Water Bottle Bracelet

HERE is something I can incorporate crochet into! I can crochet a bunch of chain in interesting colors - say, black and yellow - and then wrap it around the plastic and decorate it up! WOOO!

Oh man, so many crafts and so little time....

Skinny Scarf

OK over on FiberFlux I found THIS pattern for a skinny scarf. I really liked it, thought "oh that looks easy so I'll make it," and I grabbed some yarn and began stitching.

Here's what I have so far:

The problem I seem to have with my scarf is how it tilts uphill to the right. I'm not sure why it's doing that. Her scarf stitches look perfectly straight and I'm not sure what I've done to make mine tilted.

Got any ideas? Or should I just go with it and incorporate that into my scarf?

That said, if I can get this figured out, I had a GREAT idea with this. Stitch up a whole boatload of these in various colors - say I do some in this sangria color, and some in red, and some in violet, etc - and then find a way to sew them or crochet them together to make an afghan! Sort of like a granny square afghan or mile-a-minute afghans. I may try that with some scrap yarn and do a couple of sample or test strips. I think I'll do that this weekend...

How to Do Decoupage

I really need to learn how to do this! It can't be that hard, can it? 

Ah, but I'll need a few materials, I see....

I really need to open my own studio, but part of my problem is my confidence. I feel like anything I would do is not quite as good as someone else's work who had been doing this for several years. I need to get over that.

Faux Pewter Jewelry

OK so I decided to try my hand at faux pewter jewelry pieces. This is what I got...

This is a slightly better picture of the first one I did - but, that said, I think if I'd been able to find and use SILVER paint instead of GREY, my pieces would look far more metallic. 

Woven Lapghan

OK so I'm working on the white mesh part of this lapghan. When this is done, I'm going to use another yarn to weave into the mesh. I haven't yet decided which one to use. 

In this photo I did the top row with Lion Brand Fettucini, a t shirt yarn that may not be the best choice, because I can't guarantee I can buy enough of it to use for the whole blanket. It's made with scrap t shirt material, so finding more than 2 matching rolls is challenging. The Fettucini yarn is the one with shades of blue, in the top center of the picture.

The second row is woven with Starbella ruffle yarn in Toucan colorway. I think I like this color best, but this yarn can be expensive. At about $5 a roll, I may have to drop about $100 on that yarn by itself to get the whole project complete. Not sure. That's a bit costly. The Starbella yarn is the brilliant rainbow yarn top left in the picture.

The third row is a chain of Lion Brand Homespun in the Barrington colorway. This yarn is very soft and rather bulky, and that would make for a very warm lapghan. Hiding the ends in when I complete the weaving would be very easy too. It's a bit more affordable than the other yarns, and I get more of it for my dollar. Hmmm.

What I originally had planned was to chain some orange and some green and weave the chain into the mesh, and it would look like the Irish tricolor:

But then I thought "oh come on, get CREATIVE woman!" And I came up with the idea of weaving a more novelty type of yarn into the mesh. 

I do need to stash-bust, so I might use my Lion Brand Homespun, doubled, with some lavender sport weight yarn included, which I have. That might be my best bet. I know it doesn't show too well in this photo - the texture of the yarn is lost in my picture, but this is a closeup of the Homespun:

This shows the ripple in the yarn and the beautiful colors in it too. I find it's not easy to just crochet with, but there's plenty of other ways to use this yarn if you think outside the standard knit/crochet boxes. 

Given some of the other shades in this yarn, I bet if I made another mesh in seafoam green and wove this Barrington color yarn in, it would look stunning. Or do a soft rose mesh. 

Food for thought. 

Paper Beads!

Yay, I've made paper beads! This was quite fun. I like making beads and doing jewelry (although I haven't been doing as much of it lately) because this is something that can be worn in hot weather such as we have a lot of in Florida. Crochet is very fun, but here in the sunny South it's often too hot to wear crocheted items.

So here are the beads I made this past weekend:

And here's the technique I used to make the beads...

It's actually very easy. Admittedly mine are not as perfect as Lindsey's but they'll get better as I make more. I am running low on bead ends, but I don't necessarily have to use bead ends every time I make these.

I have tried making other beads with different paper, and glazing them with clear nail polish. They are drying at home, and I haven't had a chance to get a photo of them yet. I must admit - I like the ones shown above better. I like the quality of the paper, I like the embossed finish better than the clear nail polish, and I like the silver bead ends I used.

I decided to use two of the smaller red ones as accent beads on a fat necklace I have...

Kinda cute. Gives a slightly feminine touch to the fat Thor's hammer! LOL!

Yarns

Here's a stash buster project I've started on - partially to burn up some cheap yarn I have, and to practice the chevron stitch I've just learned:

The thing is, the red yarn and the variegated yarn here are Craft Smart yarns, bought at Michaels craft stores. I gotta say - this yarn feels like SANDPAPER. It's SO scratchy and rough! There is nothing soft about it!

I'm hoping that I can wash this with some fabric softener and it will feel a lot better; I know I had some good luck on that front with Red Heart Super Saver yarn, which also feels very rough. I made a mesh market bag with some of their deep red Claret color yarn, and with Red Heart, their dark colors are often very scratchy. Black is the worst. Well, I tossed that bag in the wash with some fabric softener, and the difference was amazing.

The pink yarn in this project is Red Heart Super Saver, and it's not too bad as far as roughness is concerned. I made a scarf with some of this, as well as some black RHSS. I've used the scarf all winter long and it's held up well, it's not too scratchy, and it has some nice drape to it (but I did make the scarf in a mesh pattern, with a slightly larger hook than is normally used with this yarn, and this gives the work some nice drape). I'm not sure if I want to continue using this pink yarn with the Craft Smart for this; perhaps I could use the pink RHSS for something else?

Well, RHSS is cheap enough yarn; if I need more hot pink I can get some.

I did find a new favorite yarn: Bernat Super Value yarn. I'm doing this with a couple of colors I found:

It's sooooooo soft and buttery. I love this yarn. This may be my go-to yarn from now on.

New Craft Blog!

HERE is a new craft blog I'll have to put into my blog roll when I get home....

In The Works....

I worked on this blanket today...I have a LOT of rows to go...

And I do mean A LOT. But methinks the colors look nice. :)

I have noticed that a lot of people think that this stitch is Navajo crochet, saying "oh we used to do a lot of this in the 1070s" - but it's not the same thing, from what I can tell. Navajo seems to involve doing rows of single crochet, cutting the yarn and finishing off at the end of every row, and adding a new row of yarn each row, instead of doing a turning chain and continuing with the next row.

That's not what I'm doing here. I'm doing 4 chain stitches, and on the 5th stitch I connect to the previous row with a single crochet. So my scarves and anything else I make with this stitch are mostly chain stitches, not sc.

So no, what I'm doing is not Navajo. It's Joseph's Coat, after Joseph's Coat of Many Colors.

EDIT May 20

This past weekend, I did more rows on this. Now it's this far along:

Still plugging. It is really getting some weight to it now, and is more blanket-like. I do have to admit that I wish I'd made the original chain longer, like about 350 stitches or more. Maybe the next one I do, I'll make it longer.

3 Joseph's Coat Scarves

I really like doing this simple, simple stitch. I made these three scarves, but the neon one on the right I might continue to add rows to, and make it a shawl or even an afghan.