I made a doily! A DOILY!

I don't do thread crochet. Nothing against it per se, just that it is in such small scale it generally takes forever and I honestly find it a pain.

So, much as I like doilies, I've not made any until now.

Some time ago, it occurred to me that I could simply follow the pattern, but with hook and yarn of my choice. This idea first came to me several years ago--and yeah, I realize it's nothing unique to me--but I forgot about it for whatever reason. Then it came up again, but I spent some time finding the "right" doily pattern. I still want to blow up a very large, involved doily into a throw for my friend Mark's apartment, 'cause his pad is funky like that, but I've had to go for instant gratification first:
This is from the book 24-Hour Crochet Projects, which I have checked out of the library. I seriously must now own this book. This is the "Diamonds in the Square" doily. I only deviated from the pattern a bit. (I still need to block it & weave in the ends, I know.)

I used a 3.5mm hook (much larger than the 1.5mm called for, but still quite small for me) & Bernat Be My Baby cotton yarn, which someone gave my mother & she then gave me.

This motif would make a really cute bedspread for a little girl, I think.

I am even more of a fan of Lady Linoleum's than I have been, now that I am working again. How that woman manages to stay so creative--and so prolific!--whilst working in the Cube Farm...! I am in awe. To be fair to myself, though, the Lady's offspring looks quite weaned, & I am spending my breaks & lunch attached to a breast pump for the benefit of my little Ro-Bear.

So I am still crocheting, but slowly. I have reluctantly given up on NaNoWriMo, because my schedule is just too hectic for me to catch up (I fell behind without realizing it, because their little word count widget screwed up). I am still going to complete that novel one of these days, though! Thanks to NaNo, I've gotten a lot farther than ever before. But that has nothing to do with crochet. This does:
This is going to be a shrug for my eldest. She's quite excited about it. I originally started doing it in track stitch, which is simply 4 rows of single crochet and one row of treble crochet, and very nice looking, but it was a bit too big when I wrapped it around her arm (I want a fairly snug fit) and so I frogged it. When I restarted I wanted something that would go faster than the track stitch, so I came up with this. It is quite simple, just 11 dcs, a 5dc shell, then another 11 dcs.

I couldn't get a good photo of it with the flash on, so though you can't really tell I'll enlighten you that it's Caron Simply Soft in Off White & I'm using an H hook. Basic work is good. I wanted just a little tiny bit of fancy in there, but simple enough that, like I said, it'll work up quickly. So far so good, though I'm not even up one arm yet.

In Progress: LetterBaby Jacket

I decided to make Esther Ro a jacket for her birthday. Probably should have decided this much sooner than about 3 days in advance. Her birthday was over a week ago, & I am still working on it. Oh well, we're having temps in the low 80s during the days anyhow.

Still, as I've been updating so infrequently lately, I thought I'd share a picture of it in progress:
I decided to call it the "LetterBaby Jacket" because, as you can see, it is vaguely modeled off a high school letterman jacket. This is mainly because I didn't think I had enough of the purple yarn (yes, that's purple; my flash did funny things with the color) to make the sleeves as well. So I decided to do this. I probably do have enough yarn after all, but I'm paranoid. I'll make a hat or something with the rest. For one of the older girls who will actually allow a hat to rest on her head, that is.

This is obviously a very simple design, with minimal shaping (decreases on every other row of the front neckline only). It still needs, obviously, sleeves, a collar, & a button/snap placket (havent' decided which to use yet). But I took the time out to crochet a little E. The yarn is a bulky version of Caron's Simply Soft which I don't remember the exact name of, the hook is J, and the stitch plain ol' HDC (except the E, which of course is done in SC).

But I just couldn't let her birthday pass by without somethinghand-crocheted, so I went to Big Lots (which I now worship, by the way) and bought more yarn out of the Amazing Dollar Yarn Display, and made Esther a hat for her birthday:
As you can tell, she likes Fun Fur about as much as I do. I had to have someone hold it on her head (I think that's Jon Jr, coz Maggie's kid) to get a picture, but I do have a couple of cute video clips of her yanking it off her head & throwing it on the floor. What she is holding in her hands, if you can see it, is a box of tights, which proved to be the most-loved gift of the evening. The box, that is, not the tights. She spent most of the night gnawing on the box of tights, even threw down her cake to chew on it instead.

(The Fun Fur hat is also partially the result of my joke to my supervisor at work that I was going to make Her Baldness a wig for her birthday.)

Today's photos, by the way, are brought to you by Image Enhance. It's actually free, rather than just a trail version or a limited-use version or some other such nonsense. It is quite simple to use. I don't know how good it is at editing photos, but it works quite well for resizing them, which is really all I need it to do right now. The only thing is that it defaults to saving them as bitmaps even if they're orginally JPGs. So watch that, since a lot of photo hosting places won't work with BMPs.