Much Finishing This Morning

I finished up a couple of projects today. I stuffed Iza's frog last night, and today gave him a cute little smile. This would have been a very quick project if I'd had all the stuffing and eyes and actually finished the putting together in a timely manner. The actual crochet was very quick. I fretted over how to seam him together, and tried to find instructions, but in the end I just pretended to know what I was doing, and it seems to have worked out fine. Now I'll just try and keep him free of cat hair for the next week, and then he'll be off to his new home.
Since I was in the mood for completing projects, and since all these projects need to be ready to leave town on Friday I finally sewed the buttons onto Lily's Baby Surprise Jacket today. The baby socks and jacket are already covered in cat hair, because the cats kept laying on the yarn while I was making them. I' m going to wash all the baby stuff tomorrow and then they'll just need to dry by Friday.Now I can devote my full attention to my May club socks, or even start a new project guilt-free. I've completed all my current dead line projects, yea!

More Like It

Well, that attempt to rip back to the toe failed, and I in fact had to begin all over again. Aargh! Someday I'll start to make real progress on this sock. The good news is that it looks properly like the pictures on the pattern now. So, maybe all my jinx will be done with and it will be smooth sailing from here on out.

I've also taken a few "before" shots of Iza's frog. I feel terrible, because I haven't named him (or her) yet. Maybe it will speak to me once it's stuffed and sewn together. Here's a shot of the empty frog husk. I also have cute little plastic eye bits to go on the whites, so they look my eye-ish. The mouth is just going to be embroidered on (I think) well I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.I also have a little strawberry plant that is doing quite well. I hope the bush he's planted under continues to protect him from the summer sun. It's already entirely too hot, and it's only just begun. This is the biggest and best looking plant, a total of 5 of my original 9 plantings are still coming along.

NatCroMo (7)

Day 7 of the CAL and only 3 minutes of crocheting done today. ... There was a time limit. The instructions today were to change yarn or hook size and crochet a HDC/HTC for 3 minutes. (That's a halfdouble or halftriple for you all that would otherwise have to look that up - like I did yesterday.)

I only managed about 27 stitches, which pretty much goes half way around the flowery looking thing that I've currently got. It was really tempting to just ignore the instruction and go all the way around, but then I stopped. What would be the fun in going all the way around? What if the next instruction comes out all the more bizarre because I have less that a full round? Yeah, we'll see won't we?

I spent longer photographing and posting about this day's work than actually doing it. Crazy!

Now back to some knitting.

NatCroMo

Apparently March is National Crochet Month. Since I've been planning on learning crochet so that I can take advantage of books like the ones from Kyuuto! I thought I might join in on a CAL (crochet-a-long) for a free-form project where the number of stitches is determined by random number generators unique to each hooker.

So far I have a flower looking thing. I only found out about this today, so I plowed through the first 6 days worth of pattern. Even with having to reference books and About.Crochet it took less than 2 hours to do 6 days worth of the pattern. The plan is for each day of the deal to only take a few minutes of your time. Of course, that's assuming that you don't have to learn how to do each stitch as it comes up.

The thing I'm most excited about is that even if I'm doing it wrong, it'll come out okay. It's not supposed to make anything in particular, and it doesn't have to fit anyone, so I just go with the flow. What really worked for me with learning to knit was just doing the stitches over and over. Once you know how the stitches work, the rest of it kind of starts to fall together. I mean, until you make the stitch correctly it's barely worth figuring out what they look like, because your's won't look like anything much.

Hey, if you're a crocheter and you're interested in the Kyuuto! series you need to click that link up there. Chronicle books is having a sale where you get 25% off AND free shipping. I wish I hadn't just grabbed up the Lacy Crochet and Amigurumi books from Overstock. And just to reassure you, it's true, the books are in English.