FINALLY! The latest sculpture is finished.

I am quite pleased with this. It's my most ambitious sculpture to date. I wish I could list all the yarns that went into it, but I'm honestly not sure what everything is.

The hair (which was worked as part of the head, sort of intarsia) is a mohair yarn I bought years ago; I think it's something from Paton's, but don't quote me on it. The curls were fairly simple corkscrews (done by working multiple DCs into each chain); the difficult thing there was that I used an E hook to keep it from getting too big. (The main part of the head was done with a 4mm hook.) The body is my beloved Caron's Simply Soft, as is the yarn I used to embroider the face (which I am also quite proud of).

The arms & legs were both made with bends in them. The legs were the most difficult because of crocheted-in bends at both knee & heel. I used a technique described in the book Simple Crochet for Cherished Babies; it's how the author makes the heels on the baby slippers in the book. Well, an adaptation thereof.

The shoes are "leaves" crocheted out of a nice tangerine colored TLC Cotton Plus yarn. I used I think a J hook. That same yarn appears in the shawl, along with some scrap Simply Soft (you may remember it from the girls' Easter skirts, LOL). I just held the two together and used, if memory serves, a 9mm hook.

The skirt is some ribbon yarn I bought at the same time I bought the yarn I used for the hair. I haven't been able to successfully use it for anything else. It was kind of expensive, but better it should be used for this than continue to sit in the closet unused!

This is the flower. One of the rare times I've used Fun Fur. The stem is a pipe cleaner wrapped with sport weight yarn from my stash, attached using a bead, then doubled and wrapped again. I was originally going to do a whole armful of flowers, but I've decided it looks better with just one.

I'm going to throw this up on eBay, with a modest reserve, & see what happens, if anything. I'll make sure there's a link here once I'm done listing it.

Here are a few more photos, and a link to a large collage of the sculpture as a work in progress:

Note, if you can see them, the individual fingers & thumb on the hand. They were made as I closed the hand, by slip stitching through two of the previous round's stitches, chaining a little, and then single crocheting down the chains. I thought I'd taken pictures of the arm itself before I attached it to the main body of the sculpture, but I can't find them if I did.

This is the leg. You can see the two bends in this picture pretty well. It was a bit of a challenge getting it to line up properly.

Here's another view of the completed project. I have no further plans to use fringe on any garments, even a shawl. These photos, by the way, were taken outside in the back yard. Yes, we need to take the Weed Eater to it, but it makes for a better picture a little unmanicured.

Work in Progess Ladder. This is just too big to put here. If you follow the progress, you can see that it was kinda frog-like for a while there. I sewed the ankles and then the hands together to get the appropriate posture, another first for me.

And now, the experiment. I have the sculpture listed on eBay. Will it sell? I have truly no idea. I have a fairly high starting bid, and I do have a reserve because I don't want to wind up with it selling for five bucks. I don't really have expectations at this point in time, but it's worth the shot.

Quick & Easy

Got a new copy of Quick and Easy Crochet in the mail the other day & whipped up this little outfit for Ro in a couple of days (but only a few hours' cumulative effort):

Cute, eh? It will serve her well this winter once we're home in Texas. It's Bernat yarn, but I'm not sure exactly what kind. It came in a kit for making a baby blanket (which I never made because the yarn was too much of a pain to work with, and no it wasn't much easier this time around, with greater experience), & the individual skeins are only labeled as Bernat. It's some sort of boucle yarn, though.

The byline for this pattern was D's Zigns. I have no idea who or what that is; if anyone knows please drop me a line. I'd love to contact the designer directly & tell him/her how much I enjoyed this pattern. Many if not most of the patterns in the magazine had the same byline. I did a Google search but wasn't able to find an exact match, and all the D Zigns, D'Zigns & other such variations seem to take me to a variety of web design studios, which somehow I doubt have anything to do with crochet.

I like this issue as much as I did the previous one, by the way, though the dreaded Fun Fur seems to have made an incursion & there's one very strange, ugly poncho too. Overall, though, it's nice, though I question the need for two or three different swimsuit coverups. There's a very neat skirt pattern that I hope to make, some time in the distant future when I'm able to procure sport weight yarn in adult colors.

I had this all typed out yesterday.

I had this all typed out yesterday. I had my finger hovering over the button to select a picture to upload to Blogger...And the browser crashed. Just...closed. I have Firefox, so this doesn't happen very often to begin with, but this was like it just closed on its own. No error message, nothin'.

Of course, I haven't crocheted my browser window. So I need to get to the fiber-y goodness! First off, I have to give another shout out to Lady Linoleum over at Monster Crochet. I had to call my husband over and show him her Bacon Wrap. Sheer genius! Of course, she is probably themost talented crocheter I can think of offhand. I love her stuff. If you had told me it was possible to faithfully create a rasher of bacon in intarsia crochet...Well, I would have believed you, but I'd have wondered why you wanted to do it, and I'd have expected it to be, you know, life sized. There is something so truly bizarre and wonderful about a giant piece of bacon. Wool bacon. A pork product made out of a sheep product!

Moving along...

After that goodness, I am almost embarassed to show off my most recent completed project. I'm still stumbling along with my sculpture. It was more difficult than I thought to crochet a leaf that looks like a leaf and has the right dimensions without curling up upon itself. I wound up having to use a much bigger hook than I'd used for the rest of the project. I'd been using 3.75mm and 3.5mm hooks for most of it. Now that I think of it, though, I think I just used like a 7mm hook for another part. I am sadly prone to forgetting such things if I don't write them down. But it was necessary, because I was using ribbon yarn. I am pleased to report that I've finally successfully crocheted something using ribbon yarn! Strange little things make me happy.

Anyhoo...This is the latest completed project, made for Linda, my middle daughter (she's 2):
It's a simple little outfit for one of Linda's Cabbage Patch Kids. I have the pattern in rough form, I just need to remember where I put it, and then I'll post it on Crochetville. There seems to be an odd shortage of free CPK patterns out there, judging by the requests I keep seeing on the 'Ville.

I'm also thinking about adapting the dress part of the pattern into a shirt for Esther.

This outfit was a little lesson in learning to listen to the yarn. I know that sounds funky. I guess I should say, in letting your subconscious take control. I spent way longer than I should have trying to fancy up the dress. I was going to do a full shell-stitch skirt, but I couldn't get it to come out right, and then I was going to do crossed DCs, and then bobbles and then...Finally I had to go cook dinner. Yarn is fun, but it doesn't feed the children. Sadly, though, if I wasn't breastfeeding I'd probably hole myself up in my room in a yarn-induced stupor and let everyone else fend for themselves. See, breastfeeding really is good for you! LOL

Anyway, the next day I picked it up again, because I'd promised Linda a new outfit for her baby, and if you knew Linda you'd know she can't be deterred. Then again, what 2-year-old can? I finally thought, Oh, heck, I'll just make it plain. Plain DCs. See, I'd planned from the start to put the pattern up on the Ville, and I try to make my patterns simple enough for beginners when I do that. I think a lot of crochet patterns are written just to be confusing, though that is improving somewhat. So I just quit thinking and started working and before too long conceived of the idea to do some BLDCs (actually, since I am left-handed & so tend to work inside out, for me they were FLDCs) so I'd have something on which to anchor a double tier off ruffles.
Of course, that's not the only place I put ruffles. I don't actually care for butt-ruffles on real baby clothes (though we do have one pair of pink ruffle-butt pants that both Linda and Esther have worn), because they seem as if they would be uncomfortable. But I couldn't resist the urge to put ruffles on the undershorts here, though I did manfully (womanfully?) resist the urge to put ruffles around the legholes.

You can see from this picture, too, that I did tie closures. That was for simplicity. Linda has actually managed to yank the clothes off without undoing the ties, and to put the clothes on other dolls (and even, once or twice, back on this one) as well. So the ties aren't an issue. By the way, they're not my usual drawstrings, but extentions of the trim at neckline & waistband. I'm interested to see if this can be successfully adapted for use in actual clothes, say in my daughters' skirts. I'm afraid I will run into the old problem of the weight of the yarn making it too saggy, though.
These are the booties. The photo didn't come out so well on account of the flash, but that's OK. You get the general idea. These were significantly easier than real booties. Real booties require shaping; these are pretty much just tubes. They do have drawstrings; I needed some way to keep them on, however briefly.

The ruffles on these were much easier too, as they were crocheted in the normal part of the stitch, rather than in free loops.

The whole thing was done with a J (6mm) hook and, of course, Caron's Simply Soft. I love that yarn.

And now for this week's Gratuitous Esther Photo. (It was supposed to also be my contribution to Saturday Sky, but that got seriously sidetracked.)

I know, it's not too clear. But I like it that way.