One Skein and Under Wonders

Here is where I think I should link to same favorite projects to make with scraps of yarns, quick things to make and items to make with gorgeous super nice lusciuous (expensive) yarn:

First, a coed perfect little thing to keep the beer warm:

*Girl on the rocks made this really nice pattern for a cabled KING COZY; as well as these other cool quick ideas:

One time I had made some really cool fingerless mittens from a felted sweater, but didn't take the time to create a tutorial. Thank you Girl on the Rocks!

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The yarn they sold is mostly the acrylic stuff that I'm not too crazy about. However, they did carry a fun skein of camoflage-colored variegated yarn by Red Heart. I thought that I could have fun making the girls little fingerless gloves from these. They were really into Avril Lavigne, and gloves with the camoflage colors could be something cheap and fun to keep my fingers busy while hanging with Heidi for many marathon sit and chats about stuff that we do on my visits with her.

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Those gloves came out really cool. They were fun to knit up and all the girls liked them.

So this year, when I found the camoflage-variegated wool from Patons (color: Forest #77014), it was like, what could I make and felt for the kids and how could I play with this? So I'm swatching and felting while I come up with ideas.

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Robin and I dug out her Barbie knitting machine and used up a whole roll of the Red Heart acrylic stuff to make a long tube. I plan to make it into a snake, fill it up and use it has a "hot buddy" for colds, sore muscles and gentle heat padding thing.

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I FOUND a great site that you can actually learn to make a granny square from.

Swatching Paton's New Wool in FOREST

Book/Blog / Podcast Mentions: Creative Crochet Book;

Question:

Granny Square Afghan

Finally, I have started my granny square afghan. It's based on the classic scrap craft granny square aghans that the bohemian hippy cool ladies made when I was a little girl in the early 70s.

The colors I've dug up from my stash convinced me it was time to get this project maybe started. My stash had this gypsy feel - alot of these rich colors, mixtures of wools and hand-dyed fibers, along with some funky old sparkly Red Heart acrylic from the 70s that I had thrifted.

After getting away from yarns and wools this summer (yes, Faith, we do have our seasons in Hollywood, CA), I dug out old boxes and bags of odd balls and leftover yarns and a J-Hook and just started to crochet around the end of September. Just simple 4-round granny squares to get my fingers warming up into working with yarn again.

This is such great use of this old stash while playing with the colors. The yarns kept urging me on as I combined the colors on each square.

Cleck on any square to see larger images

Well. So. Piles of the finished squares started to build up out of categories of colors and a theme developed of blackish squares, goldish squares, reddish and brownish tones, blues and squares with little accents of greys and greens. I threw the squares out on my bed and started to sort them out and lay out an afghan row by row.

After I had about 140 squares completed (pretty easy at 10 to 20 per day, I could see a pretty nice first four layers and realized that I had used up most of the blacks and browns type of squares and this was what I wanted the theme to be in the overall coloring - dark, rich, browns, deep dark reds, black with "accents" of the off colors and variegated wools

Then they were laid out while I arranged four more rows, stiched them together and attached them to make eight rows completed which I hope to finish next week.

I'm also swatching, felting and playing with some Army Camoflage yarn. It's pretty fun and I'll post some pictures and talk about this next week.

Blog Mentions: I became a little "homesick" for knitting with the Stitch N Bitch gals. It's been well over a year and I started to catch up a little on their blogging. It was at SNB that I learned to granny square from Faith, mentioned above. I was a knitter since I was eleven, but never crocheted - that was my sister's specialty and I somehow thought of myself more special as a "knitter" so I never wanted to acknowledge the crochet world.

Finally, around 2002, I asked my sister to teach me to crochet. I was hooked.

Then, when the little one was born, I realized the biggest advantage to crocheting around kids and cats: no worries about dropped stitches. So I had set aside my knitting needles for those early years and started to crochet.

After struggling with learning the granny square from books and the internet, I saw Faith with her little baggie of granny squares she was working on and asked her to please teach me the Granny Square. It took all of 5 minutes teaching and one hour practice there and I had it! Maybe that's why it's called a "granny" square - cause you need your granny (or a friend) to show you how.

Podcast Mentions: CreativeMomPodcast. Amy is a mother of two boys, a fantastic essayist and you don't need to be a fiber artist, knitter, mom or whatever to enjoy her. She wanders through the wanders through the funnest sites for music, books, sketching and artistic ideas and provides fun little Prompts that I love. Check her out, she's on iTunes too.