So - very - close - to - done

I'm almost done with the semester and very, very excited. It's hard to believe I'm a quarter of the way done with my MFA already. I'm afraid crochet has been backburnered (Linguist? Is that a word?) in favor of papers and such, but I've brought some with me today and will be enjoying our wintery day by sitting outside and crocheting either circles for the rug or the top I'm doing freeform. I just finished my papers for my last class with two hours to spare and can't start on the last task of the year - a take home exam - until tonight. Sigh of lovely, lovely relief.

Last Friday I had a reading, did I mention that? I may post the piece here, but I may wait until I have a chance to workshop it. We'll see. In the meantime, hope all is going well for all of you...

The end of NaNovember and a return to our irregularly scheduled programming

Hello again! I apologize for the continuted radio silence in late November. For a little while there, I was behind on NaNoWriMo, and playing mad catch up, but then I just got caught up in the story. I ended up hitting something like 59K (for those who don't know, the challenge is to write 50K in a month), and I have three scenes remaining until the end. I'll admit I broke one of the primary NaNo rules this year. The idea is to start something from scratch, but I was already 53K into a novel, so I started from sort-of-scratch at the start of the second half. If you count the 1500 words I added to the first half during the course of the month, I'm over 114,000 words and expect I'll break 120,000.

Unfortunately, I've got papers and end of the year school work to knock out, as well as an essay to polish before my reading (eep!) this Friday. My goal will be to finish and give one good revision to the book before my husband arrives for the holidays. He's driving(!) from Buffalo here to Tucson, so his exact arrival isn't firm and won't be until he's on the road really.

In the meantime, I'll be continuing to work on (and trying to post about):

• The Circle Bathroom Rug (Book: Crochet Me)
• A felted hookbook (based on the Lion Brand Yarn website free pattern)
• A felted bag (based on the Uncommon Crochet book's tube bag foundation)
  
• Coasters I'm making... which will be for sale on Etsy, hopefully along with other items (more info soon I hope)
  
• and a top I'm designing.

If the last one works out, I plan to put the pattern up for sale on Etsy as well. My goal in the next few weeks is to strike a good balance between schoolwork and crochet, as well as celebrating my big 3-0 later this week.

Wish me luck!

I'm still here!

I've been caught up in NaNoWriMo goodness lately, as well as schoolwork, but I am still here.
I've been crocheting on four different projects in my bus/waiting/down-time so there will be something new to report soon, with pictures, but in the meantime, I'm caught up on Nano and about to break the 40K word mark! W00t!

Weekend Wonder #17 - Preview

These little lovelies and some of their cousins will be on sale here in the coming weeks, along with other surprises! More pictures of Blueberries and Cream (above) and Bumble Bee (below) available from my Flickr page.

Best Laid Plans

Hello, all.
Today is Monday, November tenth, and in less than 36 hours I will be happily visiting Mr. Man in New York. Woot!
Well, now that we got that out of the way...
I will not be blogging while I'm in Buffalo, but I will be crocheting and writing (NaNoWriMo time again!). I've scheduled a special short Weekend Wonder to give you a preview of some things percolating in my mind and growing from my crochet hook of late.
Hope all is well, and to any Marines reading this - Happy Brithday!
Remember to thank a vet tomorrow!

Weekend Wonder #16 - Let's Call it a Poncho

Blog Readers, let me introduce you to this week's FO and Weekend Wonder - the Desert Poncho [Ravelry] from Kim Werker's "It's a Shawl and a Poncho" pattern in Teach Yourself to Crochet Visually. First of all, let me say this is a lovely and easy pattern I picked for what could have been the wrong two reasons. (1) Because I was frustrated that the yarn wasn't working for the Strapless Corset pattern (I shall not belabor or link to why, but you can search the blog if you want to), and therefore I was desperate for something simple that would use about the same amount of cotton yarn, and (2) because the girl in the picture looks good wearing it, I mean damn good, never mind that she's a gorgeous busty thing and I'm... not. Fortunately, I think it worked out well in spite of my poor reasoning*.

There are more pictures on Flickr (some of the same on Ravelry), including WIP shots and stitch details.

One detail of note: I think that there’s an error in the pattern or the book’s description of the stitch. If you look closely at the pictures in the book, I think 2 dc should be 3 dc. I did it with 2 even though it didn’t look right; I was 75% done by the time I really looked closely at said picture. It still drapes well and I would have run out of yarn if I’d done it with 3 dc, I'm not complaining, but if I were to make another one... Take that for what it’s worth.

I used almost the full six skeins (Bernat's Organic Cotton), alternating four rows of the main color (Hemp) with two of the variegated (Oasis). The leftover yarn I used to lace the shoulder (lace, like you lace a shoe), which you can see in the details on my Flickr stream. I'm wearing it tonight to go to a reading, so if it wears badly, I'll post that right away.

* I say poor reasoning because (1) I normally advocate for thinking things through, especially when desperate(!), and (2) because choosing to do a pattern based on how good it looks with someone else's body type is normally a surefire recipe for disaster.

Weekend Wonder #15 - Even-more-petite Petite Bijoux Bag

You may remember that a while back I made a petite "Petite Bijoux Bag" (from Sensual Crochet) with the last of the mossy green Bernat bamboo blend yarn left over after my semi-successful moebius shrug. Well, I had an even smaller amount of the colorways of the same yarn that I used for the Girl Chicago scarf: Linen and (light blue?).

Meanwhile, the Petite Petite has been serving as an apple cozy - though it's a little taller than necessary for that purpose. It's perfectly cushy for it though! Well, my housemate saw its cushy greenness hanging in the kitchen and gushed about how soft the material was. So, while she was away this last weekend, I made her a bag of her own.


There are two more pictures on Flickr; they better show the stitch definition and colorwork.

I followed the pattern from memory, roughly gauging how much yarn I had left as I went. When I went about as far up as I thought I could go with the white, I switched to the blue (which was a ball smaller in diameter than a silver dollar) for the double crochet row and the tie - which became two ties because I had enough yarn. I then went around once doing a slip stitch in blue just for contrast (and to use the last of it).

I had to modify the last round - the ripple - because I didn't have enough yarn for the stitch called for (and wasn't ripping back!). But I think it turned out great. You can see above that it's a little smaller than my best-yard-sale-find mug (50 cents!). It just fits a medium organic Gala apple, and she loves it. (An easy gift - this took less than two hours.)