Bean Bag Improvement
This is the Nook by designer Philippe Malouin (via Design Milk). It is a crocheted chair – sort of crocheted using his hand/arm instead of a hook. It reminds me of a bean bag. It can be uncrocheted, I understand, and redone in different ways. The crocheting is done by hand, and the “yarn” is stuffed cotton tubing. You can go to his page, linked above, and see him make it.
The what?
Woke up this morning after a great fundraising shindig – we put on a great party
to benefit my workplace last night. I should say my colleagues did – I’m not the party planner, that honor goes to my talented coworker & boss, with the help of some great board members. I was quite impressed – it was actually a really nice event.
Problem is, a couple of hours after I woke up I realized I had the flu. I’m just glad it wasn’t yesterday. It’s been a while since I had the flu, I forgot how craptacular it really is. I’m pretty worn down.
Aside from sleeping, I’ve just been sitting here crocheting – I find that you can do that without too much nausea. I put the Share A Square blocks up on the wall to organize the colors and have started stitching now that I’m done with black borders. I wasn’t done with borders when I took the picture. So close! A finished project!
What does it say that my closest-to-done project was done mostly by others?
How to Slip Stitch
So I just saved this tutorial from Bella Dia about how to make a slip knot.
It’s not that I haven’t made a slip knot before. It’s that I only do it once per project most of the time, so I forget, because I rarely bother to remember details I use infrequently. The solution is practice, but I’m certainly not going to bore myself to tears making umpteen slip knots to practice. I’d quit crochet if I had to do that.
I have a memory trick, one that makes me able to sort through large amounts of data quickly and recognize patterns. It’s how I read over 100 pages an hour. Fine detail passes quickly through short term memory, long enought to process, but it bypasses the long term memory stop. I can memorize a credit card in a glance and repeat without error, but 15 seconds later all but certain salient pattern-recognition details (first 2 digits & type) are gone. It’s hard to explain. It’s like a savant version of photographic memory.
It’s why I love the internet for crafting. Somebody always has a tutorial about how to do whatever I forget. It’s like a brain online.
My refusal/inability to remember details like this is ONE reason of several why I quit knitting (and Latin). Practicing casting on made me furious and irritable, really quite batty and occasionally tearful. I tried. It was painful and without joy, and I craft only for fun. Practicing preparing to knit and not really getting to knit ever was too much. I felt like I was back learning scales on the piano when I was 5 (I hated that too). But you can’t very well start a project without knowing how to cast on. So I’d forget how, have to relearn, forget, relearn … QUIT.
I only succeeded with crochet because my first project involved no chains or slip knots whatsoever. Win some, lose some.
