After nearly a month of not blogging, i thought i should let you know that I am still around.
I’ve done a little knitting
A little spinning
California Red locks from A Verb for Keeping Warm Raverly page
and…. i adopted a kitty! Introducing… Bean!
She’s mouthy (like me). This last picture is a video…. Click through to hear Bean!
insane number of kitty pics in my flickr stream.
Mark my words, mittens are going to be huge soon. As a knitting project, they have all of the versatility and satisfying features as socks. Colorwork, textures, a variety of increase and decrease methods, thumb shaping (analogous to heel of toe shaping)…. And you can use them to try to make a dent in your sock yarn stash.
Patterns I have been eyeing (Most links are Ravelry links - sorry. The waiting list is only 2 days long - hurry up and join):
- Anything from the Selbuvotter book ($24.95)
For example, NHM #9:
Or NHM #10:
Order this directly from the author like I did. It arrives quickly!
-Okka By from Randi K. Design ($7)
Her chart for a tiny little knitting village in Norway captures an amazing amount of detail. I am also impressed with the little crab that pops up on the other side…
All of her designs are amazing, so be sure to check out her etsy shop.
- Baske by Nicole Hindes ($6)
Simple enough for a beginner, but truly gorgeous! I love the yellow color that she chose.
- Hello Yarn’s amazing fiddlehead mittens. ($5.95)
I saved this for last cause I have big plans for this one. Adrian makes kits of hand-dyed yarn to go with the knitting pattern. As far as I can tell, it would be impossible for me to ever score one of those rare gems. I love her suggestion of using something for the outside that is durable and has a little mohair in it… So I am challenging myself to dye and spin all of the yarn that I will need for this project. Truly ambitious, I know, but I give myself until this winter to get it done. Wish me luck!
Following a hot tip (tweet, actually) from sockpr0n, I was able to snap up this little fella for not too much dough.
It is an 8 inch wide Clemes and Clemes drum carder. I am particularly enamored by the fact that Clemes and Clemes is literally up the street from me, so it is like the drum carder is coming back home. It is certainly well loved, and it arrived with one of the wooden gears cracked and broken. I was able to not only wood glue that back together, but eventually replace it with a stronger acrylic piece and get down to business…
I have been very satisfied with the batts I have purchased from Hobbledehoy and Stickyfingers on etsy. But in general I want a batt to have a blend of different types of fibers and not contain any sparkle and/or angelina. I’m not in it just for the colors; I have some specific textures in mind. Because of this I have been coveting drum carders for some time now (in fact nearly exactly one year), but they just haven’t been in my budget. So as soon as my little carder was running, I made a tiny batt of merino and mohair that resulted in this:
It was pure fun to spin…..
Next, I was FINALLY able to add camel down to some merino (I have had this camel down lying in wait for YEARS).
I am also excited to use it to process some of the fleeces I have piling up. It has done an awesome job with all of the Romney that I fed it:
More fun blends to come - I am ready to try a little colored fiber experimentation…
Last year on Earth Day I turned an old pinback button into a crocheted daisy. It seems like a recycling craft is a good Earth Day tradition, so here is this year’s trash-into-craft project. I have been accumulating a lot of plastic mesh bags.
You know the kind that contain onions, potatoes, or California Cutie tangerines. I found that some are just the right size and elasticity to hold a yarn cake, but most couldn’t fill that job.
Probably because of my recent fascination with tawashi (crochet and knit dish scrubbers) I thought of how much the mesh reminded me of nylon mesh pot scrubbers. So I decided to incorporate the plastic into knit and crochet scrubbers to increase their scrubbiness!
In order to knit or crochet with the mesh, I first cut it into a long, continuous, 1 inch wide strip by spiraling down the bags.
Since the mesh strips were pretty snaggy, I loosely wound them into balls.
I decided to adapt two free patterns for my use, but you could use this technique with any washcloth pattern. The patterns I chose are a knit (pdf download) and crochet version of a spiral scrubbie. The general idea is that you make a rhombohedron by increasing at one side and decreasing at the other side of your work (both increases and decreases are done on every row).
Then you sew together the cast on and bind off edges to make a short tube. Then you cinch the openings closed and it buckles down into a circular spiral.
Doesn’t it look like a little urchin?!
Details for my Sea Urchin scrubbie
Yarn: Peaches and Cream solid or other worsted weight 100% cotton yarn; Mesh strips.
Needles: US#11 or US#12 or even larger if you knit tightly.
I held the yarn doubled along with the mesh strip.
Using yarn only cast on 10 sts.
Row 1: Sl 1, knit front and back, knit 5, k2tog, k1
Row 2: Sl 1, k2tog, knit 5, knit front and back, k1
Repeat rows 1-2 16 times (8 garter ridges). Cast off using yarn only. Using yarn only sew together cast on and bind off edges to make a tube with diagonal garter ribs. Cinch the top and bottom of the tube closed, and hide yarn and mesh ends inside the scrubbie.
Crochet scrubbie
For this one, I pretty much stuck to the pattern, using only a single strand of yarn held with the mesh. I used only the yarn to cast on 10 stitches and used a size J crochet hook.
Tips for working with plastic mesh
If you end up adding plastic mesh to your knit or crocheted cloths I would love to see how they turn out!
There are two reasons why I have been good about bringing my lunch to work…
1.) California cutes are delicious
2.) My new lunch bag
The pattern is from the japanese book Motif Crochet winter accessories and I think it is for a little bento lunch box. So that is what I am using it for.
For yarn I chose Knitpicks CotLin, which at the time I purchased it had a really limited color palette. I can’t believe I lucked out and picked something I like so much (especially since the colors are much brighter in person than they are on the webpage). I just looked, and they have added some new colors. that’s good news, because this is NICE yarn. It is DK weight 70% Cotton 30% linen blend that after washing makes a fantastic fabric. There was a significant color bleed and lightening that happened during the Eucalan bath, but it still looks great (and smells a heck of a lot better). I want to use it to crochet all kinds of washable household items like washcloths and placemats.
I thought the bag was so photogenic, I did a photo shoot. I’ll leave you with the results:
Won’t you take me to…. Tawashi Town!!
i just discovered what a tawashi is… It is a japanese knit or crochetes scrubber. Powered by a book from kinokuniya called “Magic Scrubbers Part 8″, I whipped up a number of little crocheted scrubbies and dusters.
A baby seal. Believe it or not the pattern gives him x’s for eyes - that wasn’t my idea
For dusting off my TV screen
For dusting off my keyboard
After I started, I discovered the Ravelry group Tawashi Town, and through it that many japanese tawashi are made with an antibacterial acrylic yarn. I snapped some up on etsy and tried it out:
This little fella lives by my sink and does a great job helping me wash dishes!
If you want to give it a try I’ve found are few freely available charted Japanese tawashi patterns:
And if you are looking for something in english, try:
- Spiral Scrubbie
and a knitted version at this direct PDF download, or here.
Pretty much without even a second thought, I recently bought a few Japanese craft books in Japantown. These are my first, and while I don’t speak or read Japanese, everyone always says the diagrams are so good that you can figure everything out from the pictures.
Well, they are mostly right. So far my experience is just with crochet which hasn’t been too bad. Instead of having row by row directions, all of the patterns are represented in charts. In each book there is a section where they define what the symbols mean, and have some of the best instructional diagrams I have ever seen. I dare say the ambitious could teach themselves to crochet from these diagrams.
I made it through my first pattern by flipping back and forth between the chart and the instructions with almost no problem. Now I am not sure that I even want to ever read a non-charted crochet pattern again!
Every once in a while I do wonder things like “What is the title of this book?” and “That little arrow is labelling something that is clearly important. I wish I could read what it says…” I am trying to compile a list of helpful online sources for translation, but many are for knitting… i’m working on it…. in the mean time, if you have a japanese pattern that you are trying to read, I have found some friendly, helpful Ravelers in the Japanese knitting and Crochet group and Tawashi Town.
If you don’t know what a Tawashi is (I didn’t until last week), stay tuned because they are cute cute cute!
Lately, I have had visions of ripping this out.
It is sized to become a queens sized afghan, so it is several feet wide. There is a lot of crochet going on there. I an unhappy with how strictly I striped the colors. Each color row is actually two rows and I feel like I have to keep doing that over and over. Oh, and I hate the pattern. Working one direction is fun, but working back the other direction is boring (sc) and doesn’t make much progress. Oh, and I kinda think I am doing it wrong.
I originally chose this particular ripple pattern (from 200 Ripple Stitch Patterns[Ravlink]) because i liked the rounded ripples, and i had this crazy idea that afghans HAD to have little holes in them. So you could stick your fingers through them, or peek out when you are all wrapped up in it. Then I realized this is not a lap afghan, it s a bedspread. And I realize that crocheting something the size of my bed is crazy (jobs like that are for sewing) and maybe I should downsize to a practical sized afghan.
Since I have tons of the yarn (Cascade 220 superwash wool from webs) I think I am going to start a simultaneous afghan in a pattern akin to the ever-popular soft waves ripple pattern [Ravlink], it will be still for my bed, but I might decide to downsize it so that it may someday be complete.
The original rippled afghan will survive another day.
I can’t wait to get old and retire. Well, I guess I can wait, but I already have plans. I will get an old lady helmet hair perm, and enjoy my weekly gossip filled salon visits. i will yank my pants up too high (I’m guessing they will be corduroy) and act like I don’t see anyone else as i bump my cart into everyone when I am shopping at the grocery store. I will barely be able to peer over my steering wheel and if I bother to parallel park (as I will actively seek pull-through parking lot spaces* whenever possible) I will bump off of both surrounding cars every time. I will go directly to the window at the post office despite the giant line because hey - I’m old. i don’t have time to wait and no one will get mad at me because I am old. And even though I could take a minute to figure out what is going on, I will just act confused and get my problem solved right away (at least that is what I guess they are thinking when that happens EVERY time I am at the post office). I will probably die surrounded by weird collections of something that I couldn’t bear to throw out - like yogurt containers or wine corks (I have a dangerously sizeable collection of these already). I will be surrounded by a million cats. I don’t have a cat, but I love them. I am saving it up for future crazy-cat-ladyhood.
In the mean time i figure it is that crazy little old lady inside me that thinks things like these are the most wonderful things ever.
They are crocheted Chair cushions!! Aren’t they fantastic? I am guessing from the questionable “uh-huh” response all my friends give me when I ask them that question that it might be my inner granny that is irrationally captivated by these things. They are pretty much the entire reason I bought a whole Japanese Craft book. did you notice that the first one is ALL little poofy flowers?! I already have a recipient for one of these fantastic cushions:
My desk chair. It will look great with a square cushion, don’t you think?
* In my family these parking spaces are called “Aunt Carmella Parking spaces.” my great Aunt Carmella was the designated transporter of all of my great aunts and she would only park in parking spaces that she could pull through. The only thing she ever backed out of was her driveway.
Last night I got to watch my friend Captain her Roller Derby team to victory. Hooray Sirens! If you are in L.A. area I highly recommend attending a Derby Doll event - the Finals are on December 9th.
Today, since I am in town I will be headed over to the Felt Club XL holiday event. There will be crafty vendors and a mini-maker square where clever makers show off their skills. It is at LA City College from 11 to 6 (details at link above). Say hi if you see me (I might have some moustache buttons in my pocket).
I will get my shopping skills all warmed up for the SF Bazaar Bizarre next month…
Reason #415 to buy a hamster: The hamster powered paper shredder. i could really use this. i could have a hamster shred paper for my other pets - my composting worms.
- #CraftCon 2008 is this weekend - I'll be there!
- #Has anyone tried "retro-clean"? It is a detergent for cleaning old linens. Sounds nice.
- #
