9 posts tagged “crochet”
OMG, just when it couldn't get any better. I just saw this tee on Threadless, in American Apparel Girly Tees($17) and even on a hoodie($40). :o)
Book: Show us the latest book you bought, borrowed or received.
The spouse-unit got it for me as a present, and while I was a little skeptical at first, it's like the cool knit/sew/crochet mag that doesn't exist anywhere else. If you're sick of boring ancient knit and crochet patterns and looking for something new and unusual (like how to knit/crochet Gucchi and Prada lookalikes), CRAFT should be your first subscription. :o)
I was a dork-o-rama yesterday. I had recently whipped up a pretty red wool wrap for Gidget for Valentine's Day and forgot to take a picture of it before dropping it in the mail to my mother. Ugh. Sorry 'bout that - I'll try to remember to get a pic of her in it sometime soon. It was pretty - I even embroidered a small white heart on the edge. :o)
In the meantime, here's the current one in progress. It's a blend of Lana Grossa and Cascade yarns, using double crochet and some textured stitch. (Yes, the little darling is spoiled.)
The other monstrosity is the first of a pair of thigh-high legwarmers I'm working on for myself. I have these nice DC boots, and it would be just spiffy to have a pair of thigh-high legwarmers to go with short skirts on chilly days.
I've also decided to donate the following to the Los Angeles Chihuahua Rescue:
I have recently discovered the joy that can only be found in sock yarn. I never really understood the craze before because my pitiful attempts to knit socks on dpns always turned into a knitter's nightmare right around that god-awful "turning the heel" part. I'm sorry, maybe I'm slightly retarded, but I cannot follow a pattern exactly to save my life.
To birdwalk for a moment, I was commenting on that this morning to the spouse-unit. I had an idea for a scarfwrap for my mother-in-law for Christmas and was flipping through the 300 Crochet Stitches book looking for simple patterns. What makes for a simple pattern, you ask? Why let me tell you: 1) it has to have less than 4 row repeats, 2) each row pattern has to be easily committed to memory, and 3) it has to look more-or-less reversible. Anyhow, so I was flipping through the book and I realized I was reading the stitch charts with the same brainbits that I use to read code in programming books. I know this is a complete 'Duh' to all the knitter/crocheter geeks out there, but it only truly dawned on me in that moment just how similar coding and knitting/crocheting are.
Umm.. where was I? Oh, yeah - socks!!!
So I've always wanted to make my own socks. I think that was what made me learn to knit in the first place was wanting to make my own socks. About five or ten years ago (or somewhere in-between), I discovered the fun of wearing crazy socks, rather than the plain white athletic socks I'd worn with sneakers through grade school and high school. I had these knee-high clunky black platform boots, a little gothish, that someone (I forget who exactly) named my "come-fuck-me" boots. :o) I wore them with just about everything and found that one could happily get away with wearing hot pink and lime-green striped knee-high socks to work. Ever since then, I've always opted for fancy fun-looking (preferably knee-high) socks. My favorite was a pink pair that said "boys suck. throw rocks at them."
So I tried making socks just about as soon as I learned to purl, but gave up after repeated attempts. But when I learned to crochet a month ago, it occured to me that maybe I could crochet my socks! I scoured the web for patterns and finally found this Toe-Up Crocheted Socks pattern from Grafton Fibers. The pattern starts with about 3 "flat" rows then shifts to working in rounds with increases to cover the toes, continues in rounds/spirals over the instep, leaves a hole where the heel goes by chaining half the diameter of the sock and reattaching on the other end and now you continue up around the ankle; reattach yarn at the heel hole and crochet in decreasing rounds to fill in the heel! Very smart! I whipped out a pair of booties in an afternoon, in a heathered gray shade of Cascade Eco Wool. They're a little chunky to wear in shoes, but I'm wearing them right now in my Earth sneakers and they're snug, warm and comfy. I'm working up a pair in a Cherry Tree Hill yarn, and have another, umm, ... *lowered voice* 10 skeins... of sock yarn waiting.
Socks are fantastic, really. (Just in case you didn't know that already.) The yarn & project is often small enough to fit in a jacket/sweater pocket, though I don't have any jackets or cardis that fit a 400yd ball, which means I'm going to have to make one. While I tend to rush through most of my worsted or bulky weight projects with fewer stitches, the thousands of stitches in the average sock humbles me to the point of crocheting slowly and serenely. :o) People tend to look at you a little more strangely than if you're making something as simple as a scarf. Maybe they're impressed by the tiny fingering weight yarns, or by the sheer magnitude of making something as seemingly-tedious as a sock, or simply envious that you get to enjoy warm handcrafted woollen socks in this day and age. No matter the reason, people will also wonder where you "get the time" to make something so time-consuming. Haha - puny non-crafters. I'll take a ball of sock yarn over my PSP any day of the week. :o)
PS - Dear Santa, I'll take any Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock or Cherry Tree Hill Superwash that might happen to "fall off the sleigh" on Christmas Eve.
I've been in a dog sweater mood lately. I guess it's because I have the perfect dog sweater pattern in my head and that crocheting is easy to stop and start, which is perfect for all the work-work I have lately. All of my current knitting projects either have too-interesting pattern counts, or are slippery yarns on metal needles - you know, things that you can't do easily in a hurry or watching t.v.
Not like my mother's complaining. I've stopped selling for now, while I overhaul my knitting website and so my mother and her smidgety chihuahua, Gidget, are getting all these. I've even joked that she's in the "Sweater of the Week" club because I've been mailing her so many! When I get the site back up, I'll probably start selling them again. She's been getting a lot of complements on them and has specially requested a black and red one so that Gidget will match her car when they go out driving. :o)
The mint green one is an incredibly soft alpaca/wool/acrylic blend, with some gorgeous teardrop-shaped pearlescent beads around the collar. The blue one is pure wool, burly spun, warm and snuggly, with some tiny silver-lined beads. Both are stretchy enough to fit small dogs of all kinds of girth, and are cut low around the abdomen to safely allow for mess-free doggy business. :o)
Current projects: dog sweaters, suri alpaca afgan, a handful of scarves, a few toddler sweaters, an adult sweater, a few shawls, charity baby hats
For those of you in the Caps to the Capital campaign, hugs and cheers for helping out!! I've got six or seven boxed and ready to ship, with another two set for a second shipment. (This is great practice for my novice crocheting skills!)
I noticed after the third hat that printing a whole page for the 3x7 strip that makes the tag was a terrible waste of paper, so I made a 4-tag PDF. Hmm. Looks like posting a PDF file is near impossible on VOX, so here's a 4-tag JPG.
Conventional sheep, kept in close confinement en masse, are often 'dipped' in highly toxic pesticide solutions to kill ticks, lice, blowfly and scab. (Google: sheep dipping) I can't seem to find much on how much pesticide residue is left over in processed conventional yarns, but the chemicals used in the process can cause central nervous system damage. And sheep are dipped not once in their lifetime, but at least several times, on average.*
FWIW, I can't say that I'll never buy conventional yarns again. There's too much variety missing from the organic market right now. But I will promise to buy organic where possible and affordable, and save my yarn money to buy more organic, rather than splurging on cheap conventionals. I'm also contacting all of my favorite yarn manufacturers (ie. Brown Sheep, Blue Sky, etc.) to find out where they get their wool/fibers from, and asking for specific farms and locations. At the very least, maybe it'll bring to their attention that people care about this stuff. 
- O-Wool, by the Vermont Organic Fiber Company. Free shipping @ theyarngrove.com
- Near Sea Naturals carries a large variety of organic fibers, such as nettle, cotton, alpaca, wool, recycled silk, and hemp.
- Marr Haven sells their own, fresh-from-the-farm 100% chemical-free wool yarn, with minimum processing to keep most of the natural lanolin intact. (Lanolin naturally softens wool fibers with washing, and is almost completely missing from conventionally processed yarns.)
- There's a new shop opening later this fall, Organic Imaginings, which plans to feature organic yarns, including certified organic and fair trade yarns. Drop them an email and show them some love!
- Browse Etsy for homemade yarns straight from the sheep. Some of my favorite sellers that spin yarn from their own sheep are ritaswoolybatts. (The sellers I steer clear of are anyone associated with the Makah tribe, which cruelly hunts grey whales for non-nutritive purposes.)
In an effort to compile a master list of organic yarns, I've started to scour the web and save promising links to del.icio.us. If you're interested in my findings, you can find them and similar bookmarks from others with the keywords "eco organic yarn".
* If you're interested in more information about the real cost of wool, I don't recommend PETA's savethesheep.com site. I say this because while their sheep campaign targets Australian farms, it demonizes all wool growers with blanket statements like "sheep raised for their wool all over the world are castrated and have their tails cut off...". What about the few small production farmers that DO practice humane and ethical treatment of sheep? Or those that keep sheep or alpacas as pets and create homespun yarns? Add to this that PETA actually recommends the use of synthetics like tencel (according to the Green Guide, "the EPA rated Courtauld [the manufacturer of rayon] the sixth-largest producer of inorganic pollution in the U.S.") and rayon (Co-op America states that "about a third of the pulp obtained from a tree will end up in finished rayon thread"; the rest is thrown away).
I highly encourage any needlers or hookers out there to participate in this one, as it's a quick way to dent your stashes. Everything you need is in the action kit, including mailing information, and a personalized tag to go with your cap. Even if you've never knit or crocheted before, this is a great, worthy project to learn with - there are 4 simple patterns for newborn caps included in the action kit.
So, last week I learned to crochet. I whipped up a sky blue woolen scarf in no time and, in typical 'me' fashion, proceeded to run with the idea to make a round cat bed. (This is all part of my master plan to forever crochet anything rounded and burn my evil dpns.) The problem was that my lovely copy of Vogue On-The-Go Crochet Basics didn't go into enough detail.
In the instructions for working a spiral, it asks to chain 5, join with a slip stitch, then work 10 single crochets in the circle. (It took me a full 24 hours and some spacy driving to figure out "in the circle" meant literally shoving the hook into the center hole.) From there, the book advises to single crochet in the next stitch and work 2 single crochets in the next, and repeat: 1 sc, 2 sc, etc. Then it so elequently states that you should now have x number of stitches... and then the section ends! WTF? The chapter goes on to joined rounds and philosophizes a bit, but doesn't say a damn thing about how to continue increasing.
It's taken days of pouring over hat and basket recipes to figure out that you need to space out the increases as the piece widens, but my pieces were buckling in spots and I knew there was a method to this madness somewhere, but I just hadn't been initiated yet. Until this afternoon, when I stepped in it accidentally.
From Sandi Marshall's article, Crocheting in the Round - Basics For Increasing:
Increases start on the second round. This example uses double crochet stitches: An increase is made by making 2 dc in a same stitch. On the second round, work 2 dc in every dc around the circle. On round 3, make an increase on every other stitch - in other words, (dc in next dc, 2 dc in next dc) around. As the rounds become wider, there are more stitches in between each increase. (Round 4 has two dc stitches between the increases, while round 5 has three dc stitches between the 2 dc in next dc increases. And so on.)
