Baby afghan finally complete!

I started this afghan for my bosses baby slightly before he was born at the beginning of September, and now it is finally done, hooray!

It is crocheted in a soft Hobby Lobby baby yarn in acrylic, of which the name escapes me at this moment. I will edit to add. It seems like it took forever! It was not the crocheting that was a pain; rather it was the blocking, stitching together, and repairing where my scissors got a little too close. It was the first time I had ever done more than a cursory blocking job. I created a grid on a large piece of cardboard and blocked about 12 at a time.

The patterns for the blocks can be found in the book 200 Crochet Blocks. I would have to disagree on the 200 part, as many blocks are repeated with very slight variations, or only color changes. None the less, it is a great book. I especially like the blocks that have circular motifs. Maybe some day I will be crazy enough to do a full size afghan. :)


One last pic of my baby modeling the new baby blanket:

Halloween pics a little late

Well, I've been on a hell of a hiatus. Part of it is the shape my house has been in after our mini-flood and all of the work we have been doing, part of it was my lack of creative endeavors for a while, and part of it was being too tired all the time to get much else done.

But, here I am! I have actually started a lot of new projects due to holidays and birthdays, so I will have stuff to post about. And I am making a pre-new year's resolution to post at least three times a week. Even if I don't have a project finished, I figure I can come up with something craft related. So - on to the Halloween pics.

As you can no doubt see, I was Tinkerbell for Halloween this year. I made the dress and the wings. The dress was made with out a pattern, thanks to my trusty dress form. I

had a more complicated design started but I ran out of time and had to go with this. Let's just pretend I haven't gained weight and you can't see the tummy, m'kay? There wasn't any chance of hiding anything in that paper thin fabric, though. The wings are made from a frame of 12 gauge wire, which I hot glued a thin organza t o, then painted over. I also added crystals.

Dyed dress...or maybe a skirt?

I finished my ombre dyed dress today and discovered that its not really a dress. I think it wants to be a skirt. I didn't realize until hubby took the picture and I looked at it that this makes a totally unflattering dress. The problem is that the shirred yoke at the top is not long enough to fit from the top of the bust to the ribcage, so it flares out much further than it should and makes me look very wide. I might use it as a skirt instead. However, I really don't like the length this way.

If I hem it, I will hem off most of the lovely dye. I'm thinking it might need to be re-done. I think it needs another darker band of color along the hem line anyways. The color washed up much lighter than what it was wet. Even after sitting for over 24 hours, it seemed that a lot of the color washed out. I'm trying not to be dissapointed as it was my first time dyeing with these products and it was a lot of work. I ordered all of my products from Dharma Trading, and I used fiber reactive dyes in plum, wisteria, and seafoam.

A family of 2 (iphones, that is)

The last few days have been quite interesting. Brian and I joined the hordes of people on Friday to stand in endless lines in hopes of acquiring brand new 3g iphones. We arrived quite early, before 6:30am (lucky we are in a smallish town where overnighting is not required) but we were still #25/26 in line. We had decided instead of going to our local AT&T store that we would drive to Georgetown which is smaller. Either lots of people had the same idea we did, or the lines were just that long everywhere. There were roughly 100 people behind us by the time the store opened. We had decided we both wanted the 16GB white model. By the time we got to the front of the line, people in front of us were already being told the model they wanted was out. We got lucky and got ours, though.

Can you imagine standing in long lines for hours only to be told there are none left?? And for some reason AT&T refused to give any information about how many phones were available, so no one knew what was going on. Then of course there was the whole debacle with not being able to turn the phones on and activate them because Apples site was overloaded. When we got home it took about 4 hours of constantly pinging the activate button about every 30 seconds before we got through. So we finally got everything working, which was wonderful….and now comes the itunes debacle.

We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 200gb, maybe more of music, audio books, and video. The video probably bumps it well over 200, but since the whole collection is in multiple locations I’m not sure. A very small amount of this stuff translates perfectly into itunes. Along the way we have changed formats of ID3 tagging several times, and a lot of stuff is missing album art (which is needed for the cover flow function). This means that when you open itunes, everything is pretty much a jumble. So Brian and I started working on retagging and general itunes formatting on Friday, and we are still working with no discernable end in sight. Of course when we are done, everything will be so wonderfully organized, but in the meantime it’s a pain in the ass. We also figured out the hard way that when you change anything on the media center where we store all of our, well media, the individual itunes on your computer can no longer access your collection. It’s certainly a learning process. I’d really love to get around the syncing problems, but I’m not quite ready to hack the phone to do so.

Don’t get me wrong here; all of this is absolutely worth it. This phone is hands down the best device I have every used and I love it. There are a few small things I’d like to change, but everything that the iphone does it does extremely well. Here are my biggest wishes:

-multimedia messaging (yes, I know, you can send pics via email. Most people still don’t have email on their phones yet, though. So although you might be able to email them, whose phone will you be emailing them to?)
-A2DP stereo Bluetooth. In relation to my body size, the iphone is pretty big. I’d like to drop it in my bag and listen through my stereo Bluetooth headset.
-A better camera. My old phone had a 3.2 mp camera, and I will miss that very very much.

I’ve managed to get very little crafting done during this changeover to iLand, but I will have photos up soon of my drying yarn. It needs to hurry up, because I have a wedding present to knit!

Fabrics and yarns to dye for

Yes, yes, I know it's been far too long since I posted. But as usual nothing happened for a long time, and then all the sudden I had a lot happen. I will try to make several posts over the next week or so to catch up on all the different things this week. Today I spent about 4 hours dyeing yarn and a dress that I had purchased from Dharma Trading. The dress is nothing fancy, just a shirred tube dress. I have wanted something done in Ombre (dip dyed with gradations of color for those not in the know) for a long time, but finding a piece that is reasonably priced and reasonable seemed to be too tall an order. So I'm making my own. I also did a hank of silk and one of cotton. I took a whole lot of pics, but apparently I'm very shaky tonight, and hardly any of them came out well. I will take more pics and give a more detailed explanation of my process. It wasn't all that hard, but very involved. It's probably one of those things where you get more effecient and therefore, faster, as you go along. Oh, and yeah, its extremely messy. More on all this later.

Adventures in Knitting

So first off, let me say that I posted from my phone last week, and although blogger.com said my post was published, in actuality it never appeared. So now I have two posts to make. Ah, the wonders of working with advanced equipment. So I am working on the Camisole Frock tank top from Spring '08 Interweave Knitting. You can see it on Ravelry here, if you are so inclined.
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/frock-camisole


As usual, I couldn't leave well enough and have made a few changes. It occured to me the other day that in my last few years of crochet and knitting, I have only once ever made a pattern in the yarn it called for. And that time, I did it on accident. I had bought the yarn and the pattern and when I got home realized that they were one and the same. Anyways, back to the Frock Camisole. I am making it in one of the new Caron yarns that just came out. It's called Spa, and its a combination of Acrylic and Bamboo. Best of all its really inexpensive. I'm using a butter yellow color, and rather than making it in one color as the pattern calls for I am making the part above the bust seam in a sage green. I have also removed the two purl row that goes down the front and back center and replaced it with a 6 stitch cable. I've been wanting to cable ever since I learned, and now I've finally found a project to work it into. You might notice that the gauge is tiny; it's taking forever to knit up! I'm okay with that though. I've decided that I love working in small stitches because of the definition. I love the feel of the fabric it makes, too. The original pattern called for size 7 needles, and I'm working with a size 4. Which brings me to my adventures in knitting story.

My Denise Interchangeables only go down to a size 5, so I went looking for a size 4 circular. The only ones I could find in the right length were a Boye Interchangeable. These needles had me in tears, literally. The spot where the needle screws onto the cable frequently comes loose, and then your stitches snag. Then if you aren't very careful when you screw it back together, the yarn gets pinched in the screw threads, and you have to pick it out and start over. So a row that should have taken you 5 minutes takes twice as long. Annoying as hell! So, I decided that I would take the plunge and buy a set of Addi Turbos, which most knitters know is the Cadillac of knitting needles. I had never bought them because they are so expensive, but I figured at this point it would be worth it. I could only find a listing for one store nearby work that carried them, so even though it was a little far I figured that if I was quick I could make it. Silly me!

I drove up and down the street looking for this store, European Knitting, and it seems to be a residential neighborhood. I finally find the address, and its for a condo complex. Assuming that I must have something wrong, I call the store, and the lady assures me that I am in the right place, and to park and she will come get me. It turns out that this woman has rented out a condo and filled it with yarn and merchandise - oh, and a ginormous talkative cat named Moses. The place smelled like my grandma's shed, which isn't surprising considering she was an aging woman with a thick accent, a brightly colored muumuu and orthopedic sandals. :) She was very nice and quite helpful, but I soon discovered that this is not the place to go when you are in a hurry. She talked as she slowly searched through stock, which was stacked on every available surface. She often forgot where things were, or set something down and then couldn't find it among the stacks. Multiple folding chairs and vintage occasional chairs were scattered through, along with a few tables, lots of paper, knitted items, and general ephemera. Wait, maybe I was in my grandma's shed. Then she messed up the receipt on the credit card machine and couldn't figure out how to get it to print, and insisted I needed one when I really didn't. When I finally convinced her I would be ok without it, she still had to figure out how to print out a daily batch report for me to sign, which she also had to look up to do. I really wouldn't have minded this all, except by this time I was late back to work.


I'm sure I'll go back to her for something, but never on lunch hour again. :) Oh, and by the way, those Addi's are as good as everyone says they are. My knitting glides in easy circles and my work has sped up so much!

the best hubby in the world!

My husband came home last night from volleyball with a dozen roses just for me. :) Just because. I've been having a really rough couple of weeks and the last few days in particular were even worse. I have fibromyalgia, and when I'm in a lot of pain, it makes me really tired, which leads to being grumpy and exhausted, which leads to bad sleep, which leads to more fatigue and pain...and you get the idea. So not only has Bri been utterly sweet, but he brought me home these gorgeous roses! Both kitties were just as enamored of them as I am. Zuul, pictured here, decided to have the leaves as a late night snack, and Anubis tried to pull one of the stems out turned sideways between his teeth. He looked like a Flamenco dancer, uh, if a flamenco dancer were nekkid. Sorry for the bad lighting, but its really hard to get a good pic at night in my dark red bedroom.