Goal Achieved, Level Up

KNOCK KNOCK. Hello? You guys are being extraordinarily quiet. Everyone okay out there?

So you know I finished the One Skein Scarf, and mentioned the hat, and said it was all part of a hat/scarf/mittens set. The set comprises the scarf, the Applejack Cap and Lion Brand mittens made out of 3-year-stashed Homespun Prairie. Voila!

I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out. The hat was supposed to be looser than this, but since I (a) used a smaller hook to make the stitches smaller to make it warmer and (b) used bulky yarn instead of worsted, you can maybe see how I’d end up with a different hat than the pattern makes. I added stitches to it to compensate, and also added length to the hat so it would cover my ears. After all, what’s the point of a warm hat if it won’t cover your ears?  Actually, for acrylic, all this stuff turned out very warm.

The making of the mittens was an odyssey. I started them the day we left Iowa (the 26th) and made the ribbing, then continued the next TWO DAYS OF FREEZING TRAVEL through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. It was very snowy in Iowa and Missouri. Made for exciting travel. All my pictures look sort of dream-like, because I couldn’t keep the condensation off the windows. Here’s where I was just south of Kansas City, Kansas. My toes felt totally frozen.

I made both mittens at once as I went along. I knew if I just did one, the other would never get made.  Here we are in the spectacular Flint Hills in Kansas. It’s amazingly … I don’t know. Not much there but cows. The Flint Hills are a unique place. You know that super green and huge blue sky with hills desktop in Windows? I think that came from this place. In winter, it just looks scary-barren.

I’d managed to get a pair of warm slippers in Wichita, which gave me enough energy do all but the fingers by the time we’d gotten to Northern Oklahoma, near Ponca City (where I used to live). We thought we’d be able to make it home the first night, but a 2 hour traffic jam and icy conditions meant we stopped for the night in Oklahoma City.  Mittens going well, though.

Somewhere south of Ft. Worth, Texas I was mostly done with a thumb and was finally warm again! It was about this point I gave up on following the pattern, because the pattern had long since begun to seem stupid. It wasn’t wide enough in the hand, for one thing. So I just kept going and made them to fit my hand exactly.

By the time we got home to Austin both thumbs were finished. I needed to finish the fingers for the last three inches, and sew ‘em up. Two weeks later, I was done. It was frustrating to make mittens with this yarn. The thread-like core kept snapping when I tried to pull a seam tight. All I can say about it now is that my stash is smaller, and they’re very soft mittens.

It was an interesting start on non-beanie hats and finger-wear. I kind of wanted to try the patterns out on a yarn I hadn’t spend a lot of $$ on, so I could do them again but better. Now if I can only remember to write up what I did!

2009 Craft-in-Review

Many of these the projects you’ll see below are completed, but in any case, whether completed or not, these are the crafty things that have occupied my time this past year. Many of these things have taken an amazing amount of time for this crafting-at-night-only girl: the blue sweater, the afghan, the birches quilt, the as-yet-unfinished red sweater and quilted jacket.Various things conspired to limit my crafting: the business of moving, grief, and other paying concerns.

I liked all my projects, so all of them are my “favorites” but Audrey’s sweater is the one that really tugs at my heart.  Not listed here are my grandma’s birthday card, the framed corkboards or the hat and gloves that I’m 99.9% done with that match the one-skein scarf.  I didn’t really include much for food, I think I’m going to do a separate one for that.

Looking back at the year via my iPhoto library and through this blog was interesting. I got a new computer, I tried to walk/hike a lot more, the cat turned 2, there was a huge fire at our apartment complex, I went to SXSW again, I got a promotion at work, traveled all around California, went to Iowa as well as to various places in Texas, I met Alton Brown, we published a few side project websites, I nearly made it through another November NaBloPoMo, and of course we moved into an apartment half the size of our former one.  On the much more somber side, we lost our dear, sweet Audrey, and a few months later decided to honor her memory in our own way by adopting Wesley. It’s been an eventful year.

Miriam Cooks A Lot | Circle-in-a-Square Granny Square (tutorial) | unfinished Red Wide-Neck Sweater | One-Skein Scarf | unfinished silk and linen quilted jacket | Owl, Redux (tutorial)| Owls, Part 1 | Birches Quilt |Bay Leaf Wreath | African Violet Jewelry Case | Flower Afghan | Audrey’s Sweater | Miriam’s Lake Blue Sweater |  Jeff’s Blue Beanie | Experiments in Thread Jewelry | Yarn for the Project Queue

The Flickr Pictures:
1. Happy about Tacos, 2. Row5, 3. Unfinished Sweater, 4. One-Skein Scarf, 5. Unfinished Silk Quilting, 6. Tiny Little Owl, 7. Hugging the glass, 8. Birch/Aspen Finished Wall Quilt, 9. Laurel Detail 1, 10. Pot of Violets, 11. Flower Afghan, 12. Audrey’s Sweater, 13. First Sweater, 14. Jeff’s Blue Beanie, 15. Shapes, 16. Hmmm

SCARF

Ahhhhhhh … nice little blogging break there.

SO!  This is not exactly a major crafting accomplishment, but I finished a scarf. In particular the One Skein Scarf from Stitch ‘n Bitch Crochet: the Happy Hooker that I mentioned. I think it’s a pretty scarf, but it’s almost as if I suddenly went back to crochet kindergarten. What manages to redeem me is that (a) it’s cold here right now and (b) I’m also making a matching hat and mittens.

I would wait to post until I had all of it done, except my crafting has been so minimal lately that I feel as if I must show what I actually have managed to get done.

So here it (and Wesley and I) am (are):

The yarn: Once upon a time I couldn’t crochet that well, so I knew I needed to practice a lot. In pursuit of that practice, I was going to make this one crappy project-that-will-not-be-named, and so I bought all this yarn on sale (Homespun Prairie). Predictably, I got much better and decided the project was BO-RING and so I frogged it. But then I had all this yarn.

So! Recently I found the yarn and decided to make my scarf, plus this Applejack Cap from Croshay Designs and Lion Brand’s relatively simple looking mittens with wrist ribbing. I hope the yarn’s striping comes through on the cap and mittens.

The yarn is quite pretty, but a bad choice for a beginner. Homespun can be a pain in the a** to crochet with, because the ply is loose, it sort of bunches up and then it fuzzes out a bit at times. But the end product is soft and shiny, and has a nice rainbow stripe on a copper-brown background. It isn’t the best yarn I’ve worked with, but it’s not the worst, either.

P.S. I made the necklace, too. Woo!