to see how it would work up. I like how the blackberry is almost forming a spiral! I'm not sure what it wants to be yet, though.

As always, check out other people's amazing work at FO Friday. I'm off to the store to see if there's more Scary Blackberry Kool-Aid to be had. :D

Spooktacular Squee.

2011-10-16T19:26:00.003-04:00

Today's squee is all about beautiful weather (which I sadly wasted a little as I got caught up in a crocheting project---my first crocheted cables! More on that later this week.) and Halloween decorations. Halloween is my absolute favourite holiday, and every year I swear it's going to be the year that I really go all-out with the decorating, but it just...never is. I'm pretty much okay with that by now! I did, however, get this cool spider tea-light-holder thing (not pictured: two other sparkly-spiders mounted on the stake!) on uber-sale at Joann's. I think I'm going to have to buy those lame fake tealights for it, as real ones would just get blown out since the spiders, awesome as they are, won't offer much of a shield from the wind. (I insist on real candles for jack'o'lanterns, though. Fake ones would just be wrong.)

I also adorned the ugly hedge in front of my house with some fake spiderwebs and orange and too-blue LED ghost lights. Much better.

I ended up in a dollar store by accident on Thursday, and came home with this guy (...and a box of mini Moon Pies, another source of tasty and evil squee). I may go back there later for more of them---they had smaller ones that came hung on a garland, I don't know if I can resist. Not to mention the actually-kind-of-creepy gummy eyeballs. And super-cheap votive candles that might do for this year's jack'o'lanterns! And Reese's Peanut Butter Cups...

I generally scoff at my dad's weird affection for and/or obsession with dollar stores, but I think I've just been reminded of the appeal. This is probably bad.

But awesome dollar store finds aside, I think the most fun Halloween stuff is handmade. These guys are another accident---I found a tutorial that said you could create little felted balls by just sort of...shaking wool roving around in a sealed container with warm, soapy water. It didn't work out for me (it didn't help that the container I was using wasn't particularly watertight, so I got tired of shaking it and getting damp really quickly), but I ended up with these cool creepy-wispy shapes that I decided to needle felt into ghosts.

FO Friday: the One-Third Faceless Edition.

2011-10-14T07:18:00.000-04:00

A bit of a cheat for my first FO this Friday. This guy---Wonky the Tortoise, my mom's birthday-gurumi this year---was an FO last week, just sadly unphotographed. Wonky is so dubbed because my lack of sewing skills and the fiddliness of this pattern mean he's...well, wonky. But still freestanding, as a testament to the pattern's awesomeness. I knew he'd be fiddly and wonky when I began him, I've made Enough Ami to Know Better, but I couldn't resist the pattern. My mom loves a happy turtle, and this is one of the happier turtle amis I've ever seen. The way the face is designed is an ends-weaving-in nightmare, but worth it!

Especially when you can plunk him down in front of a plate of salad and hope the camera shifts into macro mode correctly, and end up with a photo where it almost looks alive. :D (I so enjoyed eating this salad after I took this photo. This is something turtles and I have in common.)

This week's Owl of the Week (available here!) is Petunia, the weirdly cutesy-poo zombie owl. (...Zombowl? No, probably not, that just makes it look like "zom-bowl," which isn't a bad idea, really.) I wasn't planning on a pink-and-green zombie-owl, but when I was sifting through the eyelash yarns, this one just called out to me to go with the ghastly-green-fleck I was using for the body. Next up, a non-cutesy zombie-owl. I'm not sure how I like the effect of the coloured safety eyes rather than the solid black, but Ms. Petunia was clear that she NEEDED MOAR PINK, so I complied. You don't want to argue with a zombie-owl. Her little beak (in slightly-sparkly green with very subtle baby pink swirls!) is pretty sharp.

And the FO I'm most excited about this week, my Camille shawlette/scarf/whatever. This is a crocheted version of the beautiful and popular Saroyan (and it totally tickled me, as a Bones fan, to be making a pattern named for/inspired by a character from the show!), and while I don't usually like crocheted adaptations of knitted designs that much---crochet and knit have such different properties, and often trying to reproduce elements of one crafting method in the other just...doesn't work for me---I think I might like the crocheted leaf-border better than the original knit version.

You guys know me. I don't do big projects. But the Knitting and Crochet House Cup nudged me into this one by having a 200 yard requirement for a task, so I started perusing Ravelry's crazy wealth of patterns and this sang to me right away. The yarn I used wasn't a match made in heaven for the pattern, for two reasons. One of which I knew going in: it was the wrong weight. This is a worsted, and the pattern calls for DK, but I was seduced by this colourway (Bernat Mosaic in Medusa), so I went ahead anyway, and the resulting shawl is a little too big-and-blocky for me to wear in a pretty way, and it obviously has zero drape, but it's nice and cuddly scrunched up as a scarf. I don't know if I'm going to keep it or give it as a gift. My initial instinct was gift, but then I wore it for hours the other day, so...

I love the way the colours worked up...sort of. The striping-ness of the yarn combined with the long rows of the shawl's midsection made for some too-bold striping on the leaf border. So I've learned a twofold lesson about what to do with the next one. (Because there's going to be a next one. This pattern is amazing, I definitely recommend giving it a try---even just swatching the first couple repeats to see how the leaf border just...makes itself, all pretty, is a really cool and worthwhile crochet experience. I've already swatched the beginning of the shawl two or three more times to see what it does in different yarns!) Lighter weight yarn in a more subtle-variegated (as opposed to self-striping) yarn. I'm thinking something in a peachy orange, maybe...

Check out some other amazing proejcts (some by much more experienced and impressive shawl-makers than I!) at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday!

FO Friday: Everything Has a Face! Even Hats!

2011-10-07T09:13:00.000-04:00

Possible excuses for my complete lack of blogging mojo lately: brain slugs. I made the first of these guys (the big one on the far left, done in cotton) from this super-simple pattern for International Crochet Day. I decided that for once, I was going to start and finish something simple, without modifying and adding details and generally complicating the process until a three-inch-tall brain slug ends up taking me several weeks to make. It was fun to just sit down and make something in like, an hour, and totally fitting to celebrate International Crochet Day with the joy of Instant Crochetification, I think. :) So I made more---the one in the middle is wool and felted (I felted him by taking him in the shower with me, hah) with his eye needle-felted on, the one on the right is made from sparkly yarn.

I also did another monster---I'd been meaning to make more freeform monsters since the birth of Bothersome the Slumberless months ago, and I ended up with Melody (that's a link to her page on Ravelry, which has some details and more photos). I made her as part of a team effort for Care of Magical Creatures class (Harry Potter Knitting and Crochet House Cup = still the best thing ever), and got inspired by one of my teammates' photoshoot of their knit monster on the beach, so I gave Melody a beach photoshoot of her own. I love that she almost looks animate in the photo above, like she's poking at the shell with her little tentacle and going oooOOOooo. Melody may end up starring in a Halloween giveaway a little later.

And what's an FO Friday from me without an owl? This is Cressida, the astronomer owl. I made her little telescope from polymer clay, and completely failed to photograph her adequately.

Reginald the gnome (made from a pattern you can find here) fared somewhat better in the photography department. Inspired by the success of the shower-felted brain slug, I took Reginald into the shower with me, too, and then dried him off by popping him in the oven set to "warm" for a while because he needed to be finished on a deadline! I needle felted his beard and then, because I can't leave well enough alone, sewed some washers onto him for visual interest. His hat is made in my own Kool-Aid dyed yarn.

Are any of you guys members of Craftsy? I am, although I haven't really had time to explore the site fully yet. But I did have time to read their email about a drive they're running to make chemo hats for Kaps for Kendall (oh, how it pains me to type "kaps" with a k...), and when I saw this silly yellow terrycloth yarn, it screamed rubber duck!! to me, and this hat was born. The hat itself is sloppy (it is impossible to see your stitches very well in yarn like this, especially at night) but snuggly, and the face (all improvised after doing a quick google for "rubber ducky" to see what their eyes look like) makes me giggle, so I hope it'll cheer up the person who ends up with it.

I also did my first Tiny Bunny Drop after being alerted to the existence of the Tiny Bunnies Movement by Contessa. This is Bronwen the Book Bunny, crocheted up while I watched Body of Proof (which is one of my favourite shows-to-crochet-to, for some reason, I guess because it has the perfect balance of like...fun and ignorableness?) nestled under several blankets (why so cold already, October? please stop.). I left her on top of a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at the library in hopes that someone awesome will find her. Today I think I'll make one to drop off at a Starbucks, maybe in a lighter brown, and I can name her "Mocha" and then reward myself with a latte...

Other good rewards-to-self: looking at the prettiness on FO Friday and Fibers on Friday!

Various Objects, Finished.

2011-09-23T13:49:00.002-04:00

Well. Not having the time or presence of mind to blog for weeks makes for an impressive, if somewhat cheaty, FO Friday post. (Totally not worth it, though. I miss sharing projects and stuff with you guys!!)

The whole Harry Potter Knitting and Crochet House Cup thing is doing amazing things for my productivity, however. The photo above---well, the yarn parts anyway--- was my homework for Defense Against the Dark Arts class, where I did a little yarn-dyeing with Kool-Aid. (Awesome. Must try again soon. I'm also thinking of putting some in my hair. I missed that boat in the 90s, I have to make up for it now!)

For Potions, the prompt was deflating draughts, with one option being "deflate your stash of yarn that's been hanging around for six months or more," and I used a lot of tiny, otherwise pretty useless yarn balls that have been around for uh, embarrassingly longer than six months, and made myself a hexagon scarflette. I even crocheted some light cotton yarn into tiny balls for buttons. (Those would be the teal blobs on the top left.)

I used the first two rows of a flower motif that was supposed to be a scarf from some random crochet magazine. This was my first experience actually joining motifs, and I got so excited about the puzzle-piece nature of putting them together that I didn't do the most amazing job actually stitching them in the neatest possible way...next time will be better. This isn't a perfect object by any means---I made it rather too high in the neck, and it folds over onto itself when worn---but it is wearable and cozy-ish, and as someone who rarely makes wearable items, it was kind of exciting.

...but not as exciting as the bear slippers! It got cold (well, to reptilian me) here for a few days, and I couldn't find any of my slippers from last winter and my feet were freezing, so I made a pair. I used this pattern, which is awesome. I modified it a little, but these are still a bit big, so the next pair (I already bought some yarn for them, this is how much I like these slippers) are going to have to get modified even more, which I'm looking forward to (mainly because I'm not making them yet and fitting-and-frogging and fitting-and-frogging...).

I did them in brown because my mama raised me all practical-like in that regard---when we're making something to walk on, we do it in dirt colours!---and halfway through (discouraged, I'll admit, by the relative non-cuteness of slippers in Red Heart Super Saver brown) I decided they would be bear slippers. So they got ears and faces, and they've hardly left my feet since. I think I could get into this whole...making things to wear thing.

But then again, there's nothing like a nice project with a face. I started this dragon (whose full name is Quintus Junius Caramel) at like, 5 AM Tuesday morning, thinking I'd probably frog him and restart. The pattern called for bulky yarn, and I haven't really done any ami in bulky, and I didn't think I'd like it. I was happily wrong, I love how fluffy-squishily this worked up. And somewhere along the line, it became clear that he needed a chef's hat and apron. I don't really remember why, but they were fun to make! I also made the mat he's standing on from this awesome potholder pattern. I'd never worked anything constructed like this before, where you're working in a spiral but switching colours and letting the colours sort of...chase themselves around to create the spiral rows, and it was fascinating.

And, of course, at least one owl. Meet Lucy (named for Lucy Westenra in Dracula), the vampire owl. She didn't turn out exactly as I envisioned, but I sort of like her anyway. Even if I broke her first blood-smeared beak and had to make another one and it held me up for days...

I think Lucy is actually getting purchased, even, which is beyond cool, and probably necessitates the making of Vampire Owl 2.0, which will give me a chance to try different colours and maybe the eye-circles design instead of the solid-face-piece design, which I think might be a better vampy look?

Go check out other people's finished (or just fibery-wonderful) things at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday!

What's Full of Double Crochets and Getting Mailed to South Dakota?

2011-09-02T09:22:00.001-04:00

This stuff! I'm happy to say that Sprout the Squid seems to approve of my star-shaped dishcloth. You always want to please your squid.

I haven't got time for a quality post (or quality photos, ugh) today, but I did want to get these things up to share, and I'm looking forward to catching up with all of your Friday posts tonight or tomorrow. :D

I used this pattern, and loved how quickly and enjoyably it worked up.

I also made a square cloth, using a block from this book. I love the look of mitred squares, but hadn't tried one yet. The book has multiple styles/methods of them, so there may be more on the way...

This was one of those instances where the yarns matched a little too well, I think. This is three colours (yellow, a variegated one, and red) of Bernat Handicrafter Cotton (which somehow seems softer/easier to work with to me than Sugar and Cream, but that may be a figment of my imagination...), and they're so well-matched that the striping effect of the square got a little lost. Next time, more contrast in my colours.

I also whipped up one of the ever-popular Olivia's Butterfly hats, a pattern I've been wanting to make since I saw it on an FO Friday a million years ago. This owl was nice enough to model it for me (it's way too small for my giant skull).

Definitely more hats-and-cloths on the way before I box it all up to send to the Pine Ridge Reservation later this month. :)

Check out other people's Friday goodies over at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday.

How the Storm Stole My Mojo.

2011-08-31T11:56:00.001-04:00

When it became clear that Hurricane Irene was really on her way (...we always hope that storms will just...shuffle out to sea before they get up here to New York), I envisioned all kinds of crafting-by-candlelight time.

And then, in a fit of bureaucratic ass-covering, I got evacuated, which was scary and stressful and a pain in the ass---thankfully---unnecessary, but also shut down the crafting part of my brain for the weekend.

So in the end, I spent the storm (which was slowed waaaaay down by the time she got here, and I won the Power Line Lottery and never even lost electricity, let alone had anything sustain any damage besides "lots of annoying fallen leaves and branches") napping and cooking vegetable gumbo and watching Winter's Bone and reading Kelly Link's amazing collection of short stories Pretty Monsters (about which there will possibly be more to say later). So all of the "here are my hurricane goodies!" items that I wanted to present to you...don't exactly exist.

I do, of course, have an owl (...or three) on the skeins, but over the past two days I've been Distracted by Dishcloths. (Or washcloths, in this case, but I couldn't resist the alliteration.)

I ended up making these in the most roundabout way possible---thanks to Ness of Bunnies and Bettas, I remembered the existence of the Harry Potter Knitting and Crochet House Cup on Ravelry, and got there just in time to sign up to be sorted for this upcoming term. So uh, this is just fair warning that I guess WIP Wednesdays and FO Fridays for the next three months are going to be filled with projects prompted by said group. The class assignments go live tomorrow and I'm so excited. Especially since the group has already led me to make stuff I wouldn't have otherwise.

Through a bunch of random link-clicking in the House Cup forums, I discovered the For the Children of Pine Ridge group (also on Ravelry), which coordinates efforts to send knitted and crocheted items to the Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and one of their August/September projects is making cotton washcloths for the elderly people on the reservation.

I love the idea of handmade dish/washcloths, but I don't live in a climate where they're practical. It's really humid here, so anything as heavyweight as a cloth crocheted from worsted-weight cotton is going to turn into a mildew ball. So I'm thrilled to have a good cause to make them for and a place to send them. The lame, teasy photo above is because both of these are actually finished, just not off the skeins with woven ends yet. But oh, more are on the way. If any of you have a favourite crocheted dishcloth pattern, please share it with me!

Now go, and roll around in the yarny coolness that is WIP Wednesday!

Some Squee Items for Today:

2011-08-21T15:28:00.000-04:00

Beginning my day (well, after breakfast and email checking) with a bike ride to chill at the beach for a while and start reading a fun, fluffy, southern-set YA novel. Summer always makes me want to read novels set in the (American) south. Last summer I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird, closely followed by The Help, and went on a little southern cooking kick that included sage cornbread and homemade BBQ sauce.

Ridiculous photoshoots for inanimate objects. As part of my "get ass in gear, list things in online store" campaign, here's Sunset the owl, last seen on FO Friday a few weeks ago. I like to give my crocheted toys weird little personalities when I list them, and I decided Sunset is a movie buff and took him outside to photograph accordingly. I was so gleeful when I remembered I had a glass bowl this small for his popcorn!

New towels!! I really love towels, for some reason, so I was happy to find that Target had an uber-sale on them last week and picked some up. I'm really excited about the orange one. The more I craft, the more I realize that I like colours I always thought I didn't like. I mean, I still wouldn't wear orange, necessarily, but it definitely has its applications and its own beauty.

Sadly, it's so humid that the towels aren't going to dry all the way on the line, so I'm off to pop them in the drier for a bit.

Go share your own squee over at Rip It Good!

Owls, Owls Everywhere...

2011-08-19T08:34:00.000-04:00

...And not a tutorial in sight. :| Yet. I've been having a week where I've (fortunately!) had time to craft, but (unfortunately!) had no time to sit around writing about crafting. But thanks so much to all of you who volunteered to read/test the tutorial when it exists. I really appreciate it and will be in touch.

Anyway, on to the owls!

Harry had only just started his porridge when, sure enough, there was a rushing sound overhead and a hundred or so owls streamed in, circling the hall and dropping letters and packages into the chattering crowd. A big, lumpy package bounced off Neville's head and, a second later, something large and grey fell into Hermione's jug, spraying them all with milk and feathers.

"Errol!" said Ron, pulling the bedraggled owl out by the feet. Errol slumped, unconscious, onto the table, his legs in the air and a damp red envelope in his beak.

(from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)

Poor Ron. What's worse than getting a Howler? Getting a Howler delivered by your family's embarrassing old owl who lands in people's beverages! (In the movie adaptation of Chamber of Secrets, Errol lands in a bowl of ~~chips~~ crisps instead, hence my photoshoot. The crisps I could do [these are actually hummus chips, and Errol only got a couple crumbs on his fluff], but popping my crocheting into a jug of milk was obviously not happening.)

When I started a more neutral/natural coloured owl, I decided to name him after the Weasleys' tired old Errol. And then discovered just yesterday that Errol is supposed to be a great grey owl and uh, looks nothing like this. But the name is sticking, and now I want to make a grey owl...

Errol has a different face than the other owls, instead of making two separate eye roundies, I worked into both sides of a chain to form an oval and made some shells for the widow's peak shape. I'd initially planned on giving him sleepy eyelids, but I liked him too much as-is once I popped the safety eyes in.

I'm trying to get my ass in gear and list some of my stuff at my Zibbet shop, so I've started with Errol. I'm always iffy about whether the photos I take for this blog translate well as product photos, but I was pretty pleased with his photoshoot, so I went ahead.

I also finished Gus-from-Psych in owl form the other day (and, as you can see, owl-Shawn didn't want to let owl-Gus have his moment in the spotlight...). When I think of Gus, I think of the very classy pastel-and-grey tones that he's often dressed in on the show, so that inspired my colour choices here.

Here's a closeup of Gus's pattern rows, which are just alternating stitches in grey and green, but I don't do a lot of (...or any, really) colourwork, so it was kind of new and interesting to me to get into the rhythm of holding two yarns and switching between them.

Gus and Errol both have rounded heads instead of pointed feather-ears, and I have to flail a little about the awesomeness of June Gilbank's ultimate finish for amigurumi, which I used to finish said rounded heads. Seriously, awesome. So much neater than my usual haphazard tugging and sewing.

I couldn't resist this little skein of random yarn from a $1 yarn kiosk at the craft store. "Mix fiber"! How...specific! I thought it might be nice for owl wings/details, but when I started working with it...

It made itself into dusties. Currently in Original and Dust Bunny varieties! This photo is pretty terrible, but this yarn seriously works up like it's made of dust and drier lint, which I could see being off-putting, but if you just go with it, it's kind of awesome. I want to turn these guys into keychains, I think, but I'm not sure of the best way to do that without having whatever I'm attaching them with start to pull the crochet out of shape. Suggestions are welcome!

Check out other people's less dusty (and hummus-chip-crumby) projects at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday.

Owl Waffles, Friday Edition.

2011-08-12T08:27:00.000-04:00

Everyone say hi to Shawn, a craaaazy owl who freelances for the Santa Barbara police department. (Anyone else a Psych fan? I'm not caught up with the show because I don't have cable, but I love it.) Anyway, if you're not familiar with the show, Shawn Spencer is its central character, and he's hilarious and super-zany and inspired this owl.

Pineapples are also a running gag on the show, so that inspired the yellow/hint of brown coloration for Shawn's body, and this pineapple-based photoshoot. (That pineapple is getting cut up and grilled tonight, yum.) I won't say too much about Shawn just now, since he'll be your Owl Along Guide next week. I hope.

Actually, speaking of the Owl Guide---would any of you awesome people like to volunteer to be a test audience for it (uh, when it exists...)? I wouldn't be asking you to actually make an owl (unless you want to!), just let me know if it makes sense, etc.

I finally got around to finishing the Dotee Doll I showed you all weeks ago, too. There's really no comprehensive tutorial around about how to make these, it seems, but the basic components seem to be that they're limbless blobs with sweet little faces (generally embroidered, but my embroidery sucks so I painted mine on felt with a teeny brush), hanging loops on top, and beaded "tails" on the bottom.

Since mine is going to someone as part of a books-and-tea themed swap, I gave her a little felt book which you can actually open (and hold closed by wrapping thread around the button), and teacup fabric on the back. My sewing is still awful, but there are aspects of this that I'm pleased with (the book, mostly) and it was a cool learning experience, so I'm considering it a success.

I also used this tutorial/template to make a giant felt flower hair clip. I think it speaks well of the template's simplicity and A+ design that I made this with giant, blunt scissors (too lazy to go dig up smaller, sharper ones, it was late at night...) while I was half-asleep and it still turned out this well! I need some felt in magentas/purples to do another one, I'm dying to layer them with the heathery grey.

I love that you guys were excited about the banana oatmeal waffles, which turned out really tasty. Here, have a bite---if you look really closely, you can see the rolled oats in there, being toothsome and delicious. The recipe I used is from the Vegan With a Vengeance cookbook, and I found it reproduced online here. I did mine sans raisins, because I wanted to top them with sliced strawberries instead.

In other FO Food this week, this thing doesn't really look like much, but I'm ridiculously proud of it. It's a miniature lime ice cream pie that I made for my mom for her anniversary, and I made the ice cream myself by bastardizing several different recipes and keeping my fingers crossed, and it worked. It even popped out of the heart-shaped mold I froze it in with minimal trouble! I have about a billion photos of the process of making it and may give it its own post at some point in the future.

Check out other people's weeks in projects at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday.

Waffles and Owls. (Possibly the next big craft trend?)

2011-08-10T12:24:00.000-04:00

You can tell it's a WIP kind of day because I'm wearing my F hook in my hair. I was hoping to get my owl tutorial done for FO Friday, but I think it'll have to wait until next week, since there's a lot of photo editing and writing to be done and there's only the one day between now and FO Friday, so...

But I have at least one finished owl who will be ready to say hello to you all, whether or not directions about making him are also ready. Here's a sneak peak:

And I seem to have started two more owls, hence the hook-in-hair...

It's probably bad form to name the owls while they're just cups and/or discs, but these are Errol and Gus.

In the non-yarn, unceasing WIP that is me trying to stay in motion every day, I've been trying to regain my long-lost bicycle riding muscles. Before June, I basically hadn't ridden a bicycle since the late 1990s, and my legs were all ...and we'd be happy to let it stay that way, please stop! But I've been telling them to STFU and doing it anyway, and it's finally starting to get to the point where sometimes, it just feels good to be riding along, which has me in a stupid-happy mood this morning.

...Contributing to this mood is my food WIP, oatmeal banana waffles.

Go check out other people's WIP Wednesday posts while I turn them from raw materials into (hopefully) waffle magic. :)

Squee: It's Serious Business.

2011-08-07T16:13:00.001-04:00

First, the Obligatory Food Squee. I love a good weirdly shaped vegetable, e.g. cutting into a red pepper this morning and discovering that it had (mostly) absorbed its own twin like some kind of horror story. I think that's Stephen King's The Dark Half, actually. So this is like that, but with peppers. And pretty colours.

And this piece of ginger, which I had to buy because (a) it looked like good ginger, and (b) I use a lot of ginger, but mostly (c) because I thought it looked like a lobster! I have plans for this ginger which involve lentils, cauliflower with curried tomato sauce, and my ice cream maker. Not all at the same time. I'm going to be sad to cut off its claw-bits and mince them, though. At least it's been photographed for posterity.

It rained on and off this morning, and I thought I wouldn't be able to use the grill, but it cleared up, and now I have two plates of delicious grilled stuff. On the other plate and thus not pictured: sweet potato slices, cherry tomatoes, green beans, red pepper (evil, absorbed its own twin red pepper), slices of jicama. (Which is a vegetable I've only discovered recently, and only discovered grilled like, two days ago, and Best. Thing. Ever.)

I'm also working (very slowly) on my owlmaking tutorial, which is fun and an interesting experience, although I sort of forgot to take enough photos as I owled along the other day, so we'll see how it starts to come together when I feel like editing said photos and writing the captions...

The idea of revealing exactly how simple and haphazard my owl-creating process is sort of makes me laugh. But there's something almost...cathartic, maybe, about revealing trivial but potentially sort of embarrassing things to a friendly audience.

I remember when I was in high school, a boy I had a crush on and I would sometimes hang out in the same classroom before the school day began. One morning I was there with some other friends, and he wasn't. I was perched on a desk talking to people, and through a combination of distraction and a badly-balanced desk, ended up getting tipped onto the floor. I landed on my feet (like a cat), but it was still loud and ridiculous and I thought to myself I'm glad the boy I like wasn't here for that one!

So imagine my surprise when, while I was talking to him later on in the day, I found myself saying "You missed it this morning, I fell off a desk!"

I don't know, I guess (for me, anyway) it's just that we live in a world where we're supposed to present ourselves as perfect a lot of the time, and it's special to find a person or group of people with whom it feels comfortable to admit that we're not, and even be specific about how. And the wonderful people from the community of WIP Wednesdays/FO Fridays who are nice enough to read this blog are definitely that kind of group of people, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to think about that.

Go share your own warm fuzzies over at Squee Sunday. :)

Sheep Inna Hat.

2011-08-05T08:42:00.004-04:00

...Similar to Discworld's sausage inna bun, only not.

A bit of a cheat today, since I finished this last week, but Sharon hadn't received it yet, so it had to stay a secret. Anyway, I can now introduce Witchy Ewe, a 3-D version of Sharon's adorable business mascot, a knitting sheep in a very elegant witch hat.

I dyed the yarn for Witchy Ewe on a hot, sunny day when I had a bunch of long-drive errands to run, so I took the yarn along with me and set it out to finish drying under the back windshield of the car because I was too excited to leave it on the laundry line all by its lonesome!

Here's what it looked like once it was dried and unskeined...

...made into a ball...

And crocheted into a sheep-shape and then brushed with a suede brush for more authentic wooliness. This was my first time dyeing/working with my own variegated-ish yarn, and even though it didn't turn out quite the way I'd planned, it was fun watching the colours appear as I went through the whole process.

Witchy Ewe was made from this really simple pattern, but I did the head differently as the version in the pattern, while adorable, didn't give me enough volume to put a witch hat on. (I made the hat via needle and wet-felting, and it's kind of a wonky shape, but I hoped the beads would distract from that...)

The "foot puffs" are genius, so cute and they really do hold the sheep up nicely. I (obviously) did mine in a contrasting colour.

Witchy Ewe's more-voluminous-than-the-pattern-specified head and hat made it necessary to give her a little help standing upright correctly, foot puffs or no, so I tucked her into the ridiculously sequin-trimmed kangaroo pocket of this shirt and we took a bicycle ride down to the beach for a satisfactory Balancing Rock. (Cue another one of those wonderful, absurd LOL what am I even doing right now? crafty moments. I love those when they roll around.)

And here's my impossible-to-photograph (especially in this morning's Grey Glare Hell Light) Harry Potter project, a Chocolate Frog. I used the basic idea of this adorable and super-popular pattern, at first with the idea of making a more realistic-looking toad. But then I thought omg, Chocolate Frog! and decided to give it crocheted bobble eyes, so it would look more like it was all molded out of chocolate and all of a piece. I also made it a bunch smaller, and then ended up frogging (LOL) the body to change the way the increases were done so it would be less symmetrically shaped. I actually really like the shape I ended up with, as it has a little bit of a Marshmallow Peep thing with a broader base and a lumpy body, which makes it seem more candy-like. (...and did I write down what I did? No.)

Hopefully I'll be able to figure it out again, because I want to make some more flavours---this guy is dark chocolate, and I'd love to have a trio in dark, milk, and white---and then hopefully photograph them better. This one is uh...purposefully destined to become an ornament, because I was finishing him in a half-asleep haze and didn't think to weight him, so he tips forward.

And here's Wednesday night's dinner (with a closer view available here), which I'm counting as an Official FO, since I shared it in its WIP state. The tempeh recipe and serving suggestion of grilled portobello mushrooms and barely-cooked green beans came from 101 Cookbooks, and I can now vouch for its deliciousness. The sweet-salty-smoky flavours of the marinade all worked really well together, and the tempeh (which is made from cultured soy and, in the case of the one I bought, other tasty grains) grilled really nicely. I meant to serve it over quinoa, but ended up making some homemade tortillas instead. (The recipe for those is from Homesick Texan and is amazing. You can keep making it smaller and playing with different flour combinations and it keeps on working beautifully.) I did up this haphazard lotus-flower-ish presentation in a hurry because I didn't want everything to get cold!

For more projects by people who probably aren't trying to pass off their dinner as fiber arts, check out FO Friday and Fibers on Friday!

A Wednesday with Lots of Magic.

2011-08-03T12:26:00.001-04:00

Today marks the year anniversary of WIP Wednesday, which is amazing. I've only been participating since...I think late November, but the wonderful people I've talked to and stellar projects I've gotten to see and be inspired by have made me a happier crafter and person in general. Many hugs and skeins of gorgeous yarn to Tami for organizing it and giving us all a way to connect!

I've got a million WIPs whirring around in my brain today, and regretfully none of them are particularly photogenic at the moment.

Like my Owl Tutorial, which currently looks like this:

Or my pattern test hat, which I think I'm going to have to frog, boo. (But not because of the pattern, which was A+ and I'll definitely link you all to it when it's available. I'm not sure if it will be for purchase or free or what...)

I decided to make the burgundy colour more fun by adding some Gryffindor gold, but the gold yarn is a sliiiightly heavier weight, which was enough to make the hat bigger than I'd like, and also added annoying increase-wobbles. So while I love the pattern, and the way this hat looks sitting on the table, I don't think I'd love the way it looks on me. I may just frog up past the gold and then add stripes in black instead, since I have black in the same weight as the burgundy.

Here's another little Harry Potter inspired mystery project, which is going to require a little bit of pattern modification fun. :D

And for my next trick (as well as the only WIP I'll actually finish today, I suspect...) I will attempt to transfigure these things into this dinner.

Fresh Food, Old Books.

2011-07-31T12:18:00.001-04:00

I'm not (and never have been) the biggest fan of summer, as a season. The heat is not my friend. I do, however, heartily appreciate the fact that the heat makes things like this possible:

Green beans! Green beans so fresh that when you steam them, they squeak against your teeth!

Mint for my tea (or tabbouleh, or beet salad...), growing just steps outside the door!

Giant, amazing, some-of-them-are-almost-black cherries on sale at the supermarket!

And an unexpected squee for today:

Sometimes people just leave boxes or bags of books outside the door of my local library, and even though I have no time or space for the books I already have, I can never resist nabbing one or two. Today someone had left several grocery bags of classic books there, and I sat down on the pavement to sift through them. When I came upon this copy of A Tale of Two Cities, I decided to read its famous first line. Imagine my surprise when, following best of times, worst of times, bla bla, there was more and it was droll and sharp and actually quite funny!

I should maybe explain that I have a stupid lingering suspicion about "classic" books. I didn't grow up reading older literature, for the most part (except when they made me in school, which gave it a sour taste), so the more antiquated language of all the things you're Supposed to Read isn't something I was ever accustomed to or had the patience for.

I'm getting better in my ever-advancing age, though, and earlier this year I finished and loved my very first Jane Austen book (Sense and Sensibility), so I was thrilled to really like the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities and find that Dickens, too, might be readable and enjoyable to me now.

And as an added bonus, the book's former owner, Mr. William Garrigan of Brooklyn, New York, circa 1927, was nice enough to sign and date it and give it some added awesomeness. While I myself hate to write in books, I love books that other people have written in, so I was doubly happy to carry this home with me.

The Owl Formerly Known as "Rusty."

2011-07-29T08:33:00.000-04:00

Who, thanks to a suggestion from Stephanni, is going to be called "Sunset" instead. Which is especially fitting since I was rushing to finish him before sunset yesterday so he could get photographed, since I knew I wouldn't have time this morning. And now it's raining, to boot, so for once my timing was actually good.

Stephanni also flattered me by asking if I had a pattern for these, so I may try to write one up, except I think it will be more of a...tutorial type thing, since these owls are made with the most basic-ever crocheted shapes and really come together through yarn choices and assembly. So it's less about like...shaping and the number of stitches and stuff and more about the overall process. Which is actually a good summation of how I look at making amigurumi overall, now that I'm typing that out. I'm looking forward to trying to put this together, I've never done a how-to before.

Anyway, here's Sunset's profile...

...and back view. His wings were done in the also-discontinued Lion Fancy Fur yarn, which had alllll the annoyance-factor the Tiffany yarn lacked. I actually trimmed the yarn on his wings a bit once he was all sewn together, the eyelashiness was sort of out of control!

And here he is hitching a ride in the pocket of my Laundry Dress, a dress I got in the little girls' clearance rack in Target almost solely because it had these great pockets, which are A+ for clothespin storage and thus higher efficiency while I'm hanging up or taking down wash. Clearly, they can also store amigurumi, which is definitely going to come in handy. I already have the next two owls planned, with names and colour schemes to give a nod to some of my TV-lovin' geekery. And it's just occurred to me to maybe do a sort of gothy-vampirey owl in black and red...

Check out other people's Friday projects at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday!

Progress of Several Varieites.

2011-07-27T11:47:00.001-04:00

So one of my WIPs this week is making a different kind of progress right now, as it's progressing through the mail to Sharon of witchyknits! But here's a nebulous preview.

And here's the next owl-to-be, who will hopefully be finished (and not terribly different looking, I'm afraid, since these things are so simple) on Friday. For now, he is dubbed "Rusty," which is really unoriginal and stupid and if any of you guys can think of a better name for him, I'd be thrilled to re-dub. :D

It's interesting that while currently-Rusty and Tiffany are the same basic number of stitches and are both worked in Loops and Threads Impeccable ombres, the colour pooling is completely different. Tiffany ended up with more blots and flecks of colour, where Rusty is coming out much more evenly striped. ...It's a good thing I wasn't at all invested in these things being symmetrical, I guess!

I'm also pattern testing a slouchy hat pattern. So far, so good, except for the part where the yarn I initially wanted to use was a nightmare to work with, so I just grabbed a random skein of Simply Soft (the yarn the pattern designer used for hers) in a colour that I'm not crazy about the idea of wearing, necessarily.

And a WIP (of sorts) which I'm anxious to get back to...Deborah Wiles' Each Little Bird That Sings. I've been devouring Ms. Wiles' (wonderful, quirky, emotionally true) novels slowly since I read Countdown, which was a really innovative and sharp piece of historical fiction set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and features both amazing graphic-art interludes and a great POV character and tone that sometimes reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird or Mary Downing Hahn's Stepping on the Cracks, a book otherwise known as "the source of most of my knowledge re: life on the home front during World War II."

But enough book reviewing. Go see what everyone else is up to over at WIP Wednesday!

Finished Feathers, Etc,

2011-07-22T09:20:00.000-04:00

Oh, the nudge-tastic powers of FO Friday, without which I would have left this little fluffball in pieces for weeks rather than dragging out my needle and thread. Meet Tiffany the owl (and how excited was I that you guys knew she was an owl on Wednesday, when she was wingless and beakless? very!), so named because her feathery wings were done in Lion Brand Tiffany yarn, which sadly looks to be discontinued. It was much easier to work with than other novelty yarns I've used (e.g. Fun Fur), it's really silky and just...slipped right along. Of course, it helps when using any novelty yarn to do something really really small---these wings were about...sixteen stitches apiece, total. So even if the yarn had been annoying, it wouldn't have been annoying for long.

Here are her side and back views. When I sent stuff to craft fairs with my mom last fall/winter, both of us had made some amigurumi owls, and we couldn't keep them on the ~~shelves~~ table, so I'm hoping that will be true again this year. And for once I'm thinking ahead and starting them now and not uh, the week and/or night before the craft fair(s). So more owls of this type will be popping up. I think the next one will be in more traditional owly browns.

I also made a couple random motifs from the ever-enticing Beyond the Square.

...I think there's something smudged on the upper left bit of the lens of the camera I used for these photos. I should check on that. I made these to hang around in some negative wallspace, but someday I'm going to do a project with actual joined motifs, I swear.

And here's the amigurumi puppy from last week, all nestled into the quilt (actually it's a "quillow"---a quilt that rolls/folds up into a pocket to become a pillow, one of my mom's go-to gift projects) he was made to match. He has his own pocket on the front of the pillow-bit. You can't see it very well in this shot, but he now also has a little fleece bone dangling from his mouth with some yarn.

Go check out out other projects on FO Friday and Fibers on Friday, which are awesome ways to enjoy pretty yarny projects without actually having to touch any yarn in the summer heat. (Unless you're in the southern hemisphere where it's not summer, in which case I'd love to come visit you.)

(Works In) Progress, At the Speed of Summerwarm Sloths.

2011-07-20T12:25:00.000-04:00

I'm a little short on time today (so I'll be catching up with everyone else's amazing WIP Wednesday posts tomorrow, I guess), so I'll mostly let the pictures do the talking.

Things in the works this Wednesday include:

A small sewing project... (Have any of you guys heard of Dotee dolls? I've been intrigued by them for ages, and this will be my first one.)

A small crochet project which, sadly, has reached the point where it's now a sewing project...

And the latest installment of Tiniest Dye Lots Ever! This little hank of yarn (about 17 yards worth) is going to be a surprise for Sharon of witchyknits4ewe, and she likes pink and purple, so I broke out the rose, Christmas Red, and purple Wilton dyes and a helpful tutorial about microwave dyeing and got to work.

I wanted to do this yarn in the microwave rather than the stovetop saucepan-baths I've used previously because I wanted little blotches of colour, and I was afraid to muddy it. So into the teeny tiny dye pots and the microwave it went for its two "zaps"... (I love that the tutorial used the verb "zap.")

The colour spread out rather more than I wanted, which I probably should have guessed would happen, especially once I added some water to the pan because I was afraid of it getting burnt in the microwave. So where I wanted a mostly-natural yarn with blots of colour, I now have a mostly-sherbet yarn with blots of natural. All part of the learning process. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway.

And now it's hanging out to dry in the (too hot, gross, get it off me) summer sunshine. It's going to be a little fussy to crochet with since the microwave fuzzed it up a bit, but I think it should be okay. I'm so excited to see how it works up, I'm going to go and check and see if it's dry again even though it's only been like, ten minutes since the last time I checked and clearly, uh, a watched skein of yarn never dries. ;)

Next dyeing project: using Kool-Aid! I bought some packets to try this months ago and haven't gotten around to it yet.

Squeet Simplicity.

2011-07-17T12:35:00.000-04:00

Because being squee-ful is awesome, and today is a beautiful Sunday, here are a few photos (and, fortunately for us all, very few words) of some things that are making me happy:

Ridiculous $1 perler bead kits, to be ironed momentarily.

Freshly-washed (and quickly-drying) hair and hydrangea bushes.

And the existence of hammocks, the best place on earth for reading.

Go share your own Sunday-squee over at Rip It Good. :)

Sprouts and Friends, Take 2.

2011-07-15T09:02:00.001-04:00

It's been one of those weeks (...or two) where I've been using most of my could-be-crafting time for other stuff like cooking and reading and walking around, so my sole FO to show today is this puppy, made from a pattern in the always-wonderful Amigurumi World. This was a "commission" from my mom (quotation marks present because I obviously cannot charge my own mom real money for crafted items), who's making a puppy-patterned fleece blanket for a friend's son's second birthday and wanted a cuddly thing to go with.

He's got a contrasting eye patch, which I always think is a really adorable design feature. This is one of those projects that I think is cuter in real life than in photographs. It was a super-simple, came-together-nicely pattern, and I worked on it while watching a few episodes of The Walking Dead (which I'm lukewarm about. I read the first volume of the graphic novel a couple months ago and I think I like it better than the show. But zombies aren't really my Thing to begin with, so.) and Game of Thrones (way more riveting to me, and oh my gosh, marry me, Peter Dinklage) and Sleepless in Seattle (I hadn't seen that in yeeeears, and I'd forgotten that Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks's characters don't ever speak or correspond before they meet, which seemed so odd! I think I wasc conflating the movie with You've Got Mail, in which they...have mail.).

The traditional amigurumi big-head shape makes this guy tip forward hilariously if you don't pose him on an incline.

I rarely manage to take pictures of the food I make, because I'm a novice cook and bad at time management and by the time something is finished I'm just so happy it's done and eager to eat it that I don't want to pause (and let it get cold!) to do photos, but I do have a couple.

These are my fourth of July seitan kabobs. I'm not a vegetarian, but I'm trying to eat less meat, and I can't resist new and interesting food. My forays into various non-meat proteins have been fun and tasty so far. Seitan is a mock meat made from wheat gluten, and it chars or browns up gorgeously, and also really soaks up whatever you marinate it in. (And the best part about marinating non-meat? You can use the leftover marinade as sauce instead of throwing it out because it's full of raw meat germs!)

And my sprout-growing project continues on, here some of my FO sprouts from last week's batch are prettifying this salad. My new, not-so-secret sprout-related dream is to buy one of these fancy-shmancy sprouters. Or figure out a way to make one so that I don't have a jar dripping water onto a pile of newspapers on my floor, which is an unfortunate side product of the sprouting process. This salad featured some carrot-ginger dressing from this recipe, which I definitely recommend. I made it without the sesame oil because I didn't have any sesame oil, and it was delicious on everything---salads, crackers, frozen green beans... (I have a thing for frozen green beans in the summer. I eat them out of the bag still frozen. Yum.)

And just because I want to share his cuteness, a turtle who visited my yard on Tuesday evening.

He was considerate enough to pose in so statuesque a fashion that he almost looks fake!

Also, because I promised a bitty giveaway! The random number generator has selected witchyknits4ewe as the winner, so an email is headed her way as I cackle over some Ideas about what to send her... :D

I like that random.org wants me to subscribe to their newsletter. I can only imagine what kind of news it contains. GUESS WHAT? NOW THE NUMBERS ARE EVEN MORE RANDOM!!

Anyway, other people have probably finished much more interesting things this week, go see them at FO Friday!

Bothersome and the Dumplings

2011-07-01T14:32:00.002-04:00

...is not the name of my new ska band (although it probably should be, and I wish I could actually have a ska band). Instead, it describes two thirds of this week's FOs.

First, here is Bothersome the Slumberless, so named because I made him beginning at like...five in the morning on Saturday, a truly stupid time to be awake, but if you have to be awake, why not make a monster, right? He just hibernated for most of the week in pieces, but I pulled him together for today!. I'm not a good sleeper to begin with, and for some reason on Saturday morning I woke up around 4 AM (to super-loud birds outside) and my brain just clicked on, I couldn't stop thinking about stuff I wanted to make. The project that was really keeping me up was a pirate-themed stuffed bear---which I of course haven't actually started---but that wasn't plausible at the time, so I grabbed my hooks and yarn and began making Bothersome here.

He has googly hypno-bead eyes (the white bits are Model Magic that I molded directly into his eye sockets, and the yellow and black bits are plastic faceted and glass seed beads, respectively)...

And his maw is a teeny-tiny, inexpertly made pocket in which he'd be happy to hold a button or something for you. Fond as I am of Bothersome, I'm a little wary of keeping him in my house, because I'm afraid he'll keep waking me up at odd hours on weekends (or any other time) and want me to make him friends or something. More on that later.

First, on to the dumplings, another impossible-to-resist pattern by Trish of genuine mudpie, who is like, a veritable guru of tiny-cute crochet patterns. I had to make a couple of these---they're so fast and the method for making them, which calls for just increasing every x stitches until the piece is a certain width, was novel to me, and it was fun and easy to not be counting rounds, too. This is one of those dangerous patterns where you finish one and just want to keep making more...

Much like these trilobites. This latest one is Chiffon (like lemon chiffon pie), and she's already in the mail!

I had the opportunity to visit the Lion Brand Store in Manhattan yesterday, and it is tiny and awesome and full of so much colour and tasty, tasty yarn. They were having a knit-and-movie-watching night, and it made me so happy just to be observing it for a minute, seeing all these people with their laps full of printed-out patterns and yarns and circular needles, and listening to the lovely clicking-needles sound...I was wishing there wasn't a movie-night going on so that I could have told people I liked their colours and asked them questions!

So in the spirit of sharing and how amazing fiber-crafting and all of you guys are, I am having a bitty giveaway---your choice of Bothersome the Slumberless (if you're feeling brave enough to chance his waking you up with craft ideas!), a dumpling (or possibly more than one dumpling...) or a trilobite! Just leave a comment letting me know which you'd like if you win, and at uh, some point (my internet access is going to be spotty next week) a random number generator and I will pick a winner.

In non-fiber FO's, I took part in this June Photo-a-Day Challenge, and actually stuck to it! So here's my June in pictures:

1. day one - hello, june. [self-portrait.], 2. day two - favourite shoes., 3. day three - hands., 4. day four - clouds., 5. day five - breakfast today., 6. day six - summer reading. [books], 7. day seven - high angle., 8. day eight - sunset., 9. 06.09.11 - day nine - fresh fruit., 10. day ten - animal., 11. day eleven - silhouette., 12. day twelve - sun flare., 13. day thirteen - something that reminds you of childhood., 14. day fourteen - someone you love., 15. day fifteen - action., 16. day sixteen - jar., 17. day seventeen - bokeh., 18. day eighteen - eyes., 19. day nineteen - summertime., 20. day twenty - water., 21. day twenty-one - macro., 22. day twenty-two - landscape., 23. day twenty-three - black and white., 24. day twenty-four - love., 25. day twenty-five - citrus., 26. day twenty-six - your favourite colour., 27. day twenty-seven: your weakness., 28. day twenty-eight - transportation., 29. day twenty-nine - trees., 30. day thirty - family.

For FOs with a less insane number of photos attached, head over to FO Friday!

In Which I Have the Sudden Urge to Watch "The Craft"...

2011-06-24T17:30:00.000-04:00

After way too much ado, please say hello to Peaches, the Goth Bunny. (My mom named her at random, and somehow it just...stuck, right away.) My third critter so far from this pattern, which resembles the pattern less and less with each iteration...

Like many newly-minted goths, Peaches is into candles, Edgar Allan Poe, and hanging out near construction materials. (Bricks are so gritty and badass, don't you think?)

The details of her outfit came together surprisingly well, and were an indecent amount of fun. My late grandmother's stash of lace binding tape came in handy, and I made this little skull bead out of polymer clay.

My definition of "goth" always involves a little glitter, so in addition to the Red Heart Sparkle I used for the red half of her dress, her cuff bracelet, and the dress's picot trim, I made a little bow with it and added a teeny tiny tulle bustle, which photographed horribly.

Her eyeliner is a little asymmetrical, but such are the perils of being goth. This is my second attempt at felt eyelids around safety eyes, and I'm pretty pleased with them. (Peaches is clearly a dwarf hotot bunny---they have natural eyeliner!)

And also, because it's been receieved safely in England, yay!, the paper-piecing ATC I was working on last week.

I started it with the intention of doing a realistic Venus flytrap, but I didn't have a reference photo, and "realistic" isn't really my specialty anyway, so it got Little Shop of Horrors pretty fast. Feed me, Seymour!

Check out what everyone else has been up to this week over at FO Friday. :)

A Different FO Friday Than I Was Expecting.

2011-06-17T23:23:00.001-04:00

Sadly, I can't debut Ms. Goth Bunny today, because she's still in pieces! (But I'm hoping against hope to finish her tomorrow in time for Toy Challenge Week...)
I can, however, introduce Slightly-Psychedelic Cheerleader Kanga-Ninni!

(She can easily un-cheerlead, because her pom-poms are just safety pinned on.) I made her for my first-ever swap over at Craftster, and since (a) I finished her on Sunday afternoon and (b) she is now safely arrived at her new home, she totally counts as an FO for this week and can now be shared!

I went with a simple geometric-patterned fabric for the front piece, because I wanted something that wouldn't detract from the face, but I went busier/cuter on the back with some buggy-print flannel. It was surprisingly nice to have something so soft as part of this plushie, it totally made the stuffing-and-embellishing process more fun just because I loved the feel of it in my hands as I worked. (...Real fabric. It's softer than making amigurumis with cheap yarn! This shouldn't have been a surprise.)

I couldn't resist adding some crochet, though, so I made her a little rainbow pocket-pouch out of a modified motif from Beyond the Square, and then embellished it with some layered buttons. I've been noticing and liking the whole "layered buttons" thing on Etsy and the online crafting world in general, but I'd never tried it myself. So far, so good. :D

I also couldn't resist going a little nuts with the face---the original pattern/tutorial had instructions about embroidering/appliqueing on the eyes and mouth, but I wanted something zanier and more 3-D for the eyes, so I made these goofy asymmetrical polymer clay buttons.

And while I was baking clay stuff anyway, I made up this Angry Bead to go along in the the kangaroo pouch. (My swap partner was an Angry Birds fan, I swear! This is not just part of my weird obsession with crafting these birds.)

And this is the awesome ninni-monster I got in return! This probably counts as a bad picture since the amazing summer-greens of the fabric blend in with the background, but I am in love with the fact that my monster? Is a Summer Ninja.

I'm not sure if I'm going to get all long-term crazy about fabric plush-making the way I am about amigurumi, but this was a fun little foray, and I'm definitely planning to make at least one more fabric plush to send to this dolly drive for the children of Japan---I love the idea of practicing new skills for a good cause.

Other links to check out: the ninni-monster swap gallery on Craftster, because oh wow is that site full of amazingly talented people! The variations and customisations that people made on this one simple pattern are kind of awe-inspiring. And, of course, FO Friday is always full of beautiful yarny inspiration and things to ooh over.

Weirdness and Whimsy, In Progress.

2011-06-15T17:23:00.000-04:00

I'm happy that a few of you awesome people were intrigued by the idea of Goth Bunny. Here she is, caught in an unfortunate state of amigurumi infancy where she resembles neither goth nor bunny. I'm hoping to get her finished as part of CraftyClare's Toy Challenge Week. I know that this is actually doable, the crocheting on this pattern is simple and fast, but the sewing always gets me...

And speaking of that, a project that I know is going to hibernate forever because of the sewing. I watched Despicable Me the other night (I thought it was pretty adorable, and had some seriously cool-looking and clever graphic design/animation going on). I will admit that half the reason I checked it out was because I'd seen some cool patterns for crocheted Minions, and I figured before I made one, I'd better see what these things actually were. And while I thought the Minions were cute (although I know I would have appreciated them a lot more if I were still like, eight years old and thus in the movie's actual target demographic...) what really caught my imagination was the moment when Steve Carrell (who has some serious voiceover skills! A+!) uttered the phrase tiny robots disguised as cookies.

I'm not like, in love with robots, so I'm not sure why this grabbed me so hard, but basically the second I heard the words, I was reaching for my crochet hooks and my skein of Red Heart Super Saver in Buff.

So here are the cookie-robots-to-be in chocolate chip (please imagine that I've already appliqued the chips on) and Generic Sandwich Cookie flavours. I made these up while I finished watching the movie, and now comes the part where they sit around for weeks while I debate the best and most interesting ways to make them robot-y. I was kind of disappointed by the appearance of the actual cookie-robots in the movie. I loved that they had segmented legs, but I was confused by the fact that they also had like...little metal cylinders topped with hats. Mine are not going to have hats.

I made a post yesterday about my International Yarnbombing Day, but I am so not done yarnbombing. This tea box is full of a yarnbomb that I'm kind of excited about, a nature-themed garland I'm planning to hang at a local wildlife refuge that I really love. I don't know how best to assemble the pieces onto the garland, though, and I may have to make a trip there to measure before I do...

I'm also working on a mysterious (the recipient may be reading this! I must be stealthy!) little paper-piecing project that's turning out much better than I expected, which is always the best possible surprise.

And another WIP---buckwheat-onion rolls that I have to go punch down and prepare for their second rise right now. Go see other people's stuff-in-progress over at WIP Wednesday while I do.

Bombs Away!

2011-06-14T17:42:00.001-04:00

Saturday---International Yarnbombing Day!---dawned damp and chilly and occasionally-raining here, so I didn't get as much cheerful-yarnthing-sharing done as I wanted. I still have a couple tags (one which is still in progress...) to put up at some point in the future. I did, however, go to a nature preserve near my house to put up my motif-tag on a convenient birch tree. I love birch trees.

While I was there with a yarn needle hung on a necklace, I got to fix up an older tag that I put up last Earth Day.

This tag had gotten all stretched out from a year and change in the elements, so I cinched it up in the back (creating the hilarious streeetched look on the front---and actually, this tag is my first-ever granny square attempt, using a tiny granny square from a vintage dog-sweater pattern book, weirdly enough).

I decided to leave a little love on a stop sign as I was walking home, but I knew I needed to measure the stop sign pole. I sadly (despite my mom's good example) don't travel with a measuring tape, so I used my headphones! I wrapped them around the pole, and put the little slidey-tangle-prevention-piece at about the right place so I'd know how long to make the foundation chain for the tag.

I used the first two rounds of this ever-popular heart garland pattern from Skip to My Lou for the heart, and made the tag itself in big sloppy double crochets because I was in a hurry!

Before heading out (in the dead of night! Very exciting.) to attach this, I decided that I should do just one more, since three is a much better number than two, and whipped up a cute little rainbow flower. I was just going to hang it somewhere random, and then I remembered seeing two little girls running a lemonade stand in their driveway a couple weekends ago, and decided to leave it at their house.

The idea of bringing something weird and random and hopefully slightly-magical to them just made me really happy. Imagining the stories of other people's lives has always been something that makes my brain hum like a happy little steam engine, I guess stemming from how much fiction I've always read, and it was cool to leave this and imagine these girls finding it and wondering where it came from.

You should definitely check out the projects shared in the International Yarnbombing Day group on Ravelry, or the flickr pool to see some of the amazing, inspiring art that made its way into the world on Saturday. I keep finding myself leaving comments that go "I wish I lived near you so I could walk by this every day!!"

Friday's Finishedness, Heat Wave Edition.

2011-06-10T16:09:00.001-04:00

Say hello to Lilac Cat, made from the same pattern as Berry Bear from back in April. I started her with visions of she and Berry Bear being posed in an adorable tea party setup, except that due to yarn differences, they're hilariously disparate in size. I still love this pattern, and I loved it even more when I wasn't trying to do it in brushable-fluff yarn---it went so much faster.

And then I didn't feel like sewing her together for uh, weeks, and finally---yay for FO Friday!---sat down and assembled her yesterday. I had this weird moment as I was putting the lace trim on her dress where I was like what am I doing? ...I'm sewing decorative lace on a cat's dress. I decided to think of that as a good thing. Next variation on this pattern: possibly a goth bunny.

I'm happy to say that Cherry the Haphazardly-Dyed Trilobite has now acheived her life's purpose---to be the tassel on a trilobite-themed bookmark for a Swap-Bot swap! The bookmark itself is my needle-felting project from Wednesday, and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. When I started shaping the trilobite, I realized that what I was going to end up with (whether I liked it or not) was something sort of simple and petroglyph-looking, so I decided to go with it and did the spiral sun and abstract water-y lines.

Here's what Cherry looks like peeking out of a book. (She likes reading about fossils, it makes her feel at home.)

Cherry also briefly acquired a new sibling, Berry, who has already departed for her new home with the person who bought Rock Lobster. These trilobites are kind of dangerous, they just...multiply. I have another one drying right now...

Tomorrow is International Yarnbombing Day, which I had Great Plans to do all kinds of cool stuff for...except that I thought it was in late June, not tomorrow. So here's my one yarnbomb-to-be so far, which will hopefully be gracing a tree somewhere tomorrow. I started this motif solely to take a photo of myself crocheting, and fell in love with the motif. I think the openness of it will look nice against a tree, inspired by the most amazing yarnbombed rainbow-spiderweb tree ever.

Go see what other fibery amazingness everyone is up to at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday!

In Which I Am Semi-Defeated by a Small Sweater.

2011-06-08T11:47:00.002-04:00

So I picked up this cute little toddler sweater at a yard sale, thinking that I liked the stripey colours and it would be a good candidate for a first Reclaimed Yarn project. I'll unravel the sweater and crochet something cool, like a striped owl, I thought.

Suuuuure you will, cooed the sweater evilly.

Having never unravelled a sweater before, I didn't think to look at the seams until I consulted a tutorial about how to unravel a sweater...

...and alas. The sweater is not, as I'd stupidly assumed, made from variegated yarn, but from a billion different coloured yarns tied together at the ends of the rows with knots. :| So now, instead of reclaimed yarn, I have...a small amount of cute striped cloth that happens to be in a sweater shape? Which isn't useless, I might try to make a plush from the sleeves and maybe a little purse from the body. But I wanted yarn. Lesson re: buying sweaters to unravel before checking if they're unravel-able? Learned.

In things-that-were-more-successful news, I tried needle felting a design onto commercially produced wool felt yesterday, and am kind of in love with the process. It's almost like drawing, there's so much more control over colour and shape than with needle felting onto crochet, or onto the surface of another needle-felted piece. The photo above is the back side of the piece (which is going to be a bookmark for a Swap-Bot swap) I made. Once I figure out the best way to reinforce it, it can be on its way, and should be showing up right-side-visible on Friday.

In the way of more annoyingly-mysterious swap-related business, here's my Craftster-swap monster, held up by Annoying Sewing Bits.

...Same goes for this amigurumi. I'm putting this photo up in hopes that it will spur me on to finish it for Friday.

And my food-in-progress, the sprouting adzuki beans. I like how the leaves on the sprouts look like tiny mermaid tails. I may declare this a finished object tonight and throw them in a salad and do another batch of lentils---these are pretty, but the lentils had a much better sprout-to-bean ratio and sprouted faster. What I really want to try next is some alfalfa, the photo of alfalfa sprouts on the tutorial I used is so pretty.

As always, WIP Wednesday is awesome. :D Go share in the awesomeness!

We were at the beach! Everybody had matching towels!

2011-06-03T08:55:00.001-04:00

Meet Rock Lobster. (I couldn't resist naming him after the insane song, which is also the source of the title for this post.) He turned out a little differently than the pattern pictures, I think because when I sewed his legs on, I did this weird kind of...cinching thing that pulled the front half of the body up so he's looking upward.

I like it, I think it gives him personality. (Personality that says I can't believe you photographed me in a colander! I'm sorry, Rock Lobster. I won't put you in any more cooking vessels.) I also added the antennae, which I made by just crocheting a chain with two strands---the yarn I made him in (which is Caron Simply Soft Paints in Spring Brook, since venividivoom asked) and a strand of very fine wire so that the antennae would be shapeable. This was my first crocheting-with-wire attempt, and for once I started a new technique with something simple enough that it worked out well and didn't make me all flustered.

And here's the bitty-shawl, a really easy little pattern from Caron. I was happy that I hadn't lost all the treble-crochet mojo I built up doing that billion-rows-of-treble-crochet market bag back in December---my hands still remembered how to do it! This was a good TV-crocheting project, since it was just a two-row repeat. It may, in fact, be called the Televised Science Shawl, because it was made mostly while watching Bones and season three of Eureka.

I'm still not convinced that I'm a shawl-wearer (I'm also convinced maybe I should actually try to part my hair down the back with a comb if I'm going to wear it in two buns, yikes.), but it was a fun thing to make. It may need some embellishing yet---my initial instinct was to adorn it with a felted skull and crossbones, since it's piratey colours, but then it wouldn't be washable anymore...

All of the fantastic Hitchhiker shawls I've been ogling on your blogs on Wednesdays and Fridays are making me look at this one and think but why hasn't it got POINTY EDGING, so maybe some googling about crochet edgings is in order.

Finally, meet Cherry the Haphazardly Dyed Trilobite. I made her in off-white Fisherman's Wool, and then popped her in a little dye bath of Wilton's icing dye in brown (along with the teeny hank of yarn encircling her in the photo, because why waste a good dye bath?). The brown was coming out too light and orange for me, so I added a little blue. Too much blue, as it turned out, so I scrambled for the red, and sadly, some of it splashed directly onto Cherry's back half as I tipped it into the saucepan, hence her name. (Her full name is Queen Anne's Cherry Cordial.)

You can see the silly colour unevenness better in this photo of Cherry drying on my laundry line.

See what other people have been finishing (or just working on) this week at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday. :)

This Week's WIPs: Mostly Offscreen.

2011-06-01T12:44:00.000-04:00

Wait, today is Wednesday? Memorial Day weekend totally threw me off. I don't really have a lot of interesting showable WIPs today. The bitty-shawl is so close to finished, just the edging left to go, which I hope to get done tonight, but it's not worth photographing again in the meantime, I don't think. And I have a plush-to-be that I'm really excited about, but that probably won't be ready until I order some safety eyes, and as soon as I post this I'm going to go start on something needle felted, I hope...

After the mostly-successful test run, I'm working on another Ninni-Monster for a Craftster swap, and even though the monster itself will be a sewn-from-fabric plush (...which I need to cut out today!), I can't resist adding in some crochet and possibly polymer clay details. The above photo is part of my modifying-a-motif process to do that.

I'm also working on a lobster, who is mostly finished except for some tedious yarn-end-weaving-in and the application of his eyes and possibly some antennae that I'm still toying with how to construct. (Wire? Yarn dipped in fabric stiffener?)

So here's his tail-end. I put him in a colander to take this because I'm sort of mean like that.

This photo probably belongs with Friday's post, since it's a finished (and delicious, and already-eaten, yum) object---a lentil sprout salad (I definitely recommend that recipe, by the way) made with my very first batch of grown-in-a-jar-under-my-dining-room-table sprouts!

So I started a second batch. Not much to look at right now, just some damp adzuki beans in a jar, but I have high hopes. :)

Other people's WIPs today probably don't involve jars of damp beans, and you should go have a look over at WIP Wednesday!

Sunday: Sprouts, Stories, Sewing.

2011-05-29T20:15:00.000-04:00

Somehow, as I was wandering around the wilds of the Internet on Friday night, I stumbled on the idea of growing your own bean sprouts. I have a weirdly vivid memory of my mom doing this when I was a kid, but only on one particular occasion---we were going to Pennsylvania to visit one of my mom's college friends, and we packed turkey-and-homegrown-sprouts sandwiches to eat on the drive. I remember being really excited about the homegrown sprouts and then not actually liking them that much, hah.

Fast forward a bit, and I have come to loooove bean sprouts, but the nearest place here to buy them where they're consistently any good is an Asian grocery that's about forty minutes away, so I don't have them often. I consulted google, was encouraged by someone linking to this tutorial with glowing praise, and went to pop some French lentils in a jar to soak for their initial twelve hour soak, feeling skeptical because the super-humid climate where I live tends to ruin cute little growing-stuff projects (see: Chia Pet, make-your-own-rock-candy kit).

Lentils, however, are way tougher than a Chia Pet, because they're already sprouting! I think they're adorable, and can't wait until they're eating-size. And then I'm going to try chick peas, and adzuki beans, and maybe buy some alfalfa...

Maybe Sprout the Squid, seen presiding here over the Sprout Jar, has something to do with it. He's like some kind of minor agricultural deity.

Speaking of deities (and what a strange beginning to a sentence that is...), I just finished the first Percy Jackson and the Olympians book this morning, and while it didn't grab me in the immediate OMG-magic-I'm-hooked way that, say, Harry Potter did, I enjoyed it. Rick Riordan had some seriously clever and funny ways of combining the modern world with the Greek pantheon, and I can see why the series is popular. I was crazy about Greek/Roman mythology as a kid, I took the pictured-above book (please tell me one of you other lovely blogosphere people remembers it) out of the library a billion times and absorbed the stories and ogled the beautiful illustrations. I like knowing---the library had a bunch of paperback copies of the first book, and all of them were beautifully battered and dog-eared---that apparently the whole gods-and-goddesses thing is still appealing to kid-readers.

I sort of want to save this next thing for FO Friday, but I don't think I have that kind of will power!

Meet Most Serene and Honorable Teatime Ninni, part of my very slow effort to improve my sewing skills. I made her from this cute pattern/tutorial, as a trial run for one I'll be working on later this week for my first-ever Craftster swap.

I even gave her a little pocket on the back (made with one of three beautiful teacup templates from Trish at genuine mudpie) to hold a teabag.

I haven't made a fabric-plush for a while (and I haven't made many of them, period), and wow, are they more difficult to stuff than amigurumi! It's harder to get the stuffing into the spaces (especially with a project that has tiny arms and ears like this one, granted), and it's so much less forgiving about lumps and stuff. This will clearly take more practice, so this or other, future Ninni-monsters may turn up in giveaway form at some point...

Sprout, Scotty, and a Preschool-esque Luminaria.

2011-05-27T11:32:00.003-04:00

Meet Sprout the Squid, my not-an-octopus tentacle project for this week. The pattern is available here on Craftster, and I knew I had to make him the second I saw the picture. Much more sewing involved than one of the octopuses, but worth the effort for his sheer cuteness.

I was thinking of adding sparkly pom-poms to the ends of his tentacles, for extra springtime celebratori-ness. I still might.

Obligatory weird close-up. I love this cartoony eye style on a cephalopod. Weirdly enough, it was initially inspired by that Simpsons episode where the Mr. Sparkle logo is Homer's Japanese advertising doppelganger.

And here's Scotty the trilobite, who I feel semi-confident in saying is the world's only felted trilobite named after American Idol contestant Scotty McCreery. (He is so dubbed because I crocheted him while half-watching the finale of Idol.) The lovely Contessa pointed me to this pattern, which I inverted a little---the body rib was supposed to be created with two front-post double crochets, but after several attempts, I decided to try a single back-post double crochet instead. Success! Scotty is just phase one in a bigger trilobite project that should be rolling out over the next couple weeks.

I'm so glad that I wasn't the only one who thought this luminaria idea was awesome. And I can now vouch for the fact that the process works, and does not create dangerous ice shrapnel! However. I uh, may have gotten so excited about the ice part that I didn't think too hard about the actual pattern part, so my luminaria, rather than being emblazoned with elegant leaves or something, is just a hodgepodge of holes that we can pretend was supposed to be an abstract constellationscape all along.

Next time, I'll draw the pattern onto the can before freezing it, duh. It will have to be a simple pattern, though, because trying to punch the holes before the ice in the can breaks and melts is a race against the clock! (But a fun one. The nail punched through more easily than I thought it would, and with a little practice you can control the way you hit it and create differently sized holes!) Another tip: while the tutorial is all just wrap the can in a towel so it doesn't move as you work!, what works better is a second person to hold the can still for you.

Before you go make one of your own (and link me to pictures if you do, I love the idea of lots of WIP Wednesday/FO Friday can-luminarias in the world!), go check out other people's projects at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday.

Don't Panic! (Even if you've started way to many projects...)

2011-05-25T15:41:00.002-04:00

No time for a lot of talking today, the weather's gorgeous and I have a date with (a) my freshly-dried laundry that needs to come off the line, and (b) a hammock, a towel, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've been a fan of the books since a friend introduced me to them in middle school, and this is the first year I've remembered to celebrate Towel Day!

Off the hooks, but not assembled yet, some mysterious, not-my-usual-octopus tentacles...

I appear to be making a small, very simple shawl, which is slightly baffling as I don't think I'm a natural shawl-wearer. I blame all of you with your amazing WIP/FO shawls, and my mom for randomly presenting me with the pattern. To celebrate my bafflement about this enjoyable-to-make but dubiously useful object, I photographed it draped over a small watermelon.

A small, extinct arthropod, freshly (and lightly---read as "my hands were tired") felted and drying on a sunny rock. I just hope a bird doesn't come and carry him away to use for its nest.

Nestled amidst the frozen cherries (I can't wait until there are fresh cherries in the supermarket...), a previously-used-for-chick-peas can, which I'm hopefully going to make into a luminaria later. Apparently you're supposed to fill them with water and freeze them so that when you punch the holes, the ice will keep the can from denting. I'm thinking it's just going to create ice shrapnel, but I'm ready (and hoping) to be wrong.

Check out other people's projects at WIP Wednesday!

Finished Food Friday

2011-05-20T11:39:00.000-04:00

First, before I forget! I'm so glad that there's interest in a Dragon Crochetalong, and in a weird burst of good timing, the designer of the dragon pattern I used for Edgar has just rewritten said pattern, which you can find here on Ravelry. I asked the pattern designer about hosting said crochetalong, and she seemed to like the idea (yay!), so I'll keep you guys posted as I mull over how to organize it. Any thoughts about that are appreciated! I'm thinking of creating a Ravelry group for it.

I can't lie to you. I didn't crochet all of this stuff this week. A lot of these things have been all crocheted for a while, and just waiting for me to feel like sewing or creating extra pieces to finish them. I've always loved play food. I had a lot as a kid, and I remember weirdly specific things about it---the seafoam green plastic basket it was stored in, the pieces of plastic toast that would change colour to look toasted or untoasted if you brushed them with hot or cold water...

And even now that I'm taller and can cook actual food, I still love the play stuff. This felt s'mores set by neafus on Etsy completely blows my mind, and some of the stuff people do with polymer clay (e.g. these pizza earrings) is unreal! So when I stumble on a cool crocheted food pattern, I can hardly resist. I also can't resist some amateur photo styling, which I've had a ridiculous amount of fun with here.

The cute little thing pictured above is the only kind of rainbow cake I'll ever make, because while I concede that rainbow cakes are gorgeous, I'd rather have a chocolate cake without enough food colouring to dye several skeins of yarn. Made from this adorable pattern over at genuine mudpie. So tiny! Mine's a bit wobbly-looking here because (a) my sewing skills need work, especially when I'm employing them while watching Friday Night Lights and (b) I got so excited about photographing the sprinkles I tossed on the plate that I forgot to try and get the best angle on the actual cake piece. I think I'm going to have to make some colour variations on this one, it's such a fun idea and a super-quick thing to crochet.

I loved this donut pattern the second I saw it, and being an avid Simpsons fan, I knew I had to make a classic Homer's-donut in pink icing with rainbow sprinkles. And because I'm a little nuts, the sprinkles took uh, months to get done. Mostly people use tubular glass beads for sprinkles, and those work fine, but I wanted something less shiny and more realistic. I ended up making these out of Crayola Model Magic, which is juuuust supple enough when it dries that they could be pierced with a beading needle and sewn on. They're not that supple, though, so I broke a few while sewing, and they're hard to colour so they're all weird on that front, but I'm pretty pleased with the whole thing.

I really liked the construction of the donut pattern, so naturally my next instinct was to make another one, but ridiculously small. And in Halloween colours, because it's always time for Halloween. The tininess sort of obscured the donut-hole on the icing, sadly. I think soon I'll try a third, in an intermediate size. And in chocolate, with white icing.

I think I started crocheting this pie slice in...March? February? I don't even remember. The pattern was fast and fun, and then I was all oh, but this is a cherry pie, it needs a lattice crust! Cue the months-long hiatus as I tried to avoid sewing on said lattice crust, which came out hilariously uneven.

Not cute-and-foody, but sort of food-related, I whipped up this little scrubbie out of plarn on Monday to send along as a thank-you gift to someone who bought a plarn octopus I made a while back. Basic pattern idea from here. I like the texture of this thing, I may have to make one for myself and see how it actually works as a dish-washing tool.

Not pictured: a felted-food project that isn't finished yet because it's not dry. It's been super-humid here over the past few days. Also not dry: half of my load of laundry from yesterday. Ugh.

This post is already getting very long and picturey, but in the spirit of sharing food stuff, have one picture and two non-picture-accompanied recommendations from my Week in Actual Edible Food, Not Made from Yarn.

A pretzel roll, a recipe I found at Cooking With My Kid and have been meaning to make for weeks. I was a big fan of those frozen soft pretzels that you heat up in the toaster as a kid, and this is like the best version of those ever. You get to boil them in a baking-soda-and-water solution before you bake them, which is fun (they float around like weird little dumpling boats, buffeted in a boiling water current!) and imbues them with this amazing essence-of-giant-pretzel taste. Also: (1) these zucchini toasts (I did mine with "ricotta" made from tofu), which are an amazing combination of flavours and textures. Just the lemon-pepper roasted zucchini on its own was heavenly. (2) this beet-barley soup, which I did without the beans and feta cheese. I'm not usually big on vegan/vegetarian soups because I think the flavour tends to lack depth, but I gave this one a whirl anyway and it's delicious! I used pearled barley, which I'd never had before, and it has a really wonderful texture.

As you curse me for making you want a giant pretzel and a bowl of borscht, visit FO Friday and Fibers on Friday to see what everyone else is up to!

Rex Dragon Day!

2011-05-13T15:35:00.001-04:00

...When I saw that blogger was down this morning, that was seriously what went through my head: no, not on Rex ~~Manning~~ Dragon day! (It's been way too long since I've seen Empire Records.)

But now it's back, so without further ado, I am ridiculously pleased to introduce you all to Edgar.

I loved Edgar right from the moment his little snout started taking shape, and even doing his legs didn't dim my affection a bit. I even got to try some quasi-blocking techniques on his row of spikes, which I wasn't sure would work since this is just cheap Red Heart Super Saver, but it actually did help them uncurl a bit.

He is so well constructed/balanced, oh my gosh. Even though both sets of his legs are slightly asymmetrical, he stands perfectly.

He's even stable enough that you can just...pop him in a tree. This pattern is fantastic, and I can't wait to make another one. Actually, since there was a lot of interest in the dragon (and thank you so much for the interest! It's so, so cool to know that amazing people from all over the world, armed with yarn and computers, wanted to meet Edgar.) would any of you want to do a dragon crochetalong in June or July? Have a glance at the pattern---the Ravelry page for the pattern is here, and the version of the pattern I used is here (on the Harry Potter website The Leaky Cauldron, weirdly enough) and let me know what you think. I've never organized a crochetalong before, I'm envisioning like, a group-compiled playlist for the Leg-Making process... :D

I even got a movie from the library for Edgar and I to watch this weekend. (I imagine that Edgar is wondering here what exactly I think I'm going to train him to do, as he's made of yarn...)
My other FOs this week are all needle-felting, affixed to crocheted-and-wet-felted bases, which is like magic! You just...stab, and it sticks, like painting but fluffier! I don't know that I'll ever have the patience to be really good at needle felting, but it's fun. Except for the occasional stabbing my finger instead of the wool.

Tree, for a Swap-Bot swap...

...and the Mad Hatter's hat, also for Swap-Bot.

And, because I can't seem to resist these crazy perturbed avians---there's something so awesome about the primary colours and simple shapes, I guess---Angry Bird, in pin form. This is one of those things where I couldn't believe that it worked, like it jumped out of my head and onto the wool. I kept thinking as I added each new colour and detail and this will be the part where I screw it up... and it somehow never was. I'm happy about this guy, happy enough that I listed him over at my Zibbet shop.

And finally, a finished object I wish I could present to you in smellovision:

Lilacs. I'm crazy about them! If I pass by a lilac bush as I walk, I stop and stick my nose in the flowers if they're low enough. Heaven.

Check out more finished objects at FO Friday!

WIPs: What-Are-These-Things In Progress.

2011-05-11T10:56:00.000-04:00

Since I'm hoping to unveil the dragon on Friday (...this may be a lost hope), I don't want to give too much away today, so here's a not-terribly-mysterious photo of a piece of it. I worked this piece while watching The Simpsons the other night, which resulted in a lot of tiny bouts of frogging because I was snickering at Milhouse rather than counting my stitches, hah.

Still to go: three of four legs. :|

I think I'll keep it (not-terribly-) mysterious this week and not describe my other projects in very much detail, either. This is going to be a sweet little yarny tidbit to be displayed on a plate, and while I loved working up the (tiny! I didn't even have to make it smaller! it was already perfectly small!) pattern, the sewing bits will probably cause it to hibernate for a little while.

I've done a bit of needle-felting recently, and most of it is already finished (!), mailed off to new homes, and will be appearing on Friday. But this one is still a WIP, shown here mid-stab. My iPod is in the background for research purposes here! Very important, evil-pig-slaying research.

And this week's springtime WIP-by-a-tree, a newborn maple leaf. This is my favourite maple tree (but don't tell the trees I play favourites) on one of my usual walking routes. It's a younger tree, so even someone as short as I am can cozy right up to its lower branches and enjoy the shade and prettiness. I love how the baby leaves are the same sort of brand-new wrinkly as a butterfly's wings when it emerges from its cocoon.

WIP Wednesday at Tami's Amis: all the cool kids are doing it.

A Post About a Different Kind of Yarn. (The Story Kind.)

2011-05-09T16:23:00.001-04:00

I've been meaning to write this post for ages. I get kind of intimidated blogging about books, for some reason. So let's see if I can combine "blogging about books" with "blogging about crafts" and un-intimidate myself a little.

Back in 2007 (I know because the date is printed out on the bottom of the page...), spurred on by a Swap-Bot swap, I printed out some directions from this tutorial and made some tiny little handbound books. It immediately felt like magic to me. As someone who's loved books for as long as they can remember, actually making one---a real (-ish) one! with actual sewn binding!---was an amazing feeling.

I've always been a reader, and even as an adult I'm still crazy about books for non-adults. I'd been reading mostly young adult books for a long time, but last summer I delved back into the younger-readers world by randomly picking up Ida B: . . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World by Katherine Hannigan, and I was shocked by how honest it was, how amazing and relatable and difficult to read in places as it dealt with the rollercoaster emotions of childhood.

I'd forgotten, I think, about that level of honesty in children's literature, and how well it works when the author is talented, the way a kids' book can remind me of how universal some emotions are---the pleasant ones and the less pleasant ones---and how they are and aren't different as a child or an adult.

Here's something I said about the book just after I read it:

it captured the emotions of childhood and all their harshness and volatility so well that it was painful, just remembering that---how big everything seemed, how much it hurt, how easy it was to feel alone and misunderstood and become slavishly devoted to my own misery just to spite everything. and I think we like to forget that kids (not just teenagers, but kids) feel that way, so although my feelings about the book were mixed, I really appreciated that Ms. Hannigan went there and wrote honestly.

And I find myself want to keep talking about this stuff, to suss it out for myself and also share the love and wonder of these books, so this is me trying to learn to do that and be okay with putting it out in the world, I guess.

Since I've been rediscovering my love (oh, Ramona Quimby books, you will be good forever) and discovering new favourites in the kidlit world, I joined a children's books-themed group on Swap-Bot, and a swap that entailed creating a "found poem" from a kids' book and making your partner a gift based on the same book.

I compiled my poem from the amazing Lucky Breaks by Susan Patron (which is a sequel to the also-amazing The Higher Power of Lucky, and a third book is being released in August, yay!), another book with a lot of moments that were wince-inducing for me in how spot-on and unflattering they were about the nature of meanness and jealousy---but those moments are balanced out with sweetness; sharp, smart, amazing humor; and a great, quirky setting and cast of characters.

The actual found poem I assembled is viewable over here, if you like that kind of thing, and the image above is a scan I did of the collage book cover before it got bound into the blank journal I sent my swap partner. I need to do more papercrafting, but my workspace (read as: roughly a square foot of my dining room table) is unworkably crowded with other stuff right now.

This is a good thing about both reading and crocheting, as hobbies go---you don't need table space to do either! I mostly read and crochet nestled into my bed, which is not the ideal place for collaging or, say, needle-felting.

Finished Objects and a Friend from the Order Isopoda.

2011-05-06T11:17:00.001-04:00

First of all, here's Bitty Yoda, frolicking in the spring greenery. He worked up really quickly, I think I got him all crocheted and sewed in just a couple hours, and then I made him (slightly wonky) eyes out of polymer clay. At some point I hope to take him somewhere pleasantly swampy (where I think he'll feel more at home) for a better photoshoot.

Mushrooms! The third one has yet to be made, obviously, but I still have a little time before Mother's Day to finish (uh, and start) it. This isn't a great shot, but I did the spots on the red one with a combination of regular embroidery and surface slip stitching, which is a technique I think I like and will be trying again. The red mushroom was made from this pattern, and the teal from this one, which I modified both intentionally (I made it smaller) and unintentionally (I wasn't paying terribly close attention and did the bottom edge of the mushroom cap in a completely different way). The teal one was devilish to get balanced---I've discovered why hey, free rocks! isn't a more popular stuffing idea. Rocks, unlike, say, plastic bean bag pellets, aren't uniformly sized or balanced, so just cramming them into a crocheted piece and expecting them to distribute themselves evenly, especially when working with something tall like this mushroom, doesn't work so well. So it took a good half-hour of rock-and-stuffing arranging to get this thing to be freestanding, and it's still not the most stable creation in the world, but it stands!

I finished up my pattern-testing headband yesterday morning and had this cheetah model it for me. The pattern for this one is available here on Ravelry.

And here's my Wrinkle in Time bookmark, for which I learned to embroider a chain stitch. (I swear that I made the stitches here uneven on purpose, to represent the characters' wending journey in the book.) I always think that I hate embroidering because I'm usually trying to do it onto crochet, which isn't the best surface for it, but embroidering on this felt (and the practice cloth I used before doing the bookmark) was really nice. I see more of it in my future, I think.

I loved sharing some spring with you guys on Wednesday, and it made me really happy to hear that you all seemed to like having it shared, so here's another bit of springtime where I am.

A tiny little friend that Yoda and I met this morning. Click the image to see him bigger and shinier. The winter has been so long that I am now feeling fluffy and sentimental about pillbugs. That's a little sad, maybe.

Actually, does anyone want to play a regional dialect quiz game? What do you all call the kind of bug in the picture? I'm from southern New York, and in my family we called them pillbugs, but I've also heard them referred to as "sowbugs" or "roly-polies."

Back on topic---check out other, probably non-buggy projects at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday. :)

WIP Wednesday - May the Fourth Be With You.

2011-05-04T11:40:00.002-04:00

The dragon (I like to think that since this is a dragon-in-progress, I can refer to it as a DIP) is dragon-ing along. It looked like a very strange hand grenade for a while, but then the tail began to take shape and all was well. Still loving the pattern a lot. The row of spikes (that would be the multicoloured blob behind the dragon body) were so much fun to work for some reason. Sadly, I'm up to the legs, which are going to be less fun.

I have a convenient excuse to stall a little on the dragon legs, though, because first I have to finish some mushrooms for Mother's Day. I took said mushrooms on a walk to the bay because they need to be weighted so they'll stand, and I figured hey, free rocks! So now I have to experiment with combinations of rocks and polyfill until they're freestanding, which should be interesting. I'm also hoping to play around with surface crochet to give the red mushroom some spots. This tutorial looks promising.

I'm also doing another pattern test, this time for a multi-stranded headband that has interchangeable flower and bow add-ons. I thought I'd just work up the bow to make sure it worked, photograph it, and frog it, but once I'd actually crocheted it up and put it together, its true adorableness won me over, which was a fun surprise. I'm hoping to get this finished and photographed and report back to the pattern writer with my suggestions tomorrow.

My favourite WIP at the moment, though, is spring. Which is admittedly a WIP on a much larger scale than an amigurumi dragon, and I can't take any credit for its amazingness, but I'm so happy to watch it unfold. Every day I wake up and there's more green around---the grass is coming back to life, the maple trees are putting out their first fragile and almost-dayglo leaves. It's still been generally chilly here, but just having some colour back outside the windows is too wonderful for words.

Go see other people's springtime (or autumn, depending on the hemisphere) projects over at WIP Wednesday.

And I just remembered that today (with its "May the fourth..." pun) is Star Wars Day! I may have to whip up a tiny crocheted Yoda to celebrate. I was crrrrazy about Star Wars in middle school. That was when they re-released the original trilogy in theatres in the "special edition" versions, and my mom took me to see them and I was in love. With the whole universe of the movies, and uh, also with Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, I'll admit.

Berry Bear and Friends.

2011-04-29T10:31:00.000-04:00

I am pleased to introduce you all to Wednesday's mystery project, Berry Bear! When I saw some skeins of fluffy variegated yarn in the clearance bin of a craft store, I immediately thought oh! brushed bears! I've been making amigurumi for a few years now and hadn't tried a bear yet, and I've always admired the ones people make (mainly from wool, which would probably work much better) from fluffy yarn and then brush to fluff up said yarn like fur.

I found the perfect free pattern, which I modified a little---surprisingly, not by making it smaller, hah! I decided to try a different look for the ears, and the arms are a bit wonky because uh, I tried to frog one and the yarn broke, so I thought okay, nevermind, I'll just try to make the second one look like the first one. Which worked out okay, somehow. I knew the yarn's fluffitude would make it annoying to work with, so I was at least a little prepared for that. Not having a wire pet brush (which is what I gather is usually used to fluff your bear), I used a little plastic My Little Pony hairbrush, which was fun and ridiculous. I also added tiny ruffle trim to the dress, which helped me improve my tension working with smaller yarn/hooks. (Read as: it was really annoying.)

Yarn difficulties aside, I loved working this pattern, especially the little dress, which I did in cotton because I wanted it to have a completely different texture and look from the bear itself. I'm already dreaming of more bears---although perhaps not more brushed ones---mainly because I want to play with colour/fiber combinations between bear and dress. I think the next bear is going to be a sort of periwinkle blue...

I also couldn't resist giving her a tiny button-center flower for her ear, and to add a little pop of contrast to her head. This is one of the more traditional amis I've made, and I'm quite fond of her. I may list her in my sadly-neglected online shops eventually.

Since you all made this octopus blush with your nice comments about him, I figured I'd try and snap a (slightly---ugh, grey days.) better photo of him and share some details about his creation.

Back in June or July, I was googling for images of octopuses and ended up stumbling upon this Squidoo tutorial, and got addicted. The basic construction, in which you crochet the tentacles (which get their great natural curl from a combination of single and half-double crochet stitches) and then join them into a ring and make the body in the round, is simple and endlessly adaptable. (E.g. tentacow & tentacat.)The first-ever one I made was the only one I followed the pattern exactly for, after that I started experimenting with tentacle length and the increases and decreases for the head/body. Each yarn or combination of yarns will work up differently, and it's so much fun to play around with. I definitely recommend giving the pattern a try and making a tentacle-friend of your own!

And one more tiny finished thing, Bitsy the Ridiculous Easter Chick, who I made up on Saturday night just in time to tuck into an Easter basket. I used a pattern from Ana Paula Rimoli's fabulous Amigurumi World (the book from which I learned to make amis!) and made it in half-size, so Bitsy and her egg are a little under two inches tall.

Go see what everyone else is up to at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday! :)

Dragons, Tentacles, Tesseracts, and a Mystery.

2011-04-27T12:58:00.000-04:00

I have a thousand almost-finished things floating around in my room, just waiting for final sewing-together or embellishments, but I couldn't resist starting this dragon pattern anyway. So far I'm kind of in love with it, and I foresee more dragons in my future. (I can't wait to make weirdly coloured ones! I thought I'd start with a traditional dark green, though.) You can't see it too well in this shot, but the shaping on the neck/head is working up really beautifully. I took this photo this morning, having grand plans of crocheting al fresco while sipping some free I Love Lemon tea that I snagged from the bank (I think the dragon wanted a sip!), but it was too windy and chilly-damp to do more than a couple rows.

I also have no less than three tentacled-things on the hooks---a regular octopus, who's just got to have his ends woven in, a tentacle-cat who needs eyes and whiskers and a nose, and an octopus crocheted out of plarn ("yarn" made from plastic bags, blue ones, in this case), which is going to take a while because plarn is hard on the hands! All of these have homes to go to when they're woven-in and appliqued and finished, which is nice.

In non-yarn crafting, I'm starting a little bitty sewing project that I'm excited about---a Wrinkle in Time themed bookmark, to send to someone on Swap-Bot. I'm going to recreate the memorable diagram in the book in which an ant walks on a folded piece of cloth to illustrate travelling by tesseract. I backed some scrap fabric with fusible interfacing so it won't fray and painted a little ant on, and while I wait for that to dry I'm going to peruse some embroidery tutorials online to see about what kind of stars, etc., I might be able to embroider on the black felt I'm using for the body of the bookmark. (My prediction is that I'll just end up with asterisk-stars created by making a few intersecting straight lines. I'm trying to be realistic about the limits of my embroidery skills!)

And here's a slightly mysterious preview of something I'm really excited to share with you all come Finished Object Friday.

Go see what other people are up to at WIP Wednesday!

FO Friday: Pastel Edition.

2011-04-22T14:03:00.001-04:00

First, some delicious-looking Marshmallow Peep style bunnies from this awesome free pattern. If you're looking for something fast, fun, and yarn-flavoured to put in someone's Easter basket, there's still plenty of time to make a few of these! A little yarn, a little stuffing, some black beads, and you're set.

In a less-conventional "cute" vein, I made this cuttlefish as a request for someone. (The pastel tones were part of the request.)

This is one of those projects that got started, got to a certain point, and...stopped. A few times. First I did the body (with some help from this post over at FreshStitches to remind me how to get a good conical shape), and then stalled before creating the little ruffle-piece. (Which I did while watching the Disney Sleeping Beauty, and what an odd movie it is! I hadn't seen it since I was a kid. It has like...zero characterization! The conventions for making children's movies has changed a lot over the decades, it's interesting.)

Then I stalled before making and sewing on the tentacles. Then I stalled before making the polymer clay eyes. Then I stalled before actually sewing on said eyes and surrounding them with an additional crocheted eyelid-type-thing. But now he's finally finished!

...Finished and difficult to photograph. I sort of like this shot, though, because the light is odd and makes him look wise and deep sea and semi-mysterious. Which is just what a cuttlefish should look like, I think.

Check out other people's projects at Fibers on Friday and Finished Object Friday!

A Batch of Travellin' Critters.

2011-04-15T16:37:00.000-04:00

I haven't had the time and reliable computer access to blog forever, so this is probably cheating, but I wanted to pop in and say hi to all of you awesome WIP Wednesday/FO Friday people and share some of the stuff I've finished over the past few weeks.

Like Zombie Panda 2.0, above, this time with his very own Tasty Brain. I auctioned him off for earthquake relief in Japan, and he's already been shipped, safely received, and dubbed "Midori" by his owner. :D

Likewise made to be auctioned (although not shipped off yet, which is kind of nice because I've gotten used to seeing him around...) is this Angry Bird, made from a modified version of a great free pattern by Karla of Itsy Bitsy Spider Crochet. (Check out her super-cute patterns---there's a whole set of different Angry Birds, and her Log Cabin Carrier is one of my WIPs right now.)

And every Angry Bird needs an adversary, so I whipped up a quick Evil Green Pig, too, and then gleefully skipped outside to photograph them in an Epic Battle Tableau. (I did not, however, actually slingshot Angry Bird at the Evil Pig Fort.)

I also whipped up this little crocheted onigiri for someone on Swap-Bot who loves kawaii food-with-faces. This was my first try at making an ami with a kawaii-style face, and I'll admit that I picked the eye shape because it was easy to embroider! I used the construction idea from this pattern, but---as usual---made it teeny-tinier. I think it was probably about...an inch and a half tall?

Also for Swap-Bot, a mini monster finger puppet. I had fun giving him his single languid eye. It's like he's saying eh, I could bite you, but why bother? I sort of want to make more monsters now. This is probably the first time I've experimented with the weird-cute monster aesthetic, and I definitely see its appeal.

Check out other people's amazing projects at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday. :)

One Part Sci-Fi, One Part Sushi.

2011-03-16T11:18:00.000-04:00

Apologies for the quality (or lack thereof) of today's photos, rainy days defeat my camera and I every time.

I'm pattern-testing this week, which is really kind of exciting. The above---which currently looks like a lovely and current-weather-appropriate raindrop sculpture---is going to be a rainbow rocketship, designed by Unforth and viewable as a finished product in a less ridiculous colour scheme over at her blog.

Next, it gets its fantastic fins. :)

I'm not always the most diligent direction-follower, I tend to take patterns as a suggestion and resize or change elements around or, uh, not pay terribly close attention to my exact stitch count as long as it looks okay... So it's an interesting experience for me to be reading the pattern closely, following it more carefully, and considering how it might read/work to someone with less crocheting experience. (This pattern is awesome so far, well-written and easy to follow and I love the way the shaping worked up. It's both elegant and weirdly cuddly at the same time, somehow.)

The aerial view, just for fun.

And my currently on hold for pressing rocketship business project, this fish-and-sushi toy, which gets sewn together so that the fish can be tucked into the sushi roll or the sushi roll tucked into the fish. (I got impatient with wondering if this process would actually work or not and gave it a test baste-together the other night and it was a success! It wasn't easy to flip it back and forth, but it did work. So now the fish just needs his fins and stuff and then it can be sewn together for real, after which point I may try to auction it off for earthquake/tsunami relief for Japan.)

Check out what everyone else is up to at WIP Wednesday!

Mitts and Tentacles and Bunnies, Oh My.

2011-03-11T11:24:00.004-05:00

It was terrible to wake up to the news about the earthquake and tsunamis in Japan this morning. I've poked around Etsy and Ravelry for relief stuff, but there's not much popping up just yet---if any of you hear of crafty relief efforts, please let me know. I'm itchy to do something to help.

The Failing Potions fingerless gloves---they may not look finished, but they're as finished as they're going to get, for a while. I'm not sure about the finger-pieces yet. I tried them in several different yarns to try and get them less bulky, but I'm still not quite happy with them. (...But I also don't really want to buy any new, lighter-weight yarn for this, so.)

So they're going to remain asymmetrical for the time being, while I decide what to do---this way, my left (and non-dominant) hand will be warmer, but my right hand will have less bulk, to make chopping slugs (or garlic and ginger) and grinding beetles (or cumin) easier. I really do need to reread the Harry Potter books soon.

One thing I love about Swap-Bot is that it gets me to make stuff I'd never make otherwise. Like tentacow.

A distant relative of the tentacat in my blogger avatar, tentacow was created for a swap for which you send your partner a ridiculous item. My partner collects plushie cows, thus, tentacow. I'd never considered making an amigurumi cow before, so I did a quick google search to get an idea of what shapes were involved.

Here's the side and back view. Tentacow is about...3.5 inches tall, maybe? He sits in my palm perfectly. It's going to be hard to box him up and send him off to his new home. (I think my next tentacle-thing will be an owl. I'm not sure whether it should have both wings and tentacles, or just be---like tentacat and -cow---an owl head attached to some tentacles.)

This was made for a tiny-item bunny-themed swap. I've never tried a bunting before, and this one doesn't exactly work right, because cheap felt doesn't have enough weight for the flags to hang correctly. (This is photographed laid flat on a horizontal surface.) It was fun to make, though, especially the bitty bunnies, who are about an inch long and made from this super-simple pattern. I want to make a whole army of them, but I'm going to try not to unless I get some kind of amazing idea to utilize said bunny-army.

Go check out Fibers on Friday (which is where I found the bunny pattern above, actually), Finished Object Friday, and Fiber Arts Friday for more crafty goodness.

This Week's Theme...Dead Things?

2011-03-04T10:42:00.000-05:00

When I first got into amigurumi a couple years ago, I was drawn to this skeletal fish pattern in Elisabeth Doherty's Amigurumi! book, but I wasn't quite ready to follow said pattern yet. I rediscovered this book in the library a couple weeks ago and decided it was time to make a dead fish.

Part of the reason I liked this pattern so much was how elegant the tail looks, with all of its almost-floral swirls. Funny thing about my undertaking this project? I hate fish. Alive, dead, in a tank, on a plate...not a fan. I was once at a deserted marina at night, and while the overall horror movie setting of it didn't give me a moment's pause, I screamed like a little girl when I almost stepped on a fish carcass. Gross.

The other element of this pattern that I loved (and that I love ten times more having actually made it) was the shape of the skeleton. I decided to do mine in wool and felt it, and I love the effect. Here it is before and after felting.

This was my first time felting Fisherman's Wool (I bought a skein with the vague intentions of dyeing it at some point), and it felted wonderfully. I'm already planning some other projects with it.

Meet Zombie Panda, who will be heading out to someone on Swap-Bot who likes both zombies and pandas. He's only about...three inches or so tall, so he was a super-quick little project, and so much fun to make. I stitched on his face/random gore spots while watching a random rerun of Ghost Whisperer, which seemed nicely appropriate.

Here, Zombie Panda can be seen stalking his prey, Can of Bamboo Shoots.

And here, he has felled it and approaches to feed! Good hunting, Zombie Panda!

Check out other people's projects---dead, undead, or otherwise---at Fibers on Friday and Finished Object Friday!

Presenting Ms. Padma Primavera, a Perplexing Pachyderm.

2011-02-25T14:23:00.000-05:00

Finished just this morning (and yay for the I have to finish this in time to post about it! effect of FO Fridays), here is my Padma the Spring-Bringing Elephant, no longer a sandcastle! And with her accessories---a fake rose, crocheted by me, and some real tulips, provided by Trader Joe's. She's made from this lovely pattern by Dawn Toussaint, whose patterns I've admired but hadn't tried yet. I'll definitely be trying more in the future, because this one was so wonderful to make. Well before this one was finished, I was already thinking ooh, what colour should the next one be? (I'm not sure there really will be a next one unless I have someone specific in mind to make it for, but you get the point.)

The construction of this pattern was different than any ami I've done before, everything---the legs, the trunk, the ears---was attached with single crochets as the body was worked rather than being sewn together at the end. Since my sewing skills aren't great, this resulted in an easier (and much neater-looking) finished product, which was happy-making.

So far, her spring-bringing powers are sort of working---it's well above freezing here today, and we got enough rain this morning to deplete the remaining piles of snow a lot, which is more than enough progress to make me want to go skip around the block singing a jaunty springtime song.

A big part of what attracted me to this pattern (which I found just clicking around other people's favourites on Ravelry, total serendipity!) was the curled-up trunk, which I thought was the sweetest thing ever. I'm not sure Ms. Padma is 100% finished, she may at some point acquire a felt patch or some beads or embroidery.

Check out other people's finished (or just fiber-y) objects at Finished Object Friday and Fibers on Friday.

This Week's Accidental Theme: Green!

2011-02-23T11:56:00.001-05:00

...Possibly brought on by my intense longing for spring. First, here's my crocheted sandcastle! ...Except that it's really an elephant-to-be, upside down. I didn't mean for Ms. Sandcastlelephant to be striped, but I didn't think I'd have enough of the lime green, so I figured it was better to put in an intentional stripe in the middle than just...run out of lime green and have to put in another colour at a random place nearer to the end. Hopefully this will be more elephantine on Friday, at which point I'll link to the pattern I'm using, which I'm really enjoying. It's a different kind of construction than I've used for amis before, and so far, so good.

I bought this fun, soft chunky yarn (which is not at all the colour in this photo, maybe I'll manage to find some better light when these have acheived FO status) on sale a while ago, thinking of fingerless gloves. Then I thought briefly of (and started) a cowl, based on a Ravelry pattern called "A Day at Hogsmeade cowl." I decided against the cowl, but by then I was already in a Harry Potter mood, so I dubbed these the "I'm Failing Potions Fingerless Gloves." (I would totally suck at Potions. Professor Snape would scare me and I'm terrible at things that require precise measuring.)

A slightly better idea of what the yarn looks like. I'm combining a pattern I found on Ravelry with the construction of some fingerless gloves I've made and liked before, and while the finger-bits are a bit wonky (and I have to get around to trying to fix them before it gets dark again...), I like them so far. The chunky yarn works up so quickly, and they're really bulky and warm and kind of silly looking. Whether I can manage to make the second one remotely symmetrical to the first promises to be a hilarious adventure.

Check out everyone else's projects-in-progress at WIP Wednesday at Tami's Amis!

Critters, Hats, and One Very Small Cauldron.

2011-02-18T15:28:00.000-05:00

Presenting...bunny-mochi! (And one lucky tri-colour kitty-mochi, because I learned from autumngeisha that in the Vietnamese zodiac, this is the Year of the Cat rather than the Year of the Rabbit.) Mochi are rice cakes, and they're usually sort of dome-shaped, so I decided to make some easy ami dome shapes and give them ears and tails and polymer clay eyes (which ended up a little too big and buggy, which is what happens when you make one piece for a project without the other pieces on hand to make sure the sizes will match...)

These mochi are having a party for the Lantern Festival, the end of the Lunar New Year festivities, so I made them some little paper lanterns and took them outside to party in front of the just-beginning-to-sprout daffodils. (Which are surrounded, sadly, by piles of dirty, icy snow, but it's melting slowly. There's hope!)

And here's the last batch of baby hats, which are hopefully all getting tagged and boxed up and mailed tomorrow.

I also finally wove in the ends on my not-a-baby-hat. If I make another one, I'll make the brim smaller, this is a little too baseball-hat-brim for me, which is what I get for finishing it at night when I couldn't really see what it looked like.

This was a tiny, silly project that went out to someone on Swap-Bot, a little cauldron pincushion. I crocheted the pieces and wet felted them, and then needle felted on the coloured steam. (Which was actually a happy accident---I was trying to needle felt some bubbles and ended up liking the wispy, steamy-looking reverse side of the piece better, so I sewed it into the cauldron wrong side up.)

...I finished more stuff this week than I thought! I made a little Valentine's heart (from this awesome FreshStitches pattern) and an octopus from this pattern, which I've used and adapted a ton and love to pieces. This little guy was auctioned off to benefit the Trevor Project and will be on his way to Australia soon.

Go see other people's Friday pretties at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday!

Year of the Rabbit, part I.

2011-02-11T12:12:00.000-05:00

I was hoping to debut this guy for last week's FO Friday, being that Thursday marked the first day of the Year of the Rabbit, but he sadly wasn't finished. Luckily, the Lunar New Year Festival goes on for a couple weeks, so I'm still technically on time. (And I have more New Year projects that are just shy of finished, so hopefully they can squeak---or hop---in next week.)

This guy was a joint project. I did the bunny-making, and my mom was nice enough to make him a festive kimono and obi. (My sewing skills are basically nonexistant. I have to work on that this year.)

In a lot of Asian folklore, the shadows and shapes created by the moon's craters are seen as a rabbit in the moon, which I love. (I adore bunnies, which is probably why I decided to semi-celebrate Lunar New Year this year, despite my complete lack of any Asian heritage whatsoever.) In Japan, the moon-rabbit is pounding rice into flour to make rice cakes, so I equipped my lunar-bunny with a mortar and pestle for his photoshoot.

I wanted something a little bit realistic-rabbit-ish instead of just a bunny with a sphere for a head, so I used the basic head/ears proportions from this cute bunny pattern (that's a Ravelry link) as a starting point, but I did it in half-size since I like everything small. The head took a few frog-and-restarts before I got it looking bunny-ish instead of too snouty and ratty. The body and arms/feet are all just super-basic cylinder shapes. It's been a while since I've done a semi-scultptural ami like this, and it was a lot of fun. Especially since I managed to get him to sit up steadily with only a few dried pinto beans stuffed into the bottom of his body. (I made his eyes out of polymer clay, and sometimes polymer clay bits can make these things really wobbly and top-heavy and hard to get balanced.)

The big bunny feet help with the steady balancing, too.

(Go see other people's awesome projects at Finished Object Friday and Fibers on Friday.)

Next Week...Something That's Not a Hat. I Promise.

2011-01-28T11:50:00.001-05:00

Although this installment of Tiniest Dye Lots Ever totally counts as not-a-hat, right? This week's bitty-overdyeing project involved dipping some Paton's Classic Wool in "Old Gold" (which here is a euphemism for "mustard.") in some Wilton food dye (and regular food colouring) in red. I was nervous at first because it looked like it was going to turn a muddy brown, but I like the end result. I also like that when you put the original and dyed colours next to each other, you get a very go go Gryffindor! effect. :D Maybe I'll make myself a little Gryffindor wristwarmer or something. I think it's getting to be time for some Harry Potter re-reading.

And here are this week's little hats. The one in the lower right (and again in hideous mustard, why is this stuff even in my stash?) is an adapted puff-stitch pattern that was fun to do, and the purple one next to it is the Battlestar Idol Baby Hat, because those were the two shows I watched as I made it.

The turquoise one is meant to be viewed from the air:

This is so any passing birds will have something interesting to look at, clearly. I actually kind of love this one, I was getting fed up with trying promising-looking patterns that had to be frogged after a bit (...whether this is the patterns or just me is up for debate...), so I flipped through my motif book to find a circular one I thought could be adapted into a hat. I want to make thousands more voluminous popcorn flowers right now.

I also finally finished off my little black brimmed hat, but it needs its ends woven and I'm thinking of giving it a contrasting hat band or something, so it's not showing up here yet.

I will, however, happily share the results of some serious Untangling I did to finish it.

This was a big giant snarled mess for about...six months, and now it's a nicely-behaved yarn snowball! (But has this inspired me to unsnarl any of the rest of my snarled yarn? No.)

Stop by FO Friday and Fibers on Friday to see other people's hats and not-a-hats. :)

Meanwhile, at the Hat Factory...

2011-01-21T11:28:00.000-05:00

This week's crop of teeny hats for Caps for Good. I've been playing with stripes and bobbles (the two variegated hats in the center row have little popcorn-bobbles on them, which didn't really photograph here) and some front-post stitches for a couple rows of ribbing (on the orange hat in the lower left), but I think I'm going to consult Ravelry for some new patterns soon. I need to get better at following patterns and having the patience to work through them even if I have to turn off the TV or my music to do it.

But a much more exciting FO...

All of the amazing hand-dyeing that's been popping up on WIP Wednesdays and FO Fridays got me inspired. I don't have any white/off-white wool in the house, but I do have some Paton's Classic Wool in lemongrass, which I figured would be light enough to overdye with interesting results. The bright yellow-green-ness of the yarn limited my colour choices, though---it was basically "try to make it greener" or "add some blue," so I went with blue.

I had some Wilton's icing dye in just sitting temptingly in the cupboard, so I did some googling and went with the process outlined at this tutorial, except I decided to live on the edge and skip the thermometer part. What I really wanted was something variegated, but I decided to stick to basics the first time around, and settled for just not trying to get the dye into the yarn evenly, which sort of worked and created some slight variations in colour.

Hand-dyeing is just as much fun as you all have been making it look! I was ridiculously excited when the dye actually exhausted and instead of a murky pot of blue water with some dubious yarn, I had a little hank of kelly green yarn and clear water!

And the obligatory "before and after" shot...

I can see this becoming a dangerously addictive hobby. And I was planning on buying some off-white wool for an upcoming project anyway...

Check out other people's projects at FO Fridays and Fibers on Friday!

A Warm-and-Fuzzy FO Friday.

2011-01-14T14:54:00.001-05:00

I feel silly for just having learned about the Caps for Good infant hat drive when the deadline is the end of February. It's been running since September! I could have made so many more hats! I found out about this drive and got one of their "action kits" after I made my WIP Wednesday blog post, and have managed to whip up five hats since then, somehow.

The pattern in the kit is so, so easy---all nice friendly double crochets, so it works up amazingly fast and the tall rows make it easy to know where you are in the process. I made these while watching Dexter. (And have thus titled them "Slightly Murderous Baby Hats" on Ravelry.)

I also wanted to try a more complicated pattern, so I gave this one a try, because the ribs looked pretty and I haven't done a lot of front and back post crochet yet.

This hat was a fantastic way to practice the technique, since it's so teeny (it was supposed to be in sport weight to be a preemie hat, but I did it in worsted so it's more regular-newborn sized. And being modelled here by a handy stuffed cat, as I am [happily] not in possession of a creepy baby doll to put it on.) It was a great way to learn what the front and back post stitches actually look like from different angles, and get into the rhythm of using them. The ribbed fabric it creates is really plush and warm, too.

I also wanted to do some preemie hats for SuddenExpression's preemie hat drive, which you can read about on her blog or on Ravelry, and I couldn't resist the cuteness of this bear-hat pattern.

Making and attaching the ears was fun---it was almost like putting together an amigurumi, but less small and fiddly.

Check out what other people are up to at FO Friday and Fibers on Friday!

Some Lazy Wednesday WIPs.

2011-01-12T13:25:00.002-05:00

I'm still in one of those moods where I just keep starting new things to see what will happen and end up ripping them out, which is always fun (with occasional hints of frustrating). Said mood/mode of creating stuff doesn't really loan itself to a WIP Wednesday post, sadly. I guess I could photograph all the skeins of yarn I've started and un-started things with?

My hat is sort of coming along, though:

My decision to make it in black has slowed it down, since I'm up to the edging bit, and with black, I need to do it in daylight so it will be easier to see what I'm doing and get it as even as possible.

I also started an interesting rectangular motif in two reds and black that may become part of my planned skull-scarf.

...Or I may just end up frogging it. It's a mystery!

In non-fiber WIPs, I rediscovered the joy of Artist Trading Cards the other day. This is as good a place as any to explain my blog title, actually. It's part of a lyric from an Ani DiFranco song that goes they say goldfish have no memory / I guess their lives are much like mine / and the little plastic castle is a surprise every time. I've loved that since the moment I heard it in high school, and it actually describes part of the way my brain works---I'm pretty sure that I forget how much I like certain things (like painting or collaging or crocheting or all the shades of green that appear in springtime) on purpose so that I can be happily surprised by how wonderful they are all over again.

So the other day I decided to be surprised by the fun of making ATCs (which are little 2.5 x 3.5 inch pieces of art, it's such a fun and un-daunting size for a tiny project, even for someone who's mostly fine arts impaired, as I am), and joined some swaps on Swap-Bot, where I've been swapping stuff on and off for years now. One of them is for a heart-themed card, so I had fun painting a piece of the newspaper (the legal notices and pets for sale/adoption section, haha) in a quick rainbow gradient, and I'm going to use a heart paper punch to cut lots of hearts and then glue them together in overlapping layers. That's the plan, anyway.

(Go stop by WIP Wednesday at Tami's Amis to see what everyone else is working on!)

2011's First Finished Projects

2011-01-07T13:58:00.001-05:00

I got these photographed today just before even more snow started falling. I filled the bag with some tasty groceries (cereal, dried apples, and tea, yum) and hung it from the support of my sadly disused clothesline. I really miss using my clothesline, you guys. Winter cannot end soon enough for me.

So there's my finished CD-in-the-bottom market bag, which is a pattern I definitely recommend. It worked up easily and well, and once I got into the rhythm of the treble crochets, it was something I could do while also watching TV---in this case, the first series of the BBC's Being Human, which I liked a lot. There's so much vampire/werewolf/paranormal whatever narrative around at this point, and this show (which has a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost all sharing a house in Bristol) was in interesting take on it.

The CD in the bottom works wonderfully---one of the problems I always had with the idea of crocheted market bags is my suspicion that heavy stuff would just stretch them out, and this seems to counter that nicely. I love the idea of using useless CDs, too, although of course once I actually needed one for this project, it took me forever to find one. I wonder where I've stashed them all... (Remember when AOL used to constantly send you CDs in the mail to try and coax you into installing AOL?)

This peace sign granny square (which I attached prayer-flag style ties to) was actually my first FO of 2011. Made from this (excellent) pattern, this was my first attempt at this kind of colour change where you have to carry the unused colour along on the back, and while it definitely took getting used to---there was a lot of ripping out a few stitches and going back to pick up the other colour, which I'd forgotten about---it was fun. I've always said I'd never make an afghan, but after doing this square I'm not so sure...

But first, a hat! Which I think I'll go work on right now, while watching Dexter. I saw the pilot the other night, and whoa. So effectively creepy, and Michael C. Hall is amazing. And the south-Florida setting is perfect for some wishful winter watching. (See also: Burn Notice. I wonder if my library has season three yet...)

(Go check out what other people are up to at Finished Object Friday at Tami's Amis, or Fibers on Friday at Visions of Sugar Plums!)

Some WIP Attempts At Softening the Winter

2011-01-05T15:15:00.000-05:00

First of all, thank you so much for all your sweet comments about The Pony. I think sometimes when you spend a lot of time alone with a Secret Project, it's easy to start doubting the wisdom of said project, and it makes me happy that you all liked the pony and the gesture behind it. :)

It doesn't look like it right now, but this is going to be a hat. A cute little tiny-brimmed hat from this book. I made one of these in October (which was my First Hat, actually) and it sold at a craft fair. This one is going to be for me. In past years, I had the luxury of not wearing hats because they tend to look stupid on me, but I walk a lot and it's just too cold right now to be vain, so I need more hats. This one is interestingly constructed---you make this nice brainless rectangle piece, which is all just neat rows of half-double crochet that I plan to do while I watch some TV tonight, and then join it into a hat-sized cylinder and work the top in the round and add the brim.

I don't even remember how, but I somehow discovered the wonder of Craftsanity podcasts the other day. I listened to the most recent one, an interview with Anna of the adorable and amazing (adorabmazing?) Mochimochi Land, and I found the discussion that ensued about crafting weird, whimsical things really inspiring. I was finishing off my market bag (I actually have FO's for this Friday already! This is very exciting.) as I listened, and a crocheted happy tree popped into my head.

One of the things I miss most about seasons-that-aren't-winter (uh, besides ever not being cold) is trees. Not that the trees go anywhere for the winter, obviously, but I miss the colours and sounds and beautiful shadow-shapes created by their leaves.

I'm not sure about this yet, I think I'm going to frog the trunk and make it thinner, since right now it has a distinctly mushroom look. It's so, so nice to just work on something freeform, though! I've been following a lot of patterns lately, and I'm finding it really relaxing to just increase and decrease where I feel like it and not worry about lumps and bumps, because a tree's leaves are supposed to be unevenly distributed! If I like this enough to sew together, I may make some little polymer clay beads to make it an apple tree.

I'm really excited about this year being Year of the Rabbit, so I figured some bunny-making was in order. So far...just this partial head and ears. Held together (and given rudimentary eyes) with pins, so clearly, a voodoo bunny. Other planned bunny projects: giant bunny ami from Cuddly Crochet, possibly some bunny slippers.

See what other people are up to for WIP Wednesday at Tami's Amis.

The Pony.

2010-12-31T12:36:00.003-05:00

My mom is my favourite person in the known universe, but she's difficult to buy/make/otherwise procure gifts for. She's one of those people who already has everything, and while she loves all things handmade, she can handmake most of them better than I can.

About a week before Christmas, I was doing some mostly-aimless searching around on Etsy for interesting things that she might like, and I suddenly recalled that when we'd been talking about childhood Christmas presents recently, she'd said, sort of sadly, that no one ever got her a pony.

My mom grew up in Queens, so while her family had a yard, it was a tiny yard, and I don't think she ever had any real expectations of a pony. But I get the feeling it was the patriotic duty of all good little girls in the 1950s to at least want one, and if you didn't, the House Un-American Activities Committee might have come around to ask some pointed questions.

So I thought: perfect. A pony! My initial plan was to order a plush one from Etsy, made by someone more skilled than I am, but nothing I found in my searching grabbed me, so I went looking for patterns instead, and being slightly crazy and [falsely] emboldened by the success of the crochetalong penguin, I decided not to wuss out and buy a smaller pattern, but to go with the giant Perfect Pony. (It was supposed to be about 17" tall, mine ended up about 20", somehow.)

It started out well! The shaping on the head turned out beautifully, and my first attempt at adding sleepy-eyelids to a plush (an effect I've often admired on other people's plushes) was more or less successful.

And then I started the body. And ripped it out. And started it again. And ripped it out. And started it again. I could not make it work---I guess I'm just not a focused enough counter to handle the construction of the pattern, which involved working increase on a chain rather than in the round, where a few missteps are less evident? I lost an entire day trying to get it right, and then gave up. I almost gave up entirely, because it was December 22nd by this point, but the thought of being able to tie a big red bow on this thing and give it to my mom on Christmas morning all look, it's the pony you asked for fifty years ago! made me take a deep breath, scrap the pattern, and just make an improvised body in the round.

(Conveniently, the bow hides the ugly seam between its neck and body!)

I stayed up until 2 AM with this thing a couple nights in a row, making its ears (which I designed with help from this adorable horse purse pattern) and legs and sewing in the mane, and finally got it to a place where it was at least mostly sewn together and free-standing around 1 AM on Christmas. It's far from perfect, but my mom totally got the gesture of the thing and loved it. Totally worth the angst.

Next, I have to design it some accessories! There was a saddle/bridle included in the pattern, so I might make one of those. And a pretty horse blanket! Maybe with some embroidery. ...Does anyone know where I can find a good embroidery tutorial?

(Check out other, probably less insane projects at Tami's Finished Objects Friday post.)

Some Snowed-In Serial Dabbling

2010-12-29T12:09:00.003-05:00

I still have to blog about the Giant Pony Project (I'm going to cheat just a little and do that for FO Friday), from which my hands are still recovering. After spending most of December working on focused or semi-focused projects, it's making me happy in this post-Christmas, sadly-snowed-in lull to return to my more typical creating-stuff method of starting a billion tiny things just to see how they'll work...and then leaving them unfinished on the skeins until I need the yarn for something else and rip them out.

I'm reading a pirate-themed YA novel right now, and while I'm not sure about the novel, it made me want to do something piratey. I made myself resist a number of cute amigurumi pirate bears, and went with this cool skull motif (that's a Ravelry link).

It's a great pattern---easy, fun, and pretty much foolproof, because I definitely messed up the eyes a bit (which is what happens when I try to listen to music and crochet things that require counting at the same time) and it still looks pretty good.

I'm thinking of making this adorable iPod hoodie, so I learned Tunisian crochet yesterday, via a nice tutorial over at Corchet Spot. I need to stop being intimidated by new techniques just because they have fancy names, because this is the second one I've learned recently (the other being front and back post crochet) that I really like.

I'm still a bit wobbly at it, obviously, but this is just my test swatch to see how stripes would work up, etc. This is the Tunisian knit stitch, and I love the knitted-look. I'm hoping to learn how to knit in the upcoming year, but until I do, there's this stitch to perfect and create something that at least looks similar to knitting.

I might combine these two semi-WIPs, actually, and make a red and black striped scarf in Tunisian crochet with friendly skulls on the ends.

I also have one actual project going, this cool market bag with a CD in the bottom to give it weight and shape.

So far, so good. And I am going to be so much better at treble crochet (which I hadn't used much, previously) by the time it's finished.

Check out more WIP Wednesday posts over at Tami's Amis!