Crocheted Projects

I made this for my mom for her birthday in 1988. It didn't quite get made in time; I think I sent it to her in August sometime. I was really happy with how it turned out, although I used four ply yarn and a G hook, so it's almost like armor plate. Just your standard granny square afghan, nothing amazing. It's a wonder I didn't get carpal tunnel finishing it, as my hands have not done well with thread work or even complicated yarn work, but the granny squares seem to be a breeze. Guess that's why arthritic grannies like `em. :-)

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Okay, okay, one more afghan. For now. I saw this pattern in a craft magazine shown to me by a friend of mine who I am proud to say I personally infected with the Quilting Virus. She's currently hooked completely and does beautiful work. Anyhow, she showed me a quilting project in a December holiday craft magazine that she liked, and this afghan caught my eye in the same magazine. It was red, green, and white in the magazine, obviously -- the center flower is supposed to be a poinsettia, I guess. But I'm not that fond of that color scheme, so I substituted dark purple and a forest green for the more yellowish holiday green, which show up better on the close-up. It went together very quickly.

I joined these squares by a stair-step method that minimizes the number of tail ends that must be worked in. I always use this method to join squares, and I'm happy to share it.

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I had wanted to make a sweater for some time, and the patterns would never work out right. After two tries at a published pattern, I decided to just chuck it all and make a raglan myself from the directions in Maggie Righetti's book "Crocheting in Plain English." I highly recommend the book -- and the sweater directions are perfectly understandable -- they are at the very end of the book. No relying on matching someone else's gauge, no guessing at the yarn -- you just make your own gauge patch and off you go! And you're assured that the finished garment will fit!

Planning it was fairly easy -- I took measurements for the yoke off of a jersey shirt that fit me well, and tapering the sleeves was easy. They are made with dc's, and I found that doing one normal row, and one row with a decrease on each end worked out perfectly. Try that, it should work just great.

Anyhow, I'm just really proud of this thing, and now I'm planning on what to do for everyone I know -- looks like sweaters for gifts this winter holiday! If you're interested in a pattern, there isn't one so much as a set of guidelines.

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These are both for friends of mine who have had kids. The mint colored one is for Ryan Scott Mayers, and the variegated one is for Thomas Casteel-Six. Now, I just have to mail them -- but at least I finished them in time! I've always heard these stories of people finishing baby gifts as the kid enters high school.

I love the variegated yarn I used for the second one, but I have no clue where I can get it since the place I found it closed down. I think it's called Canadiana, and it's just wonderful -- soft and easy to work with. The mint stuff was a nightmare -- great for baby gifts, but it had a yarn ply, a nylon ply to make it go bumpy, and two silky thread plys. Working with it drove me nuts, but it came out nice.

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I love the pattern for this afghan. It's a quilt pattern called "Interlocking Squares" and you can find the layout for it here. (It's a public-domain quilt pattern that's been around since the 1800's, so it's not copyrighted. In a quilt, it's usually set on point.) It's a marvelous pattern for quilting, knitting/double-knitting, crocheting, filet crochet and colorwork, and it's very adaptable even to cross-stitching. I'm crazy about it, if you can't tell. Anyhow, I made an afghan out of this pattern by using three tr's for each square. You could use two doubles, or one single per square. You can knit it by knitting the red squares as well as the black to add a diamond or other shape in the large white cross-shaped areas and avoid long strands. It'd make a knockout double-knit bedspread for those of you who have that kind of patience to finish a slow project. To crochet or quilt, don't bother with the red squares; it looks classier without them.

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I love this interlocking spiderweb pattern. I figured it'd be fun to try a shawl using that pattern, and it was. I made it for a friend of mine, Sidra, who is to the right in this picture. It was fast and fun, and not hard at all. The shawl is black, which is why I opted to put up a B&W picture of the thing.

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And yet another baby sweater for the newborn son of a coworker. The pictured baby is named, unsurprisingly, Muir. I was going to do it in baby pastels, but I had this Caron Wintuk that I fell in love with and never did anything with, so I decided to use it. It's just a gorgeous colorway, and a relatively soft acrylic yarn. Baby sweaters are always best made out of something machine-washable.

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The best thing about making baby sweaters and blankets is that they go so fast. Normally a sweater, even a crocheted one, is a long project. Crocheted, they can take weeks. Knitted, months. But for a baby? A weekend project! It's lovely.

You'll notice that the jacket is very long; I figured it would double for a little wrap. Pop the kid into the sweater, flip up the bottom, and you have a combination jacket and blanket.

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As I am currently studying Welsh, I spent the month of August 2005 there, mostly up north. During this time, I spent four lovely days at the Eisteddfod and a week in the home of a lovely Welsh couple, Eirian and Meredydd Jones. As a thank you for their hospitality and warmth, I opted to make an afghan for them.

For some strange reason, I got a kink for a ripple afghan and had to make one for them. I knew that I wanted to make it out of Lion Brand Homespun, but I'd wanted to make it sage green, oatmeal, and pumpkin. Unfortunately, Lion Brand does not make a pumpkin or rust-colored Homespun yarn, so I had to improvise. I'm happy with how it turned out, but still wish that I could have found the appropriate rust red.

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More with the Welsh ... Like the five-petaled rose with England, the shamrock with Ireland, and the thistle with Scotland, the daffodil is a traditional symbol of Wales. Along with the above afghan for Eirian and Mered, I'd wanted to make an afghan of some sort for my tutor-turned-friend, Paula. However, with this one, I decided I wanted to give it a Welsh flair. I did some searching online for daffodil patterns but wasn't fond of what I found. I only found one, and it was really nothing but a granny square afghan with a daffodil sewn to the center of every other square. Not too exciting.

So I decided to try coming up with a pattern of my own, one that would be a bit more unique and that would take advantage of the six-sided symmetry of a daffodil to create an afghan that would tile hexagonal finished "squares." The result is the hexagon at right.

I wish I could tell you how many skeins of yarn it would take to make a typical afghan, but the reality is that I just don't know as I haven't finished the thing yet. What I can tell you is that I've bought three skeins of Caron Simply Soft Brites Lemonade color, which you can get in almost any yarn catalogue or craft store. I've gotten slightly more than 15 daffodils out of one skein. A couple dense skeins of almost anything else in no-dye-lot forest green and white should do you for the rest of it. Worsted weight and an H hook, and the finished hexagon was 11" across for me, at its widest.

The pattern can be found here.

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And it's done. Finally. In a few days, probably this Friday, it'll be off in a box to Wales.

Using the above pattern, this afghan took three skeins of Caron Simply Soft Brites in Lemonade, and three skeins each of Red Heart in Forest Green and White, although I think four skeins each of Caron Simply Soft in Dark Sage and White would have been good as well, and softer. You'll see that the hexagons don't lie as flat as I would have liked, and I think that since the Caron is a slightly thinner yarn than the Red Heart, using that yarn would have avoided this problem.

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For a lovely, patient friend of mine. I asked her, "What sort of stuff do you like?" Her reply was, "Pink and leopard-skin, because I have problems." :-) She added that she likes things that say, "Girl space! Get out!" I adore the hell out of her.

So now, July 2006, she has a big ol' box o' girl cooties trucking its way up to her. I hope she loves it. I used a doily pattern from an Elizabeth Hiddleson booklet, and bought not a whole lot of worsted weight acrylic to make it. It's lacy enough that it doesn't take much yarn. What you don't see is that I also used some incredibly girly pink confetti yarn to make two fluffy, multicolored rings around the interior of each of the white stars by simply chain-stitching around the posts of the triple stitches twice. Eew! More girl cooties!

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A while back, I saw a scarf like this posted to the LiveJournal community crochetcrochet, in colors that reminded me of `mint chocolate chip ice cream -- mint green and chocolate brown, of course. I loved the gingham-y looking check pattern, and I determined that I'd make one at some point. I don't believe I did it the same way that the original poster to the LJ community did it; I got the impression at the time that she used triple-crochet whereas this one uses double, but I'm not sure.

I decided that it would come with me on a cruise that I went on with my mom in October 2007, a Carnival Mexican Riviera cruise. (It's been an ambition of mine for years to take my mom on a cruise.) I was originally going to make it out of navy blue and lime, but when the time came, I couldn't find the blasted lime yarn, so light blue it was.

So a lot of pleasant memories of blended pink drinks with paper parasols, sitting on deck with my mom, and picture-taking are wrapped up in this scarf, which I gave to my roommate when I got back.

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A favorite when I saw it on the Livejournal Crochet community -- made with a few thousand skeins of Lion Brand Homespun and an N hook. My roommate was amused that it was USC colors, as she works there.

For my mom for Christmas 2007. And I have no clue what that coinlike shape on the afghan is in the picture. A lens artifact, I suppose.

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When I went on the aforementioned cruise with my mom, we saw those little purses that are somewhat trendy nowdays, made of candywrappers, in a touristy little shop in Cabo San Lucas. They reminded me of the gumwrapper chains that I used to make when I was little (I had quite a long one), and I decided I wanted to learn how to make the things and see what I could come up with. This knitting tote was the result, perfect for sock knitting.

I googled for directions and found out how to make them, but disliked the straight bottom of the standard bag. I figured that there had to be a way to make it oval on the bottom. You can see that I made a crocheted oval for the bottom out of sock yarn, poked holes in the points with a Dremel, and crocheted the thing in place. I then made a liner with a robust, stretchy, twill fabric of sorts, crocheted uniformly around the top edge, and crocheted that in place against the edging on the top of the paper exterior. There was very little pattern to this thing; it really did amount to "do whatever works," so I'm afraid I can't be much clearer.

Appropriately enough for a knitting tote, the bag itself is made of chopped-up Patternworks catalogues.

My only real regret about this thing is that I forgot to sew a little pocket in place in the pink liner. Oh, well. *sigh*

The handles were a nice find on a secondhand handbag that I grabbed at the local Goodwill and cannibalized for the handles. They are just what I'd wanted: leatherette, brown, rolled, with flat-bottomed rings. Perfect. (You can see them in View 7.) I've also kept the rest of the old Goodwill rescue bag as it has a nice liner in it that will likely come in handy for a future project of some sort. This tote was finished December 16, 2007.

Interestingly enough, I've since discovered that paper objects like this are a major genre in what is called "prison art," which I find interesting and, in retrospect, perfectly reasonable.

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I had a little fun with the loop stitch. :-) Also, I love saying "bun muppet." Seriously. See if you can frown and say this.

A standard bun snoodish thing crocheted over a large-sized (though still way too small for me) ouchless cloth-covered elastic. The other views give you an idea of how it's put together. You can have tons of fun with the basic idea. Cat and dog faces would be cute. Baseballs and basketballs for sports fans. Hell, your imagination's the only limit.

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