momma purse

For my momma's upcoming birthday, I crocheted her a purse. She got it in the mail today so now I can post photos of it! I recycled a metal clasp from another purse and started by crocheting right onto the clasp, and then building it down from there. I used Lion's Brand alpaca yarn (same as I used for my elephant), which I love the look of, but the alpaca hairs really shed all over and I wouldn't recommend it for anything that is going to be WORN, which is why I just use it for purses and amigurumi. And it's really soft, so the purse was really flimsy... I had to rig some metal wire inside to keep its shape, and kinda sew that into place, and then I hand-sewed a lining to go inside as well. (I'm still kinda scared of my sewing machine, so I decided hand-sewing was the way to go). It definitely isn't perfect craft (I'm not much of a sewer), but I'm pretty happy with it. And my momma sounded excited about it, so that's what matters.

rocking my socks off

Okay, just when I was thinking I was making some kinda cool stuff, I find this girl's blog and find someone making way cooler stuff. I'm so jealous of her mad crochet skills... I like how she makes her stuff more realistic, not just cutesy. Most amigurumi is just some colored circles and cute eyes and a smile, it's a bit more rare to find someone doing something more realistic. I also think she's a bit more determined to make a ton of them until she gets it right... I don't have that much determination. Usually I just go with whatever I can come up with, or I give up. I never thought of brushing my yarn to make it fuzzier, I will definitely have to experiment with that now. And I might hafta try making her tree frog. I love tree frogs.

Blessings

This morning on the Marta the old guy I was sitting next to saw me reading my devotional and asked me if I was a Christian. I said yes, and then he asked if I knew where the ichthus fish symbol came from, so we talked about that for a minute. He said "I just thought of that when you got on the train for some reason." Then I went back to reading.

As I left he told me to "have a blessed day" and I told him to do the same. For some reason this phrase stuck with me... it's something cheesy that Christians say all the time and it always seems just like the stock thing to say instead of "have a good day" to signify "hey, I love Jesus, so I'm going to say blessed instead." But for some reason today I just kept thinking about it and what that actually means. I've been sick and feeling icky lately, and just really worn down... like it's just tough to get up and get through the days. So I started thinking about how I really NEED a blessed day... physically and emotionally. So I said to God "I actually need you to bless me today. I don't know what that looks like... but You do. And I know that however You choose to bless me will be what I need."

So I'm at work, having a quiet but productive work day (which is probably a blessing in itself) and I take a break to check Craftzine.com's blog, cuz I do that sometimes to give my brain a break. I love looking at cool crafty things. And what do I see, but a notice that I won their random book giveaway. How cool! I got pretty excited about that... I don't usually win things, but this week I won a crafty contest, which is awesome, but this one didn't even require any talent or anything on my part. It was just kinda random. And I immediately remembered my prayer for blessings. So that made me happy.

Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! -Matthew 7:9-11

Penguin wins!

My crochet penguin pattern won 2nd prize in the Instructables Homemade Holidays contest! Hooray! I'm pretty psyched to get a subscription to Craft magazine. I'm already addicted to their blog.

Crochet Goldfish Pattern

I made a goldfish this week, and I actually kept track of what I did and wrote a pattern for it. Since I'm kind of experimenting with writing patterns, I'm giving it away for free:

Crochet goldfish pattern in Acrobat PDF format (right-click: Save Target As... in Internet Explorer)
I would love feedback from anyone who makes this. I'm thinking the yarn i used is a little too dark orange, I may go looking for another color yarn before i make another one.
All the photos are courtesy of my wonderful husband. Yay Chris!

Update: When I wrote the pattern I didn't have a lot of time, so I didn't spend much time trying to format it to specific rows or testing it for typos. So a lot of people are mentioning having trouble with it, which probably means it has typos, and would probably also be easier if I reformatted it. Since I don't have any time to do any of that, I'm just removing the pattern until some later date when I can reformat it and get a couple of testers. I did all of that (good formatting, a few testers to verify it all works) with the Sea Creature Mobile, so if you're looking for some goldfish, there's a pattern for a different style of goldfish there.

Update 5/18/2010: Okay, enough people have been asking me to post it, so it's back up. Most of the people who have asked for it also promised to send me feedback, but no one has, so if you are the rare person who actually goes through the pattern and wants to send me notes/suggestions/feedback to make it better, I will forever be in your debt. At any rate, you've been warned that the formatting is weird, plus I just did some strange things to get it to look the way it is supposed to and sometimes that's hard to explain, but I do think that if you can look past that you can get it to turn out okay. Good luck!

my new hat

I made this last week to help keep my ears warm. My piercings get REALLY cold when it's cold and windy out. I also decided I needed more green in my wardrobe. I love this color green.

and since we've no place to go...

I really love the weather widget image for snow. Seems so much nicer than the real stuff outside.

featured 2

New update, they also featured my penguin pattern. Pretty cool!

crochet purses

I was just organizing posts with labels and such, and I realized I never posted a picture of the purse I made Emily for her birthday, because I didn't want her to see it. Now I can post it. So here it is:

This was actually the second purse I made... the first one is the one I use every day.



(first purse)

These two were both crochetted with wool and felted. I actually have a couple others I just never took pictures of. Right now I'm working on a purse for my momma (not felted)... I actually need to get off the computer and hand-sew a lining for it... I'll post a photo once I finish that one.

featured...

So I posted photos of my crochet elephant on instructables for a contest... a few minutes later I got an email telling me they were featuring it on their homepage. Pretty cool!

I took a screenshot of it cuz I'm sure it won't last there long.

Crochet Penguin Pattern

Okay, I posted a pattern for my baby penguin on Instructables. This took way too much work.

adorable...

This just might be the cutest thing I ever did see.

It's a good thing it was already sold out once I saw it, or else I probably would have made a completely impractical impulse buy! (impractical because I don't really wear rings.) The rest of her stuff doesn't excite me quite as much.

after Christmas shopping...

So we've been really busy, between prepping for holidays, being gone for the holidays, and recovering from the holidays. There are things I've meant to post that I just haven't had time to do. Not that I have time now; I'm at work and stuff. But I just remembered that I meant to post this and if I don't do it now, I'll forget forever.

My friend Kim has an Etsy store with some great paintings that you should check out. I got a set of Christmas cards from her to send to people for Christmas, they were photographs of some of the paintings she has for sale. And she's selling stuff for super-cheap, so if you see something you like you should snatch it up soon!

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.

Christmas Ideas

If you're overwhelmed by the thought of asking for more "stuff" for Christmas (or people gifting you stuff even though you didn't ask for it), try asking for something a little different this year... like a sheep, or a crocodile, or an irrigation system. Not for you, of course, but for people for whom a gift like this could change lives. Oxfam Unwrapped has a ton of new gift ideas since the last time I talked about them, so you should check it out and see if there's anything in there that strikes your fancy.

I know that personally I'm afraid to give these gifts to most of the people I need to get gifts for, because I'm afraid of offending them by not giving them something tangible that can clutter up their homes. Maybe I'm totally misguided, but I keep hearing everyone's unenthusiastic "uh.. thanks... this is... just... great," when I think of giving these gifts. So if you would like something like this, make sure to tell people so that they know this is a gift you would enjoy. I'm all for it, in case you were wondering. :-)

laying low

Not a whole lot going on here; nothing to report. I have been really lazy during my long weekend. Really lazy. As in watching hours of YouTube videos and playing games on my PDA lazy. I planned on going out shopping on Friday, but then I went through all the Black Friday ads and realized that there were no better sales than normal sales. If there were some good sales on hard drives, maybe a cheap PC laptop to replace the one that is falling apart, maybe some good sales on jeans, I'd be out there fighting the crowds with the rest of the good Americans doing their patriotic duty to spend money the day after Thanksgiving. But when the "sales" are things like $30 jeans and buy one pair of shoes get one pair half off, or $600 laptops, it just wasn't worth it. That's the kind of sales these places have most of the time. So why would I fight the crowds on the busiest shopping day? No thankyou.

So to make up for barely leaving the house Friday, I planned to go run some errands on Saturday. But then Chris got some awful food poisoning from our Tin Drum Asia Cafe take-out, and woke me up in the middle of the night with it. So we had a rough night, and he spent most of Saturday recovering from that. I just thank God that I didn't get food poisoning, too. The last time we were both out of commission with food poisoning, and that was about the worst two days of my life. We were so helpless we had to call a friend to bring us gatorade and soup, and then we didn't know how either one of us would manage to open the door when she arrived, because we were afraid if we moved an inch we'd be sick again. Awful.

Anyways, I left the house long enough to get us some groceries and cleaning supplies, and that's about it. (I did go to Michael's to get some yarn that was still on sale for the rest of Saturday, but that was a lame sale too, so I only bought what I needed. Disappointing sales). Anyways. I've been lazy.

Chris works tomorrow so we won't go to church until the evening service, and now that I've spent 3 days being lazy I don't know if I'll be able to snap out of it and make myself leave the house when I have no plans and most the people I know are still out of town for the weekend. Maybe I'll just work on my sweater. I've finally got the body completed and I sewed snaps on it today... now it's just down to the sleeves, and I'll have made my first sweater. If I'm really diligent this week I might even finish it in the month of November, which was my goal for NaKniSweMo. Huzzah!

Chris says it's bedtime, so off I go.