The Apocalypse Continues

2018 has continued to impress me with the sheer number of disasters that have struck. The most recent is that my trusty desktop computer, which has been my solid companion for seven years and several repairs (most recently replacing the RAM a couple of months ago) has finally died. It took a few days but we've managed to rig up my laptop to a monitor and keyboard for use until we are able to replace my desktop. I am clinging to the hope that with the changing of the months - HELLLOOOOOO FEBRUARY! - that things may settle down. 

Alright, thank you for listening to me whine yet again. Enough of that and onto the happy things. 

This month I went on my annual Painting With a Twist trip with my favorite cousin. We went on a Saturday and she choose this picture. It was SO MUCH FUN! We'd done a couple other previously but they were a bit on the little kid side. This time around we were able to schedule a really cool painting called A New Day.

 

I also finally got my grubby paws on a copy of Beetles, Bugs, and Butterflies. It took almost a month after ordering to arrive but it was worth the wait. If you are thinking about getting this book, don't get the Kindle version - wait for the hardcopy, its totally worth it. I never liked amigurumi but this book had me sold from the first time I stumbled across it. What you do is create a little caterpillar, and then the egg sack, and pupae, and the wings to go with him, so he goes through the entire life cycle in a crochet toy. Its modular and very cool. I've loaned the book to someone but I should have it back this weekend and I'll share more about it then. Also, if anyone knows of anything similar please let me know, I'd love to look into it.

In the world of crochet, I started this bulky hat. No pattern, just winging it. I used a double strand of yarn - one a variegated purple and the other solid black RHSS. I like how the black kind of mellows the yarn out a bit.

What I have affectionately come to think of as my Ravenclaw scarf has grown slightly. This project will definitely need to be blocked when completed. I'm not sure if its the yarn choice or the chevron pattern, but the whole scarf has a ripple to it.

Finally, this is as far as I was able to get on my cross stitch project for January, not meeting my goal of four rows on the first page. I've since put it away and resurrected Tiger Chilling Out.

In other news, I finally got fed up with trying to piecemeal the baby's room into a baby room rather than a storage room and I pushed everything not baby related out into the hallway and living room. Now there is some serious sorting and hopefully a fair amount of trashing and donating to do with the all that stuff.

Settling In

The last of the major disasters has been dealt with as far as I can do so. Its now up to the grace of God (amen) and good will of the IRS (haha.) Now its time to settle in to my new full time mom role and take care of a few projects around the house that I've been dying to do - like cleaning, sorting, and dejunking.

Having finished all of that emergency chaotic nonsense up last night, I took a little time to try something new and try to destress. I started the first octagon tile of the Persian Tiles blanket.

 The next step is to do the fans and the outer border. Its been interesting so far and I think I'll have to increase my tension to make everything lay pretty.  I'm making up the colorway as I go.

I also did the first block of the afghan I showed in my last post. However, since taking this photo I noticed that two of the stitches are in the wrong place and I've frogged and stitched it correctly. I do want to do this as a JAYGo, so I'm stuck here until I practice the join I want to do using some scrap yarn.

The Red Heart Super Saver Latte set is completed. It only took a few more rows to finish the hat.

I finally found somewhere to donate all these hats and scarves I keep making. My church works with a food pantry/charity closet called God's Helping Hands. They ran out of cold weather gear in December, so I'm excited to find somewhere that I know can use the hats and scarves.

I have a bin full of yarns waiting to become hats and scarves and right now they are the easiest thing to pick up for just a couple of minutes so I imagine they'll be a lot of them in the near future.

So it Begins

I always think of this scene when I can see something coming, whether its illness or a foot of snow or just about anything.

We've been very blessed in the last year, avoiding the majority of illnesses that were going around. I think I only caught one cold while pregnant and it was pretty mild. But so far, 2018 has entered with a bang - two cars in the shop with major repairs, IRS audit (tell your representatives to vote fair tax!!!), student loan repayment complications, a computer that needed repair, and now what I'm hoping it just a cold and that the Smidget doesn't catch it.

My little guy is almost four months old and he wants to spend more time sleeping than usual but other than that is generally happy and good natured. I'm letting him sleep as much as he wants, hoping that it will keep him healthy.

I was without a vehicle for about a week, so as soon as we got both cars back I took Smidget out on an adventure. Armed with coupons and giftcards, we traversed the highways to the local JoAnn Fabrics for some much needed retail therapy. It turned out to be the perfect day for it. We've mostly been staying home due in part to not having a car and in part to the bitter cold, but yesterday was a spring-like 55 degrees F.

 I came back with the above haul of beautiful soft squashy yarn. The intent is to use it in an afghan that caught my eye on Ravelry. I discovered that the pattern was only published in a book but a little research resulted in finding the book on Amazon for the cost of shipping and handling. In case you've never explored the used books on the Amazon Marketplace, be advised that it has a plethora of fun out of print books that often sell for one penny plus the $3.99 s&h that Amazon allows their sellers to charge for media items.

The majority of these afghans are crochet but there are some cool knit ones as well, if that it your craft. The one that I took a liking to was #26 in the book, but there are so many cool afghans I think I'm going to have trouble deciding which one to make.

 

I suppose I'll just have to spend some time staring at the pretty patterns and snuggling my yarn before I decide :) 

 

Achievable Goals

Here it is, my to do list for 2018.

1. Finish the water bottle carriers (four complete, three to go) by 1/20/18

2. Finish the brown hat

3. Do 3050 stitches in Guardian Angel

Yes, I know its a short list but the plan is to complete one thing and then add another to the list. I have a bad habit of making too many plans and completing none of them. This list covers my three major hobbies and has bite sized goals. Instead of "Finish the Persian Tiles blanket" I'll choose things like "Finish two hexagon tiles for the Persian Tiles blanket." and rotate projects once the goal is met.

Smidget's Temperature Blanket

Over the last few weeks, I've been putting a lot of thought and planning into the Smidget's temperature blanket. I choose the Summer Garden Granny Square by Attic24, inner color is low temp for the day, middle ring is high temp for the day, outer row is black.

The hardest part was figuring out a layout. This is what I came up with. Its 18 x 21 squares. The black squares separate the months and are at the beginning and the end for a total of 13 black squares. The first day is his birthday, meaning that September is split on the afghan.

I did the first few days as a test run and I'm pretty happy with how its turning out, although I was getting tired of the pink/yellow combination.

So I programmed Excel with conditional formatting based on the colors I had chosen, to give myself a preview of the upcoming color combinations and it really gets interesting once I get past the first week or so of September. We had some unusually warm day this September, it was actually quite pleasant of a fall.
 

There is no rush to get this done, so its been set aside until I finish a couple smaller crochet projects that I have in the works. I'm just really pleased to finally have it figured out.

There are a few more temperature blanket styles that I'd like to try out, so I am considering eventually making one for my birth year and one for Jack's, or maybe one for our anniversary year or something like that. There was one that had highs on one side and lows on the other with a sine wave pattern seperating the two and someone suggested that you could do that by finding the number of light and dark hours per day and making the ratio the same. Oooh so many good ideas...

New Year, New Projects

I've moved the vast majority of my projects into my crafty room. They aren't properly organized yet but that will come later. I'm trying to only keep two projects at a time handy for working on in the evenings - one crochet and one cross stitch.

The cross stitch project is the one I started at New Year's and I'm sad to say I haven't gotten back to it yet. But its waiting for me, for when I have a few minutes. I wasn't able to keep up with the 100 days of stitches with the holidays and so I plan to restart soon.

My other New Year's start was Persian Tiles. I just did one of the granny squares and then I set it aside in favor of an older project.

My primary crochet project is a hat that will match the scarf I just finished. It should be completed relatively quickly.

The hat and scarf are done with Red Heart Super Saver Stripes in Latte

The scarf took almost two full skeins and it is a very dense warm scarf. I choose a hat pattern with a similar look, and although it won't be as thick, I think they will match nicely.

.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

With the Smidget getting a little older and starting to consolidate his day time naps into something longer than thirty minutes, its entirely possible that I might manage to squeeze an hour or two of dedicated crafting time into each day. 
New Year's is typically a time when I want to start new projects, and while I want to do so this year, I'm also feeling the weight of all the things I've already started but not yet completed.

Yarn for two ongoing projects

Christmas yarn for a new project! 

I've consolidated all the yarn not actively involved in something into storage bins. I've cleaned the vast majority of my crafty projects out of the living room, sorting those I want to keep on hand into three totes in a basket and one bin for the temperature blanket. The rest went into my sewing room. I'm going to try to keep only one crochet and one cross stitch project in the living room at a time and put anything I'm not actively working on away. This will become especially critical when the Smidget becomes mobile.

The two new projects I am celebrating the New Year with are Persian Tiles Blanket using Sheepjes Spirit yarn and Guardian Angel by LA Williams cross stitch, which Jack kitted up for me for Christmas.

I also had a couple last minute finishes for 2017. The first was a couple water bottle carriers and the second was a scarf which I haven't had time to photograph yet.

I have six more of these to make and I hope to have them done by the end of the week (hahaha).

Let me know if you made any plans for the New Year, I'd love to hear about them!