My kingdom for my card reader...

I just spent an hour or so photographing my 40 hats, individually & as a group, and now I cannot find my card reader to load the photos onto my computer. I swear to you that I am done though. I actually finished on Maundy Thursday.

I also crocheted three cropped sweaters for the littles, as Al Gore has yet to deliver on his global warming promises and thus it's 48 freaking degrees today. At least in theory it is, though it feels just the same as it did yesterday when it was 37 degrees pretty much all day long. Seriously, what the heck? I'm in Texas, it's supposed to be hot by now. It was 93 degrees last Easter.

40 Hats, a progress report

Thirteen hats there, & the 14th on my hook will finally catch me up. I'm trying to be creative & so far no repeats. But the chances of coming up with 40 different, workable, variations...I don't know about that.

I love this yarn.

Pretty, huh? It's Frosting by Yarn Bee. I think Yarn Bee is Hobby Lobby's brand; at least I've never seen it before now. It's so lovely; it reminds me of a field of wildflowers. I'm about to make a baby hat with it.

2/40 so far on the Lenten Hat Project.

Hooks & Hats

This is my new rosewood crochet hook. My cousin Maggie & I went to the Yarn Barn Tuesday. Yarn Barn seems to be the closest thing to an LYS we have in this city. We seriously need a real LOCAL yarn store. Many apologies to the elderly ladies at the Yarn Barn. But I'm trying to make an effor to shop locally, so one chain store is as good as another.

Their selection of crochet hooks was pathetically small. Aside from some bone and abalone hooks up by the register, these rosewood hooks were the only ones I couldn't have found just as easily at Wal-Mart or Michaels. There were beaucoup knitting needles that were different from the typical stuff, but there was only one rotating rack of hooks. Pathetic.

It was only $8, though. I started out trying to make a hat with it, but it was splitting the fibers too much. I will try again, just not with something I'm trying to make quickly.

Hats...Someone on MotheringdotCommune mentioned that she was doing "40 hats in 40 days" for Lent. Sounds like a great idea, so I'm stealing it. Well, copying. I'm Protestant, so we're less about giving stuff up than we are about taking stuff on. It's my biggest charity project to date. I hope to find a local hospital for them to go to, but I'll mail them somewhere if necessary.

Valentine's Day Purses **UPDATED**

I was hunting all over trying to come up with something to make for my girls for Valentine's Day. At first I was going to make little pillows with their names on them, and then I remembered that they're girlie girls. So I made purses instead.
They're insanely simple & fast to make. I used an H hook, Caron's Simply Soft & Simply Soft Brites, and HDCs. Each one is an hour's work total, and that's being generous.

I'll have the pattern up on my patterns page within a day or two.

In other news, we went on a magazine hunt yesterday, and I finally found a copy of the KnitScene that has Lady Linoleum's pattern for the mini top hat in it, and that's going to be my next crochet project.

UPDATE: The pattern is online here. Please let me know if you find any obvious mistakes.

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.

Bobbie's Sweater

I actually finished this about a month ago, but haven't had a chance to post photos for it yet. So here ya go:
Cute, eh? The stripe pattern is modified from one of Candi Jensen's, but other than that it's 100% original work.

I had originally intended to make her sleeves in the same stitch pattern as the body of the sweater, but it was taking far too long, so I frogged it in the interest of time. (And yes! it gets cold enough in Texas to need a sweater like this. Geez, people!) I did the sleeves and collar in two days and rushed the collar through right before going to work so she could wear it that day.

But I didn't like the collar, so the very next day I frogged it & replaced it with this:

It's now almost a turtleneck. Two rows of HDC (one to establish the neckline, one to decrease its size some) and then several rows of a rib stitch comprised of 1FPDC followed by 1BPDC. Smaller hook too. She can wear it without a shirt under it now without worrying about it falling off one shoulder.

I got the usual comments about "working up the courage" to crochet a sweater when I showed this off at MamaDrama, so my current project is to make a tutorial on sweater-making while making a sweater for Linda. So look for that within the next few weeks. It's really ridiculously easy to make a sweater.

Oh, before I forget, the specifics:
yarn~ Caron's Simply Soft
hook~ H for the body & sleeves, F for the collar

Merry Christmas

Of course, it is just barely still Christmas here, and for those of you already on the East Coast it's Boxing Day already. (No, I don't celebrate it, I just read far too many Regencies as a child.)

Here is my contribution to Christmas crochet, a project which occupied way more of my time than it should have:




I crocheted all the ornaments for my tree this year.

The reason behind this is rather odd, which is typical for me.

I had never before gone out on Black Friday, but this past day after Thanksgiving I actually did.

Some issues with an overheating van prompted me to stop at Home Depot for a cool-down, and I decided this meant I needed to buy a tree.

I found this adorable little potted tree there and had to have it. I am odd in that I prefer small Christmas trees to large ones. A carry-over from my childhood when we just couldn't afford the bigger ones, I guess.

Anyay, I bought this one and brought it home and decided I wanted to have it decorated by the time Robert got home from work. I confidently opened up the box marked 'X-Mas Decorations'...only to find nothing more than a few strands of lights and a jingle-bell wreath.

Darn.

So I grabbed the materials I always dohave to hand, and set about crocheting the popcorn garland. Then I made a couple of balls and a couple of spirals.

The project grew from there. I decided to make a snowman. Then I knew I had to make other stuff too, so I set about finding stuff to make.

But, since I can't let anything be easy, I set myself some simple guidelines. Number one: no novelty yarns. It would have been all too easy to use up some of the fizzy furry stuff I have sitting around to make interesting ornaments. But I wanted to stick to the plain Jane stuff. Most of what is there is actually worsted weight too. Number two: only use my F and E hooks. I hate small hooks, and I rarelyuse anything smaller than a G. So I set out to do something different here. I think this is mainly because the first hook I found was an F. Number three: no patterns. It was OK to look at pattern pictures for ideas, but I had to figure out how to do it on my own. Number four: whenever possible, use HDC. My favorite stitch.

Close-ups of some of my favorite ornaments (and I apologize in advance for the poor quality of these photos):

C'mon, you know this had to be there. Self-explanatory. Texas flag. Crocheted sideways to make it easy, using a vague intarsia technique for the red and white stripes. (I wanted to work them at the same time & make sure they were connected.) The star is simply embroidered on it, of course.


This picture frame was a royal pain in the rear end to make, and I am not thrilled about the final product. The picture is only somewhat secure in there. This is really just an excuse to put a picture of my girls up on my blog.
I'd re-take this picture, but I am far too lazy. I hung the cross backwards in this picture. There is actually a very nice slipstitched green border on the front of the ornament. The overall effect is reminiscent of a stained-glass window, or so I like to tell myself.

Of course, it strikes me as a bit macabre to have a reminder of Jesus's death displayed for the holiday celebrating His birth, but I was doubtful of my ability to crochet a manger. (I think I will save the crocheted creche for next year.)

This was requested by my husband. He works for Roto Rooter now, and this is my first iteration of the Roto Rooter emblem. It's not very good, but it is recognizable as the subject at least.

By the way, the Roto Rooter guys are authorized to work on gas lines. Surprised me. My husband is in training and thus far seems to have spent as much of his time unclogging drains in the city zoo as anything else. But I digress.

This is my favorite:
Miniature sweater. I got the idea here, but that one is knitted. I have such a short attention span and this in particular really played right into that. I think it took about a half-hour's work, total. I may need to get into miniature crochet some more.

That is all for now, Merry Christmas to everyone out in the blogosphere, and hot coffee vibes to all my fellow Episcopalians. For those of you who are Christian, especially my fellow Protestants, spend some time this busy holiday season thinking about Mary and the huge sacrifice she so willingly made. We tend not to give her the credit she is due.

New Book: Crochet Squared

I love this book. Indeed I do. I bought it about three or four weeks ago, or rather made my hubby buy it for me, because I've been once again fascinated by the idea of modular crochet, and the entire idea of this book is that you use two stitches (chain and single crochet) and two shapes (squares & rectangles) to create a number of garments.

Of course, I am not enamoured of scarves, or ponchos, and this pushes my "stupid invented names for everyday stuff" (is 'shrawl' really a necessary part of anyone's vocabulary?) buttons. But it is, at it's heart an excellent description of a fascinating technique.

So last week I decided I'd blog about this book, and I went on to Amazon.com to swipe an image for it. Which you can see that I've done here. While there I came across the reviews. A good many people apparently bought this book because the author is black.

My bad. I didn't realize what hue the author's skin was until actually the day last week that I decided to write about it here. I know how to crochet already, so I tend to skip past the front section of a book if that's where the how-to stuff is. I was bored at work, though, so I decided to read through the front section, and it was only then that I noticed the author was black. Far be it from me to give a darn what the ethnicity of a book's author is. (Sometimes, gasp, I even read books written by liberals.)

But this review in particular has caused me to invent a new rule. First the review, then the rule:

I bought this book primarily because it's by an African American author--I rarely see people like me crocheting, let alone, publishing a book. I also bought this book because I thought it'd have some innovative techniques I was not privy to.
Unfortunately, I was very disappointed with my purchase. I love Ms. Polk's yarn selections, but they are not cheap and you need a lot to make most items featured in the book. Also, it takes forever to make her items since she only uses about two small stitches, particularly single crochet. Granted she uses oversized hooks for some of her projects, many crocheters might have trouble finding these hooks. Also, I tried her scarf pattern but was confused because the stitches look elongated, but she does not say she's elongating--just using a size S or T hook. I used both of mine and did not get the same effect she did. Some of her patterns also are a little hard to begin, as if the author assumes readers know what to do.
Once again, I feel deflated by the crochet/literary world. No wonder I turn to knitting books and magazines, and adapt the patterns into crochet.

OK, now for the rule. If you buy a book 'cause the author is black, then that damn well better be the basis for your review. Don't say "I bought the book primarily because the author is black, but I don't like the techniques in it." Uh-uh. If you're gonna buy the book because the author's skin tone matches yours, then review it on that basis. If you buy a book 'cause the author's black, then your review ought to read "This book's author is indeed a dark-skinned woman! Woo! Great book!" If you want to be a grownup and buy a book because of its content rather than its author's color, then review it on its content. (Geez, where have I heard this content rather than color stuff before?) But if you buy a book just because the author looks a certain way, then review the book on that basis.

Sheesh. It's like buying a book just because Sean Hannity is on the back cover and then complaining that his sentence structure sucks.

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.

Awash in UFOs.

I swear to you, I am still here. :-)

I keep starting things, and then getting confused/burnt out/bored and wandering off to do something else.

No excuse. My cousin just learned how to crochet & she's crankin' stuff out left & right. Made my baby a scarf for her birthday even.

I'm working on a sweater for Esther right now. I'm feeling the itch to get back to sculpture crochet soon, but I'm not sure what to make.

I am working out of the home now, too, so I have had more time sucked from me. I pump milk during my breaks. I am bound & determined to buy a hands-free breast pump so that I can crochet and lactate at the same time.

Hmm...perhaps I will make a breast...Wouldn't that be fun to explain to my supervisor?

Proud of my cousin.

My cousin Margaret decided she wanted to learn how to crochet. Since we're both southpaws, she asked me to teach her. I'm not great at teaching, but I was able to show her how to single crochet, and this was the result:
Cute, huh? She made her daughter a little purse. It's not the most perfect crochet I have ever seen, but I'm still mightily impressed. I mean, it's not a scarf. It's something she came up with the idea for all on her own, and she figured out how to do it with essentially no help from me.

I bought her I Taught Myself How to Crochet, the kit that has been around at least the past 15 or so years, because I used it back in the day. So hopefully it will work for her as it did for me, and if not we now live in the same trailer park (Yes! I am true to my roots!), so she can easily come to find me whenever she needs help.

In other news, I've shelved the skirt I was working on for myself. Mainly on account of the fact that my husband put it up somewhere & I've no idea what he did with it. You'd think he'd put it with the rest of my yarn & WIPs, but no.

I am also working on an outfit for Margaret's daughter, Cheyenne. She picked out her own yarn, the Bernat baby yarn that's supposed to stripe up. Damned if I can figure out how to get it to make neat stripes, though. I am making sure to use the hook the label mentions, and I have gone so far as to fold in half the length of pink I'm working with in half so I can hopefully get two rounds out of it, and nada. It's driving me nuts.

In other yarn news, Big Lots has some pretty nice yarn--again, Bernat--on sale for a dollar a skein. I am now the proud possessor of 12 skeins (four each of 3 different yarns) of this magical dollar yarn. It's nice too. I don't recall the name of most of it, but it's acrylic/mohair/angora, a nice fuzzy yarn. I have baby sweater plans for it.

Yarn Haul

In the past two weeks, I've bought 20 skeins of TLC Cotton Plus yarn for $20. Total. That's a buck a skein, for those slow in math.

Where did I come across this bounty? Texas Thrift & Dollar Stores. So anyone who reads this who happens to be in the San Antonio area, it's worth a trip if you really like red, green, or yellow. Those being the 3 colors they have. I have only red & green. And no, I'm not making a Christmas afghan. I'm making this:
This, of course, is the Citrine Skirt from the Fall 2006 issue of Interweave Crochet. Designed by Annie Modesitt, who of course has some great designs for someone who identifies herself as a knitter.

I of course, am not making the skirt in the yarn called for, and therefore it will be single-colored & not striped. I'm probably violating the entire purpose of the pattern by not using that particular yarn, but oh well. I don't like orange (it's one of those colors I seriously think no one looks good in, though I've been told I do), and I don't like stripes.

What I do like is that this pattern actually comes in my size. I am making the biggest size, since the pattern says it's to sit low on the waist. I'm very appreciative of the fact that it comes in my size, as so few crochet patterns do (I wear a 16/18, which is an XL or 2X depending on the brand). I am even more appreciative of the fact that it comes in a variety of lengths. Though I do like long skirts--and am, in fact, making mine to be about ankle length--I am nevertheless quite short, so ankle length on your "average" woman (I put that in quotes because I am 5'5", which is exactly average height for a woman, but all clothes seem to be designed for gals taller than I) is tripping-length for me.

While I am on my list of things I like about the pattern--there is a diagram in the magazine for the bottom part of it, which is kind of confusing.

Still, either there is something wonky in the supply list, or I crochet even more tightly than I thought. The yarn is listed as being #2/Fine & the hook a 3.75mm/F. I am using the Cotton Plus, which the label says is worsted weight (though looking at it I'd guess it's sport weight) and still need a G/4.25 mm hook to obtain the stated gauge. I started with the 3.75mm and then moved up to 4mm before settling on the 4.25mm.

Not that it's really a problem, though. Just an observation. So wish me luck, as I don't tend towards complicated, adult-sized projects often.

Safe & sound in San Antonio

We're home. Most of my stash is still in transit. I've only bought yarn once since moving here. Unemployment does funny things to my YAS (yarn acquiring syndrome). I've only crocheted 2 doll dresses in the time I've been here. I'll check back in when I can, hopefully with some FOs to show off; I'm borrowing coz's computer.