You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2008.
Happy Halloween!
I’m at the department today so won’t be wearing a costume. Add a few Halloween hair clips and spider socks to this photo and that’s my ‘dress-up’ for the day!
I made these wristwarmers in between studying just in time for today. I only had one ball of this black yarn so I split it in half and then started! Trying a new (stretchier!) bind-off I used more yarn than I expected so the second warmer has about an inch of some icky dk black yarn double stranded. But, I love them! They’re the “jiffy armwarmers” also available as a ravelry download! I’ve already been asked to make a few for friends.
I was browsing on ravelry in between world series innings and thesis chapters to stay awake (I’m in the UK!) and found the best project ever- a knitted Phanatic!
Giolou even photographed him posed in his characteristic actions (check out the photo of him on one knee and looking upward).
I am in awe of the fantastic detail!
“Highlights Of (the) Week”, or “HOW I remind myself that life is good!”
It’s 12:45am and I’m waiting for the opening game of the World Series to start. Being 5 hours ahead, I’ve stayed up studying and drinking jasmine tea. Apparently, in large quantities Jasmine is a stimulant- although I can’t tell if it’s the tea or my excitement at seeing baseball (and my wonderful home team!) on tv here in Scotland that’s making me slightly shakey.
Anyway, thinking through the past week, I decided to post a few of my Frugal/Creative highlights.
1. Receiving two new (free) crochet books, as blogged about previously.
2. Finding perfectly ripe bananas at the grocer’s for 25p a Lb. I spend 99p and left with 13 delicious bananas which are now all chopped up in the freezer waiting for smoothies and baking!
3. Receiving a large roll of Batting/Wadding for quilting from freecycle and enjoying the walk to unexplored parts of my city as I went to collect it.
4. When my partner managed to find a very nice pair of work trousers at the charity shop.
5. Partner’s aunt stopped by with a large tray of eggs she had received from a friend and shared with us.
6. Not really frugal or creative, but seeing mention of my baseball team in the local metro newspaper!
GO PHILLIES!
I never actually got around to crocheting as I has planned yesterday.
However, I followed my urges to create something quickly gratifying and useful. Before I realised it, I was raiding my fabric stash and positioning different colours on top of a pair of most-disassembled mens corduroy pants/trousers.
There was a small part of me that said I should go to the fabric store to get something fantastic to line the bag and decorate the front. That suggestion was quickly deflected by a comment about buying fabric at the charity shop. A moment later, I told both voices to hush down and knew that I would just be creative with what I had instead!
It was a dreary, rainy day and I wanted something comforting- this led me to reach for my favourite colours, including green and turquoise…after playing around for a bit, I created this design!
Quite new to the applique deal, I decided against tucking the edges in- figuring it would give a more textured, natural look anyway. At least for the tree. I used interfacing on the backs of the pieces in hopes that it will stop them from fraying. Once the tree trunk was sewn around the edges I wanted to add some more texture and found that the most satisfying part of the process! It was also a learning experience seeing how slow to go in certain curves and how different stitches (I used the ever so slightly zig zagged straight stitch) change the look.
It is large enough to carry a big notebook (tall enough for a UK notebook and also wide enough for a US one!) and several other things. When I finished sewing the strap in yesterday I was giddy beyond belief because I knew that it was a new bag for me to love. It fills the void of “every day bag”…Also, it was nice to have made myself a gift for all my hard thesis work!
I took it for a wander today and as if in response to the bag’s arrival the weather was sunny!
This past week has been a rough one thesis-wise. I’m just getting to the stage where everything is modification, expansion or clarification of what is already written. This means that there are no exciting “eureka” moments where I design a new chapter format or come up with a fantastic idea. As a result of this, and simply over-work, I had been feeling pretty dumb. Luckily, I realised (with the help of PhD discussion boards on Ravelry) that I’m not the only one to experience this. So last night I made a deal with myself: If I could finish the work before going to bed, then I could sleep in today!
I only managed to stay in bed until 9:00 but I gave myself napping privileges for the day. Besides a bit of resting, I’m going to reward myself for my work with some crocheting! For the past two weeks I haven’t really allowed myself to sit down with a hook and yarn because I was so worried about what needed to be done. Today, I am going to work on a jacket I’ve been thinking about for ages and swatch something from my new crochet book, Blueprint Crochet.
For the past year or so I’ve been clicking open emails and answering surveys to earn points. I had been saving for a year of National Geographic but that reward has been discontinued. Amazingly, the replacement is the ability to order any book on Amazon! They each have different point redemption values, but besides that it’s all free! I knew that I really wanted Blueprint Crochet and then checked out my Ravelry queue to see which other book had the most patterns bookmarked. I chose Not Your Mama’s Crochet as the second book. They both arrived yesterday- a timing I’m attributing to karma!
So…with my lesson learned (to allow myself some crochet time in weeks of heavy work) I am rewarding myself today with lots of tea, crocheting and (maybe) some chapter editing.
Wandering around on Ravelry I came across an amazing crochet version of a currently popular knitting pattern.
Staceydaze interpreted the piece beautifully and has written about the process here. The original pattern had been in my queue more for inspiration than to attempt knitting it any time soon but her crochet version is now at the top of my priorities! Visit the post and tell her how wonderful a job she’s done!
It’s October so I figured it was time to re-cap the summer wedding season and all the ways we crafted our caring instead of diving into consumerism. First, I made my sister her garter using a very old pattern which doesn’t seem to be available anymore. If you’re on Ravelry, here’s the project link including my modifications.
We also made their wedding gifts and forgot to photograph them, so I had to wait for my sister to get around to it!
The coasters are from a fantastic tutorial that is easy once you figure it out and yields beautiful results! We made eight coasters so they would have plenty when friends come around. Here’s a larger photo of the table runner on my flickr account. Missing from the picture are two crocheted mesh cotton shopping bags and fair trade Oxfam incense.
After failing at two attempts to make an octagonal potholder from the Tightwad Gazette (The batting wasn’t thick enough and the final product ended up strangely curled as a result of my beginner quilting skills) I made this one up. Taking a large piece of newspaper I traced a very large oven mit and cut four pieces from some thick cotton fabric (the zip-off bottoms of trousers that were never worn as much as the shorts) and two sets of batting (wadding in the UK). I then sandwhiched the batting between two pieces of fabric, right sides out, and crisscrossed with the machine to quilt them together. After doing the same for the other half, I pinned everything wrong side together, sewed closely to the edge and popped in a hanging tab, turned it right side out and viola! It ended up smaller than I thought it would and next time I’ll make the template even larger, but it is still useable!
My sister was also amazingly crafty for her wedding- making beautiful fan style programs, painting her own aisle runner, sewing men’s ties, (machine) embroidering gift bags, bridesmaids gifts and tons of other beautiful looking things! She also made the earrings for the bridesmaids to wear during the ceremony!
My Bridesmaid dress was such delicate material that it quickly gained water and birch-beer stains throughout the reception and needed to be dry cleaned, so I left it in the U.S. with my parents.
After seeing photos of my sister’s wedding, friends in Scotland almost demanded that I wore that dress to our friend’s wedding in August. I told them were it remained and wondered if I could wear a black dress I had received in a freecycle bag a while back. At first, it seemed as though black would be fine for the reception and I searched for colourful shoes at the charity shops to colorize the outfit. I found two pairs for £1 each and was going to build the colour scheme around them- either borrowing or making necklaces and crocheting a shawl. The shoes I picked up were blue and pink pairs, but here’s a polyvore clip from when I was working through how to accessorise stylishly yet without buying anything new (aside from £1 shoes that is!).
I then got nervous about wearing black to the wedding after seeing how touchy my sister got about white and off-white being mentioned so I decided to play it safe. I priced fabric for making the infinity dress but only saw one colour that I sort-of liked and it was £8 a metre…That night, I went through town on the way home to top-up my phone and saw a beautiful colour dress in a charity shop window! Hoping I waited at the door for the shop to open at 9am Saturday. Incidentally, it is the same shop I stood waiting to open when I bought the dish set! When I tried it on, I was a bit disappointed that I would have to alter it in some way- I was looking for an easy fix. Then, I reminded myself that I can only learn if I try and, I bought the dress.
I had planned on simply taking the shoulders up, but realised that the armpit space would be too tight and that I would have to raise the shoulders half way as well as take the fabric in at the sides. The upper two photos show the un-altered dress and what I planned to do, the image on the right is after alteration (more fitted bust and waist area, and the lower picture was taken at the hostel before we left for the reception (they got married at the registry earlier that day). In a bit of a panic the week before the wedding, I realised that we only had a little black bag in the house- obviously rejected since the black dress was vetoed. I went, once more, to the charity shops looking at every one in town searching in vain for an appropriate colour, style and size (to fit a camera, dancing shoes and an epi-pen!). Finally, I had a very “duh!” moment and just grabbed a blue men’s shirt, came home and made a bag! This is the tutorial I used for the bag and definitely want to make more. I embroidered a beaded flower/plant and lined it with a white shirt in my stash to give a bit of a contrast. The lining also helped it match my shawl and shoes. The shawl I wore was started in June, ignored when I was in the U.S. and then used to tie my white shoes into the outfit. The shawl pattern is from this site.
