Three-Color Afghan Q&A
So one of the main projects I’ve been working on in December was a gift, so I never showed it that much, however now that the holiday is over I’ll reveal it. It’s an afghan that I made for my grandparents, now about five feet long and about 4.5 feet wide. It’s very dense and yet stretchy. Working on it with it on my lap kept me very warm!
Yarn: It has three colors - off white, chocolate brown and dusty blue. The worsted-weight yarn is Vanna’s Choice from Lion Brand (oh how my husband laughed when I brought home Vanna White yarn!). It’s an acrylic yarn, and I thought it a bit squeaky to work with. But on the whole it’s pretty soft, easy to care for, and fairly priced for a project as big as this. I believe it took 5-6 balls of each, something like that. It was made by holding three strands of yarn together as you go, so it took lots of yarn.
Hook Size: Speed Hook Size Q . This was my first foray into “speed hooking” and I am torn about the method. I mean, the loose gauge is great for this sort of project, but it’s not quite so fun to work with. Kind of hurt my fingers.
Pattern: Lion Brand’s free pattern the “5 1/2 Hour Throw”. I modified this pattern quite a bit althought the basic “V stitch” (as I call it) is the same. I used a smaller hook (calls for size S) which of course decreased the gauge a lot. I still thought it was loose, so to keep this from feeling “too floppy” I used pretty tight tension. Despite the gauge decrease, I did increase the size overall significantly by adding additional stitches (the original is about the size of the striped without the border). I also removed the fringe it called for and instead added a two-row deep half double crochet “binding” border to tighten the edges because I was still unsure how the floppiness and stretchiness of the stitches around the edges would work out over time and with repeated washing. (Note: Normally I would give you the link to the pattern, but Lion Brand’s site is apparently in the midst of renovation and is totally borked. So here’s the pattern from Michael’s.)
Color Pattern: The pattern is a single color thing, but I made a pattern of solid stripes surrounded by a three-tone border. This matches my grandparents’ sofa (they call the sofa a “davenport” which I’ve never heard outside that area of Iowa). In my next post, which I shall title “Made of Fail” I’ll tell you how I ended up making this particular color pattern, and give you some insight into how spectacularly the phrase “I am not perfect” fits me and why that doesn’t matter. The crap I had to go through to get this project to completion was astounding, and as usual, it was all my fault because I made it harder than it needed to be. Typical. Well, hope y’all like it 
My brother Jeremy gracefully agreed to “model” the blanket to show approximate size. Pretty big for a lap throw, yes?
Afghan Detail of border and brown stripe:
New Holiday Wreath … looks funny
Oof, the first part of the holiday is done … lots of cooking, people have visited (there’s one of the family dinners there), I have visited people, there has been shopping done, I have made it through a big chunk of work, and now there’s just a nice holiday and some presents. And all that running around is probably why I feel so exhausted, eh?
So I like making a new wreath each holiday season. I always find it somewhat amusing to see how many different decorative things you can do with the same basic round object year after year. This year I wanted to make one to keep, to get back out next year, perhaps . So this is what I made. I wrapped a straw wreath with an excessive amount of fabric (some of my mom’s shiny vintage fabric), using a vast quantity of large, dangerous-looking pins in the process. Now I need to buy more pins.
Then I cut out some of my favorite holiday shapes. Next I threw that batch of misshapen junk out and tried again. This time I had better luck and made a front and backing piece for each, and glued them together. Next step I embroidered them - got some swanky gold and silver thread for some, and a nice bell for the, um, bell. If I were to do this again, I would embroider before gluing the backing piece on, because embroidering through hot glue is not fun.
Last, I just pinned the ornaments on. Purportedly it’s now done, but I kind of think it looks unfinished. I can’t decide whether it’s done, or needs something … and if it needs something, what it might need. I’ve considered adding some candy cane striped trim, or perhaps creating some more ornaments for a bit of a layered look. I just don’t know.
What do you think?
P.S. I made two of the trees. The other one (which had more embroidered lights) I made for my swap partner. Sadly, my apartment office will not give me my packages, so I have not yet gotten my swap stuff. Darn it. Irritating people.
Handmade Consortium
I’m tempted to think that “consortium” sounds slightly shady. I don’t know why. I attended consortiums, or perhaps was in a consortium, when in grad school, I can’t remember which, and it seemed to involve quantities of kosher vegan food (I ate a lot of kosher vegan food in school) and occasionally cheap wine.
But this is not that consortium, and I digress. This is the Consortium that runs the Buy Handmade Pledge, and they emailed me a couple days ago to tell me that they were past the 10,000 mark - that is, more than 10,000 people have taken the pledge. I was, I believe, No. 639.
But also, there was an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine about the Pledge, which morphed into musings about Etsy (which has apparently topped 1,000,000 sales now), a few mentions of Craft and some confused contemplating of the whole craft movement and how it ought to be characterized. Hehe. I think it is fabulously interesting to see people who are not really connected with craft peek into this “movement” as it were and try to figure what’s going on.
I’ll also point you to the Flickr pool that the Consortium made of people creatively depicting their Handmade pledges. Some pretty interesting stuff in there, like this:
from Meu Pintinho Coloridinho aka Carola Rodrigues
