Works In Progress
Day 5- still haven't had a cigarette..
For Christmas my mom sent me some awesome, kick ass books. The sequels to Stitch 'N Bitch by Debbie Stoller; Stitch 'N Bitch Nation and The Happy Hooker (all about crochet). So I was asked by someone to make a hat for them, I found what I thought was a great pattern from The Happy Hooker. Well it seemed simple enough, but no matter how many times I had to frog it, it still wasn't coming out right. I had to start over about 3 or 4 times and this is the first result:
It's a solid brown with a really cool, retro brown and blue varegated yarn as an accent. Unfortunately the varegated yarn just didn't stand out like I'd hoped, but you can see a little bit of it in the striping accent of the hat. Also, it kept turning out really big and really loose. You use a double-crochet stitch to make it, so that's why it's so dang loose!
This next one is a reverse of the one above. You can see the same varegated yarn as the main color and I used the brown as the accent stripe, which again, you can hardly see. This one also was crocheted tighter (just held onto my yarn and PULLED!) so it fit a bit tighter as well.
Above is my current project, this is a knitted afghan I'm going to give to my neice. It's actually a super-simple pattern I found in Creative Knitting magazine (I need to find the month, but I think it was July 2006). I think they listed it as a "back to college" type gift and you can make it in the school's colors. I just picked two pinks and ran with it. I think this is going to be my favorite for a while.
I also received my Lion Brand catalog in the mail yesterday. I'm super stoked about it, lots of kick ass patterns and really neat yarns. There's a great throw in there, but the only problem is that it's made from a yarn I hate with a passion- Homespun.
About 2 years ago, I had received a super-easy pattern from my aunt for a shawl/poncho and she used the Homespun as well. Well, this stuff is CRAP I tell you! From the first minute I started to knit, it started to shed all over the place. Oh and forget it with the tassels! They shed so bad when I wore the thing to work there was black fuzz everywhere from the bathroom to my desk. I left an embarrassing trail everywhere. So I thought I'd give it a wash to see if that would help, I almost killed the dryer!
So I'm going to see if I can find an alternate yarn to use and make the same throw, but never again will I touch the Homespun.
I'm getting so excited about all my knitting as of late. I also ordered a book called Big Girl Knits. It's received a lot of good reviews, but also a lot of complaints that the patterns are "nothing new." Now, to me that doesn't matter, I'm just glad to finally have a book and a way to make something for ME. It also, I hear, has a section to help big girls like myself adjust regular patterns to their own bodies. I hope this is true because there's a sweater from Stitch 'N Bitch that I've been dying to make for years now, but haven't because I'm afraid I won't get the shaping right and it'll end up a big potato sack. I'm crossing my fingers and will update y'all on that later.
For now, back to work.