I got it.

After a few hours' feverish work, there is now a link to my free patterns page immediately to the left. It'll stay there permanently. Here's another link, to make this very simple: Sabra's Crochet Patterns.

It's not pretty, but it's functional. There's a reason I'm a crocheter & not a web developer.

I'm working on it.

I've gotten several PMs over at C'ville asking for photos for my Beginner Baby Set. I'm working on getting all my patterns up on one webpage where they & their photos will stay more or less permanently (at least, I've no intention of taking them down!). I will devote much of my Sunday to that & will make a post both here & there when I finally finish.

I have more patterns than I realized! I did a search for threads I'd started at C'ville & was quite suprised to discover I've a total of 14 patterns (not 14 threads on it, though, I sometimes grouped 2 or 3 patterns in a thread).

It also brought home to me how desperately I need to write a new pattern! I haven't written anything in a very long time.

I am working again, though, so my crocheting time is once again severely curtailed. I do data entry at work and spend my breaks pumping milk for Miss Esther, so I don't have time to crochet there.

I feel so dirty.

I made a scarf. Yes, a scarf. But it was for a good cause:
I made Linda a scarf for her birthday. I didn't take a separate picture of the project by itself, apparently, so you're stuck with the photo from her birthday party.

I used Wool-Ease, which I'd bought years ago for a totally different project. I think it works better this way, though. The hat is from the same yarn, with another yarn that I think is a cashmere blend, but again it's so old the label is missing, used for trim. (You can see it in the flower.)

Both hat & scarf were made from the same skein, with a tiny bit left over. Not bad, not bad at all. I made the scarf in a manner similar to Mile-a-Minute Afghans, which is to say I worked down the chain, then back up the other side of it, with extra stitches in the "end" chains. It's essentially worked in rounds. Not terribly original, but still better than the typical back-and-forth you find in scarves.

Happy Birthday Miss Linda

One of Miss Linda's 3rd birthday presents is this outfit for her baby doll.

The doll itself was a Christmas gift, & a really great find for about $10 at Wal-Mart. No bottles (my pet peeve), and pretty lifelike aside from the white cloth body (and why can't they make the cloth body the same color as the limbs?). Anyhoo, it's a nice doll for the price.

I stayed up until about a quarter past one in the morning finishing this up. The dress is based off of Crotiques' Baby Girl Sleeper Set. I have made a few dresses from this pattern, but never actually made the pattern as written.

The yarn I used came out of my stash. I bought it years & years ago in Virginia because it's such a pretty color, but it's too rough for me to have used as clothes for an actual baby, but of course that's not as much of an issue with doll clothes. I have no idea as to the brand or weight (though it seems to be a light worsted weight), as I lost the label years ago. I used it to make one of my Christmas ornaments & fell in love with it again, so I wanted to use it for something.

Linda adores her doll's rainbow dress, and now I'm itching for more of this yarn to make other doll clothes. I am that insane, yes.

There will be more pictures tomorrow from Linda's gifts. I gave her just this when she woke up this morning because it will probably be pretty late when Rob gets off work tonight; she'll get the rest of her gifts then, two of which are crocheted.

Mittens!

This is what it looked like outside today:
That is my car. Note the icicles.

It got up to a whopping 32 degrees yesterday, but was below that much of the day. Unfortunately, we lack central heat. So, even though we had heaters going yesterday, it got to where my eldest was complaining about having cold hands.

Obvious answer?

Mittens!

I used this pattern from Bev's Country Cottage:
Bev's Hat-Mitt combo.

It's a great pattern. It's all single crochets & slip stitches, and it works up quite fast. I did have to lengthen it some for Bobbie's mittens & use 11 rows instead of the suggested 10 for Linda's mittens, but other than that, the construction is just great. It is so simple & works up quite fast, probably about a 1 or 2 hour project for someone without small children climbing all over her.

Oh, for Esther's I used a G hook instead of the H hook, but other than that made it exactly according to pattern. She seems to quite like hers. She spent some time staring at them and clapping her hands, and even tried to put one of them on her foot instead of her hand.

Blast from the Past

This is Linda wearing a dress. Not just any dress, mind you. This is Linda--age about 2.5 in this photo--wearing her baptism dress. Which she had last worn at 4 months old. No one was more surprised to see that it fit than I. It was not particularly large on her as a baby, or at least I did not think it was at the time.

I wish I had a decent picture of her in the dress as a baby, but I am holding her in the only one, and you can't really see the dress.

Her third birthday is this coming Friday, and I am taking a break from crocheting her birthday gifts to post this, because my hands hurt.