crochet holidays

So between my birthday last week (I turned "too many" years old) and early Christmas gifts, it's been a very crochet holiday season. I'm pretty psyched with all the yarn and yarn gift certificates and similar crochet-erific gifts. And teas. I love yarn and teas, and apparently everyone who knows me knows it too, which is great. Oh, I also got two Oxfam Unwrapped gifts, irrigating a farmer's land and providing seeds to farmers. Pretty great! Anyways, back to the crochet.

I think the best crochet gift ever is the one that my friend Jaime gave me last week. It's a crochet hook with an LED light at the end, so I can crochet in the DARK! Why would I want to crochet in the dark? The main reason is road trips. We tend to drive long distances at night, and it kills me that I can't do anything useful in the car when it's dark. But now I can continue crocheting! Because I'm a crocheting maniac.

Pretty great stuff!

crochet: clutch

So I crochetted this clutch purse for a friend of mine, and then I asked Angela to help me with sewing on the zipper since i'm clueless with a sewing machine. Little did I know that this would require making a whole inner lining, and that the whole process would take something like 10 hours to figure out. Poor Angela! But she was a trooper, and I think the lining makes this so much better. But I will probably never make another clutch since they need a zipper and zippers are difficult. Alas.

crochet: rockhopper penguin

I just finished this for my cousin for Christmas, because he likes penguins. I'm not sure he turned out just like I expected, but I hope he likes it.

I think I'm going to try to write a pattern for the baby penguin. We'll see how that turns out.

lol of the day

Chris says I am a total loser, but today's Dinosaur Comic made me laugh a lot. So much that I had to share.

more crochet

So I finally uploaded some photos of some of my other crochet projects... one of them I did a couple months ago, is this elephant that I made without a pattern... I still don't really know how I did it, and I'm not sure I could replicate it.

I also crochetted and felted this purse for my sis-in-law Nicole for Christmas... we just exchanged gifts this past weekend, so now I can show you.

She picked out the colors and gave me an idea of what she wanted, because I'm kind of determined not to make things like purses for people unless I know what they want... I don't want to spend 50 hours making something that someone is going to throw in their closet and never look at again, ya know?

I also made a purse for my other sis-in-law Emily for her birthday, but I don't k now where the pictures are. I forgot to upload them to flickr I guess. Alas, later.

Oh yeah, if you're wondering, I still haven't finished my sweater. I kind of got tired of making the sleeves, so I'm taking some time off from it while I try to get a few Christmas gifts made. It won't be a very handmade Christmas though, I just don't have a lot of time. ::sigh:: But hopefully I'll get that sweater finished this winter while I can still enjoy it.