Someone Must Have Died or How I Came to Own All This Yarn.

Let's give an inventory, shall we?

7 purple mohair (97%)
15 army green mohair (97%)
10 purple/blue/green mohair (97%)
9 pink/blue/gray mohair (97%)
7 camel mohair (97%)
4 red mohair (97%)
1 buff mohair (97%)
1 pink/orange/purple mohair (97%)
7 off white nubby 100% wool
18 red wool eyelash* 100% wool
13 dark teal eyelash* 100% wool
1 red shoelace-weave 100% wool
1 dark teal shoelace-weave 100% wool
4 light teal shoelace-weave 100% wool
1 dark teal 50% alpaca/50%wool blend
1 lime alapaca/wool blend
6 black/blue 100% wool
2 bone cotton/silk/linen nubby
5 hot pink cotton nubby
2 black traditional eyelash
1 light pink traditional eyelash
1 light blue cotton and eyelash

All skeins of European provenance and 50g weight. Mostly French and German.
Total skeins= 118
Average cost of skein (conservative) $8.00
Total cost if purchased new and separately= $944.

What do you think I paid?



*Not eyelash, exactly, but not normal, either. It's like shoelace woven on one side, and loops on the other side.

Providential Oddities

This afternoon I had a meeting at my local senior center, to get trained on how to ask companies to donate to one of the organizations that funds my workplace.

As I was leaving, I saw a table of women crocheting. Something overcame me, and I sat down with them and just started chatting. I hauled my hook out of my purse* and asked if they had any extra yarn to play with. For about 20 minutes I learned about these ladies and their various crochet meet ups. Monday and Wednesday 1-3 p.m. at the senior center and fourth Thursdays at 6 p.m. at the IHop. They showed me how to properly (EW THERE'S A CICADA!) start your first row and assured me that my meathook-like grasp was a perfectly fine way to hold a hook. They called my technique dainty, in fact. I lamented my problems with following patterns, and they were excited at my freeform approach. It has a name! It's called modular crochet**. I told them about my bag making and my felting, and they absolutely lit up with joy.

I put in a volunteer application, and I hope to stop back by if I'm ever in Durham on a Monday or Wednesday from 1-3. Thanks Lorlene, Hazel and Miss Mary Rita.

I miss my grandma.

* I know. They laughed at me, too.
**Hilarious URL!

Bossy Boss Boss

Ahem, I mean manager. Anyhoo, she had surgery last week, so I made her a glasses case. Periwinkle and purple are her fave colors, so that's what I went with. Note to self: tight stitches to begin with = less shrinkage and felting = bad. Also, next time I refrain from any kind of monogram. My skills are less than lacking.

Market bag

It's passed already. Just needed to get out of bed, step in the shower, put on some clothes and hightail it over to my coffee shop.

Yesterday I finished this hot pink market bag I'd put on the back burner for a while. It took just an extremely boring medical interpreter training to motivate me!! Filling in vocab sheets when the trainer a) can't train to save her life and b) is wrong three times a minute and c) takes forever and rambles serves to really get that hook flying.

So here it is in all its dubitable* glory.

I'll call the kids shortly, now that the moment of woe has passed.

*I love making words from other words.

Accomplishment

Y'all? I finished the bag and it is SO FREAKING CUTE (if I do say so).

I'm going to email Emily and tell her she's not allowed on the blog until her birthday.

LOOK!




And then a closeup:

EMILY DON'T LOOK!!! Blah Blah Blah Half-Double Crochet

EMILY DON'T LOOK!!!














Ok, it's safe.





Emily, go home. Scat!



I've been making what I hope will turn out to be a fab felted bag for my sweet Emily's birthday. I wonder how old she is turning this year? Hm. Good question. Eh, doesn't really matter. I was just wondering.



Anyhoo, the bag's mass (as you can see above) is row after row after row of single crochets, which gets really old really quickly. Mind you, I began this bag just a week ago at Michele's going away party. (Sniff!) So that's pretty good progress. I have at least a week to go on it (depending on whether I actually get this to Emily on time or not!), so I think I'm good.

So this morning I got out of the house (for once!!) and went to a local coffee shop over on 9th street. I played around a little with making some flowers from my favorite (and only) crochet instructional book. That necessitated actually following a pattern a learning a few new stitches. The pattern following got quite a bit off target, but I am really glad I know a bit more about the stitches versus actual terminology. There are some basic stitches I apparently didn't know, yet thought I did. I was doing something entirely different. Ah well. Who knows what those stitches are called?! (Sorry, Jamie. I did wrong by you...next time I see you I'll teach you right.)

Back on track. The flower's a bit poofy for my taste--supposedly it's a chrysanthemum. The yarn is thrifted, and really really rough wool. I wonder if it's meant for tapestry? I'm pretty sure that felting it will take very little time relative to the body of the bag. I think I'll felt the flower apart from the bag and then hook it on somewhere.

The rest of the day today:
Laundry
Lemon Pound Cake
Pick up car from oil change
Maria's house for an equinox party. With a bonfire. That's going to rock.

I haven't had a lot to say recently, have I? There's no real reason for that. I'm just plugging along, enjoying life for the most part, and thinking about the fact that three of my friends had babies in the space of 1.5 weeks. I've only met one of them so far (so cute!!), but I hope to meet the other one real soon. The third lives kind of far away, so I won't meet her for some time.

Since I put together my grow light setup, I've been getting up a little before 6 every morning. It's nice to have a cup of coffee outside at that hour. I sit and listen to the birds; I've finally been hearing Roo-Roo the Rooster, who lives across town a bit, as an illegal pet. He's sweet, and very vocal. I'm also going to bed really early too. Except for last night, when I was up until midnight. I think I slept too much the night before!

I've finished a couple of neato crochet projects. One was the plastic-bag doormat. Note to self and others--use bags that have mostly the same weight to them. If you have particularly strong bags, cut the plarn WAY thinner than for a typical grocery bag. The other project is a jellyfish, which I think I probably mentioned somewhere else, but can't be bothered to look it up and see. I like this one where he seems to be swimming. (On my unmade bed!) And this one is what he looked like after I decided that he needed to have a heftier head.

I had my little nephew LiLi (Liam) in mind when I whomped that baby up. Now I need two more projects for 10 year old boys. Can't leave the others out, you see. I have no idea what they might like, though. It's also slightly complicated in that I still refuse to use patterns. Cobby Cobberson (Conor) loves soft things, so that's a factor. Bubbina (Ian) is a harder nut to crack. He likes science. Actually, both of the twins are really into nature. Maybe I'll make an caterpillar emerging from a cocoon or something for one of them.

Any other idea? What would 10 year old boys like? A nose with boogers?