Creepers

For the holidays this year, I had no idea what to get most of my friends.  I started trying to make an owl for the one I did have an idea for, but placed the eyes too low and messed up adding the beak, so I had a little ball with eyes and really no idea what to do with it.  Until she saw it and thought it was thoroughly creepy.

So I left it alone to creep.

And made it a bunch of friends.

Each friend got a creeper with a vague idea of what it was.  The brown was still more or less an owl.  White was a marshmallow.  Green was a marimo moss ball.  And blue and grey and red.

Personally, I think the red was my favorite.  It was Red Heart in cherry red with 12mm eyes.  Most had 9mm, the grey one had 6mm eyes.  But there was just something about how the red and the black eyes worked together that made me really like it.  Unfortunately, it's the one I don't have a picture of.  Hopefully in the future!

They're easy to make, fit really easily in the palm and if stuffed enough, make great stress balls.  They bounce, they lurk, they watch, waiting for the best time to pop up and remind people they exist.  They're creepers, plain and simple.

Again, worked in rounds much like the cthulhu plush, starting at 6 st and going no more than 30 before tapering off again.

The World

And of course, the last piece of the birthday present was the world.  Discworld, that is.  Again, PlanetJune came to the rescue in helping me make that a reality.  I made the underworld first in all blue, reveled in the fact it was actually flat, photographed it, stuck it in Photoshop, laid a map of Discworld over it, marked stitches as different colors, printed it out and went to work on the top world.

I didn't realize until it was too late that I was pulling the yarn on the underside too tight, but it helped make the mountain 3D in the end.  I didn't cut the yarn between colors because that just seemed like too much work, just let go of the one I didn't need anymore and pulled up the one I did.

As to be expected, the pattern and what I was working on quickly departed from each other.  I don't know how, I don't know why, but I had to start changing colors on the fly and it worked out.  It's not 100 percent accurate, but who cares?  It turned out more perfect than I could have hoped, and it fit right on the backs of the elephants on the back of the great A'tuin.

There was so much back and forth making this, and for a while, I really worried that it wasn't going to turn out.  And then it all came together and it did.

Turtle!

The next part of that same birthday present was a turtle, pattern also purchased from PlanetJune.  This introduced me to the idea of shaping a 3D piece by adding or removing stitches.  Blew my mind.  Getting more and more crafty every day.

The turtle was a lot slower-going than the elephants for several reasons.  New techniques, of course.  Having to rip pieces out and start over a number of times, too.  General end-of-semester business, too.  Also a little bit of fear that it wouldn't turn out or it wouldn't be liked by its recipient.

It was worked on in the dorm, in the car, in the office, in class, at work - everyone saw it and everyone thought it was the best thing ever.  A number of people wanted one.

I managed to finish it by holding my hook different after the injury with the elephants, and got a lot of funny looks because it forced me to use my elbow for leverage rather than my wrist.  Digging and scooping and catching were all very different motions when I couldn't anchor the hook between those last two fingers.  It was a good learning experience.

As with the elephants, there were turtle parts.  There were shenanigans.  There was not a mailing issue that I heard of, which was great (unless you count the mailroom screwing up and giving me the wrong tracking number).

I really enjoyed working on the shell most.  It was so different from how I would have thought to approach the problem and really showed just how creative you can be with crochet as a form.  Building up the edges and figuring out how to make it more smooth than angular was particularly impressive.

I'll admit I'd love to have a turtle myself, but I don't know if I can devote myself to a month of work again so soon.  In the future, I will eventually have a turtle of my own to love.  This one was well-received.

Hephalumps!

For a friend's birthday, I decided to make a bit of an elaborate project that started with four elephants.  I bought the patterns from PlanetJune, because it was cheap, she's clear about her patterns and they were adorable.

When you're self-taught, you don't realize what you're doing wrong until someone else points it out and then you realize how much more sense it makes to do it this way as opposed to the other way.  For instance, when I first started, I didn't understand what people meant by sc and was doing a sl st to make things.

Anyway, doing the elephants, I suddenly realized how much more durable crafted objects were when you use both st of the last row instead of just the front one.  And so these elephants really mean a bit more to me than they already did.

Finger puppets happened.  Injuries happened (I've got a scar from my hook wearing off the skin between my ring and pinkie fingers).  Piles of elephant parts happened.  I used a yarn needle for the first time.  Three-legged elephants happened.  Mailing incidents happened.  Shenanigans continued.  And there were elephants.

Red & Camel

My school has a three-week long winter term where students can take one accelerated class for 3 hours 5 days a week, mostly to get undesirable core out of the way.  After they changed their credit system from 4 to 3, winter course shifted to mostly two-week courses.  They failed to make sure the students knew that.  So I arrived back on campus a week early with absolutely nothing to do.

After a trip to Jo-Ann's, I came back with Sensations Rainbow Boucle in red & camel, two skeins (853 yards each).  I started with a ch of 156 and sc'd the whole thing, back and forth.  It became my "I don't want to think" project and took two or three years before I finally made it through the first two skeins and the third I'd purchased to complete a border of dc going perpendicular around the outside.

It ended up a lot wider on the starting end than the finished end.  It's a definite trapezoid.  The border wasn't even all the way around and is a bit wavy in places.  But it's warm, it's done, and the cats love it.

I worked at it during winter term.  I worked at it waiting in line to see Sucker Punch.  I worked at it at my first overnight SCA event.  I worked at it in class, hanging out in the dorm with friends, at home over the holidays.  It's been a bunch of places and it's been a long time coming, and it's worth all the stitches.

At one point not long after I finished it, it fell off my chair and onto my knee brace (which I call my knee corset).  It's a lot of spandex and metal and velcro.  Unintentional felting nearly broke my heart after how long it took to finish, but it's just one of the corners and not that noticeable if you're not looking for it.

The Walrus

Each summer, I have two interns learning how to be leaders and work with kids.  At the end of their month of learning, my co-leader and I give them a thank-you gift based on what we've learned about them or the inside jokes that developed with the kids.

For my second one this year, we had absolutely nothing.  It was the night before the last day and the only idea I had was to get her a stuffed walrus (because she was on her school's swim team and the kids had taken to calling her a walrus), but I couldn't find one anywhere.  Not Toys R Us, not the local drug stores that always have an odd selection of animals, not any of the specialty toy stores.  I even checked the local Petco on the off-chance they'd have a walrus chew toy.  Nothing.

So at about 8p, my mother dug out some brown yarn (I had none, which is why this wasn't my first idea) and I got working.  I worked it much the same as the head of a cthulhu plush, in rounds starting at 6 st.  I increased until 54 or 60 (really whichever one looked better) and instead of doing the curled tentacles, I ch'd 4 or 5 and hdc'd my way back; each new ch was connected to the previous row of hdc.  It didn't look the prettiest, but it worked.

When the body was stuffed and finished, I made a couple small triangles for flippers and a rough trapezoid for the tail.  Then I dug out some thin white and made some quick tusks (ch 10ish, sc back), sewed them under the lip bit and called it done.

She absolutely loved it.  Everyone was very taken by it.  I will admit it was rather adorable.  And it was then I got the request for a manatee.  But that's for another day.

Cell Case

In January, I finally upgraded my phone after four years from a "dumb" slider by Sony to a "smart" BlackBerry.  It was scratched within the first week.  I figured out why the screen was damaged: holding the darn thing to my ear, it hit my earrings.  I never figured out what scratched the back casing or chipped the shiny bits around the screen and keys.

But I did figure out how to prevent a lot of it from continuing to happen.

 I grabbed the leftover teal Red Heart Soft from the bolero, ch'd 20 or so, worked in round until it was tall enough, stitched one end together and had myself a sock for my phone.  The kids at work were super impressed that I did that all while they arrived in the morning.  My co-workers were amazed even though they'd seen me work on the baby jackets.  It was nothing special, just a solution to a problem.

And of course, less than six months after that, I had to revert to my old phone and it didn't matter.

Pictures to come.

Spock Bolero

When I realized, rather late in the semester that I would be walking in the graduation ceremony at my university in May, I scrambled to put together an outfit to wear for the big day.  A dress, of course, with teal tights, shoes and accessories.  But strapless dresses just beg for some sort of mini jacket.  So I started searching for patterns.

And found this maui shrug pattern.

I had a friend pick up Red Heart Soft yarn in teal, two balls, and got to work on a medium shrug.  I pulled it out twice, as the pattern wasn't as clear as it could be, but eventually figured it out and started cranking.  I didn't keep the tension perfect, so one end was wider than the other in the end, making one sleeve larger in the end.  It ended up a little long from sleeve-end to sleeve-end, but it was exactly what I wanted.

Which would have been perfect if they hadn't sold out of the dress before I had the chance to purchase it.  So I ended up wearing something else entirely to graduation.  When the dress was finally back in stock, I nabbed it (the last one to ever be sold from the original distributor).  By that time, the clip and earrings had gone to another lucky lady, so the dream pretty much fell apart.  And then the final nail was my mother telling me the colors didn't go together.

I've never listened to anyone else about color or pattern choices I make, but it still hurt to have gone through all the effort to be told it was wasted on the people to see it.  I still love the mustard/brown/teal combination and keep looking for opportunities to show off the outfit.

Pictures to come.

Mother's Day + Flowerpots

So, after the rose I made for White Day, I had a request for a Mother's Day rose.  It was simple enough and done fast enough that it worked out perfectly for my roommate.  She was out with her mother while I finished and I left it for them to find when they got back.  Both of them were very, very pleased wit the result, as was I.

That was just the beginning.

From there, I made a flowerpot full of roses for my mother, out of chopsticks because I lacked anything else or the means to get anything else while at school.  I worked on it for what seemed like ever, through superhero movie marathons, through packing and moving out, through when I should have been studying for finals.  There was superglue everywhere.  My fingers may have been stuck together a number of times.  I might have left superglue on the dorm chair.  I wrapped toilet paper around the stems to arrange the flowers within the pot because I had nothing else.

But I finished it in time.

And then my grandmother tried to pick it up by the flowers.

But it was gorgeous and appreciated and something that was added to the bookcase knick-knacks beside the stuffed cat made of fabric scraps and pom-poms to commemorate when my mother's flame-point Siamese passed away.

And then everyone else wanted one.  For every occasion.  My grandmother for her birthday.  My aunt for her birthday.  My boss for her 'thanks for picking up the reins' present.  One of my mother's friends for some reason or other.  So many flowerpots.  They're easy, though.  Each rose takes about 20 minutes.  Calyx about 10-15.  Assembly another 5-10 each.  And then putting it all together in the pot, of course.

I graduated to from toilet paper and chopsticks to floral foam and hot dog sticks.  Work much better.  And gel superglue is much better than liquid superglue at keeping off your fingers.  Toothpicks help for application, too.

Great Old One

So the army of cthulhus I made was obviously inadequate, because I felt the need to make yet another.  This was not entirely my idea; a friend was making a scarf out of Lion Brand Fun Fur in white.  She threw the leftover at me and said to make something to make her laugh.  The clear choice was to make a cthulhu out of it, so I did.

Following the same pattern, same hook, same everything, just with Fun Fur for the head (I switched to a thin red yarn for the body and hood I added).  In hindsight, I probably should have just done the tentacles in the Fun Fur, but then I wouldn't have a puff-ball of an Old One hanging about.

He's adorable, gathered a lot of attention and laughs and was frustrating like nothing else to make.  The fur kept getting tangled and in the way and just generally knotted an obnoxious, but it was worth it in the end.  Working on this project actually inspired me to use yellow fur in the future to make a Lorax.  Time will tell, however.  As of yet, I've been unable to find it in yellow.

Zaage Scarf 3

This was a bit of a disaster.  I had rose and blue yarn I'd gotten from the Dollar Tree and didn't know what I was going to do with it, so the obvious answer was to make another scarf for my Vampire: The Masquerade character, Zaage.  Only I used all the yarn.  And there was quite a bit more than I thought there was.

It was a brand called Rhapsody in a dusty blue and a dusty rose.  I did a bunch of different patterns I don't recall at this point that ended up sagging a lot more than expected, which only added to my problem.  By time I was done, the scarf was about 4 inches wide and 25-30 feet long.  The ends were rose, the middle was blue.  It had to be wrapped several times around.  It was really a bad plan.

This thing was so terrible it almost doesn't deserve a post (especially this long after making it).  I did wear it for a good while, though, until I finally got fed up with having to wrap around and around.

And since then, it's sat in the closet with the other multitudes of scarves I've used for the character.  I really need to stop actually making scarves each time something happens in-character to the one I'm wearing.  It's really the only time I wear scarves to begin with...

Pictures eventually.

White Day

For Valentine's Day, I received (quite by surprise) a duct tape rose.  I've never liked giving or receiving flowers (unless they're potted or can otherwise be planted and even then I'm still not excited about the idea) because it's a waste of money and it's rather depressing to watch something so beautiful die.  Plus, is that really the message you want to send to someone you love or care about, or who's in the hospital recovering?

Anyway, I was absolutely tickled that I didn't have to give this flower schpeal of mine and wanted to return the gesture.  So I searched for a pattern for a relatively realistic long-stemmed rose, as I really had no idea how to go about such an endeavor.  While there was a super-detailed, super-delicate one available via Etsy, I went with this one, as it was simpler and free-er.

For the flower, I used an E-4/3.50mm hook and white Sugar 'n Cream yarn.  I didn't have a yarn needle to secure the bottom after rolling it up, but I made do with my C-2/2.75mm hook and stitched a little more to keep the outside edge of the spiral from coming up.

For the calyx, I used the same E-4/3.50mm hook and a green medley Sugar 'n Cream.

Being a college student, and one without a car, I had to make due without a pipe cleaner or other wire.  I substituted a chopstick as the stem.  I had to work it slowly into the flower and through the calyx then remove the blossom and push the calyx down the stick so it was out of the way.  I then poured a little super glue into the hole in the blossom, dribbled a bit around the end of the chopstick and inserted the stick into the flower, checking to make sure it couldn't be seen through the petals.  I dribbled a bit more glue around the chopstick and pushed the calyx up so it met with the blossom.

When that dried, I tied the green yarn onto the bottom of the calyx and wrapped the rest of the chopstick, securing the yarn by dribbling superglue around the bottom of the stick and on the yarn.

It was a real quick project, very adaptable, very easy.  I sprayed the flower with a little floral body mist and sent it off for White Day.  In Japan, Valentine's Day is basically broken into two days.  February 14 is for girls to give the men in their life handmade gifts.  March 14 is for guys to return the favor with gifts that are typically white.  I like that it divides the responsibility and doesn't focus on love or significant others necessarily.

Mardi Gras

When I was out pattern-searching, this was one I found.  When I went home for winter, I had to hide my yarn stash (facilities was checking dorms for disallowed items due to bed bugs) and realized it completely filled my large suitcase.  Which means that I need to start using it up before the end of the semester when I head home.

I had three skeins each of WonderArt Wintuk Knitting Yarn in Gold, Montgomery Ward Mothproof Sayelle in Kelly Green and Woolworth Woolco 100% Virgin Wool in Amethyst.  I didn't have a size Q-19/15.00mm hook, so I used my largest one, an N-15/10.00mm) and kept the yarn very loose.  I followed the pattern until I ran out of green, which ended after 38 rows, then did a border of the amethyst 3 sc deep.

Yes, I have a lot of old yarns.

It didn't take 5 1/2 hours like the title of the pattern may have suggested.  It took a great deal longer.  Not sure entirely how much time I spent on it, but it was at least double.  It was outrageously simple, though, and really did produce a lovely product.  Even though I used simple worsted weight yarns made from acrylic and wool, the blanket is super soft.

It's the perfect size to accent the foot of a bed, or to be a lap blanket for warmer weather when fleeces or the like won't work.  It could also easily be altered to be a beach coverup or an overlay for a simple dress.

Kosi: Coral & Turquoise

One of my crafty friends back home was going on about how she was going to knit a coffee cozy so she didn't have to keep making use and consequently discarding the one-time-use cardboard ones available in coffee shops.  I figured it would be easy enough to crochet one, so I did.

I pulled two balls from my scraps, a thicker turquoise and a thinner coral and went to work with an H-8/5.00mm hook.  Ch 40 with the coral, sl st into the first ch.  Switched to the turquoise and went around with hdc... where I realized it was going to be too big.  Switched to coral and sc around, reducing 4 times for a total of 36 st.  Continued the color pattern until there were 5 layers of coral and 4 layers of turquoise and then finished.

Unfortunately, I wasn't thinking which side I was going to want out and used a method of reducing that uses the lower part of the combined stitches, which is invisible from one side but very visible on the other (see second coral layer from the bottom in the photo).  And of course that other, visible side is the one I decided I wanted out.  Such is life.

That's it.  Real quick little piece.  Didn't take more than a half hour.

More pictures to follow.  Friends have already been requesting coffee cozies of their own.  Hooray for reducing waste, even if it's little things like crocheted coffee cozies.

Birthday purple
and red cozy.

Alpaca Kiss

A while back, I was browsing the free patterns available on Michaels.com for ideas on things to make.  This one really struck me and I knew I'd finally found something I wanted to make for myself.  So when I got back up to school for the winter term, I set about making it happen.

The front and back pieces were crafted using an I-9/5.50mm hook and two 374-yard skeins of  Sensations Goldenrod in neutral multi - it's super soft and super warm, and I need something warm here in the not-so-frozen north.  The neck used a H-8/5.00mm hook and about 110 yards of my $23 hank of "Goldie" - an alpaca I met over the summer.  She gave me a kiss.

The front and back pieces took a week together and the neck two weeks on its own.  The pattern was a bit confusing and required several do-overs until I understood what it was I was supposed to be doing.  The neck took so long because the special stitches that allowed for the pattern (I'm not sure I did them right because the instructions were a bit vague) weren't ones the hook could do on its own.  I had to physically pull a loop over in every single stitch.

But it was totally worth it in the end because it fits and it's warm and it's gotten a number of compliments.  I did modify the pattern a bit (as you'll notice with the hook sizes); I reduced the number of triangle stitches at the widest point from 31 to 25 and the piece was still a bit big.  I did not fringe it, as I have cats and that's generally the better way to go, but I might in the future.

I think the best thing that came out of this was the comment that my grandmother would be proud.  She was an avid crocheter - though I have no memories of watching her (I was very young when she died), we have a lot of her works around the house.