Fiber Monday Christmas Haul

 

I got some Crochet Supplies for Christmas!

For all that 2020 was a dumpster fire of a year, Christmas wasn't bad for me. I slept in, got tons of tea (you'll be seeing some really fun reviews in the coming weeks, I promise!), and yes, I got some crochet goodies!

First we have a very nice yarn bowl!

The yarn bowl was a surprise, since I'd completely forgotten I'd asked for one lol. It's heavy, sturdy, and very, very pretty. While the swirl to keep your yarn straight is a little rough on the inside, I can see that with time, it'll wear 100% smooth. I do find myself slowing down a bit because my derpy brain subconsciously expects a soft cotton/acrylic blend to somehow produce enough friction with the wood that it starts a fire lol.

A Heckin Cool Hanging Shelf

This beefy boi is much deeper and wider than it looks from this angle - a full skein of red heart can go in either side-to-side or back to front! I can stack them! This will revolutionize my storage troubles, I think!

Some very pretty yarn!

My sister got me some very pretty yarn - some Unforgettable (a yarn I've really loved working with in the past!) and some more it's a wrap in a very nice blue colorway that I'm already itching to play around with!

Last (but certainly not Least!): Two nice Amigurumi books!

My folks picked me up both the yarn bowl and the pretty Unicorns, Dragons, and more Fantasy Amigurumi book, so I think I know what everyone's getting next year :P

My grandmother on my dad's side gave me that cute white-covered Amigurumi book, and honestly, it's just so precious. I hope there's a cute lil birb in there so I can make her one to keep her tiny parakeet company.

All in all, it was a delightful crop of crochet contributions and I cannot wait to start hooking away at all of these precious patterns with the big ol' pile of yarn scattered around my room. Thanks to the ball winder my partner gave me for my birthday, the new hanging rack, and yes, even the bowl, I'll be able to condense my collection to one or two small spaces with ease :)

I hope your Christmases were warm, cheery, and delightful, and I hope you'll swing by tomorrow to read my blathers and check out what my plan for the rest of the week is!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Twas the Tuesday Before Christmas

 

Twas the Tues before Xmas and all through the blog...

Not a Casual was settled

Many projects were Frogged.

The photos were stored on the Drive and the phone

As the blogger was stitching upstairs, all alone

Except I'm really terrible at remembering poetry I've heard a thousand times, so that format's just not gonna work for me lol.

If it weren't already quarter past 8 I'd sink more time into it, but instead, here's what I've been up to:

I've been making Christmas presents nonstop for several days. A couple are finished/delivered - a stuffed wombat for my partner, some snowflakes for my friends, a pair of filet crocheted doilies for my grandmothers (one with deer, the other is a snowflake) - but I still have a major project each for my sister and my dad to work on!

Now, while I don't think either one of them reads my blog (and if you do, please feel free to object ;) ) but I'm still not sharing what I made until after the holidays lol.

I will say this, however:

My sister's gift? It has necessitated a great deal of invention.

I love the patterns from WitchWolf, and I especially love how they look when worked up (I've had a few small successes, after all!). I took one of their patterns and altered it in paint.net so that it was the "right" colors and maybe changed a few lines for clarity, but the really exciting thing (besides trying tapestry crochet and succeeding so well) is that I have been struggling to make up the back of this project properly because it's boring. I'm not one for boredom, so I came up with a solution:

Teach myself Tunisian Crochet.

Problem: I don't have any Tunisian hooks

Solution:

I made one

Okay, FC, I hear you say to yourselves, How?

Well, way back in college over a decade ago (ouch), I made a really cool art project that was called "Electrical Spaghetti". It was a bowl made from coiled and sewn ethernet cable filled with "pasta" made from phone cords and other white wires, "meatballs" made of tiny wire balls, and "sauce" made of some red wires. I actually wound up unsheathing a bunch of smaller wires to make those meatballs and they came out of a red casing. I never threw the split, abandoned casing out because I'm probably a hoarder and while trying to figure out how to do TC without the right equipment, I looked over and saw it dangling off of my desk, trying to escape.

So I snagged it and the hook I was gonna use anyway and ran downstairs to grab some electrical tape and married the split plastic tube to my hook. I'm about to try it out!

...

I tried it out and... it doesn't 100% work, but it works enough for the first few rows. We'll see if I can get all the way up :)

Regardless, I've been very busy and I'll be glad when Christmas is over. I need to start working on gifts in freaking September next year lol.

So that's all from me!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Fiber Monday - Working Towards Joy

 

In Which I'm Doing My Best :D

It's that time of year when everything I do or think or make or say is an effort towards making someone's holidays a little brighter, and you know as well as I do that it can be exhausting. I have been crocheting nonstop since 6:30AM and that's after about an hour of sleep because I'm a garbage human who may have serious insomnia and an addiction to really stupid YouTube videos. On the plus side, I have finished 2 whole projects - including the most mentally taxing one - and I've started on a commission I was given by a family member and... it's the size of an infant. I'm not kidding. I think I have enough fluff though, so that's not going to be a problem, and the supplies were all... uh... supplied to me.

That being said, I still have a bunch of snowflakes to finish sewing ends in on, soak in OxyClean with my Filet Crochet Panels, and starch (maybe), I have several small plushes to make, and I have no idea what I'm doing 99% of the time.

It's the most stressful time of year, folks, but it's still worth every moment of doubt and every small blister forming on the top of my pinky.

One of these days I should show you all how I crochet, because... I do not do it correctly. Everyone I see holds the hook and project in the same hand and the yarn and project in the other, but not me. Nope. For some reason, I literally cannot make it work the way I see everyone do it, so I hold the hook between my right thumb and middle finger and loop the yarn up over my ring finger like a block & tackle before running it up and over my pointer finger, using the pointer as the means for advancing the yarn.

The way I've described it makes no sense, but some day I'll show you, and you'll probably understand, even if you'll have no idea how that makes anything easier. I will say that I should probably look into a leather thimble for my pinky just based on how the yarn rubs it raw sometimes lol.

Also, I keep dozing while I write or crochet (had to rework one part of the commission four times because I kept nodding off, but now it looks 4x better than it did, so I can't quite complain.

Actually, this brings me to something I wanted to discuss with y'all about my crochet work. Since it is such a big part of my life, and since I really enjoy doing it, I was wondering if, after Christmas (it's already too late to ship anything out for the holidays with how awful the mail is backed up everywhere) anyone might be interested in commissioning anything from me? I'll work on doing some pricing on what I'm willing to do, putting together a catalog, etc, but I think that might be a good supplement to... whatever job I eventually find, and I'm already crocheting a bunch anyway, so why not?

I might get up the gumption to do art commissions, too, but I think I need a few more months practice on that. Don't want you to end up with a potato after you ask me for a dragon, after all lol!

So yeah, that's where I am today - working hard on some large pieces for Christmas!

Hope you're all crafting right along with whatever your craft is!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk: Ho Ho Huh?

 

In Which I have Inspiration... but not experience

I am a "by the seat of your pants" kind of artist, which means that I don't tend to go into Thursday blogs with anything resembling a plan. I basically just... draw something. Now, that's not a methodology I recommend - it's infuriating to get a better idea in the middle of a doodle and then realize "oh yeah, I have no idea how to do that!"

This week, I wanted to draw something holiday-adjacent, what with Christmas being literally 2 weeks away (gulp!). I plugged in the tablet and set to work and...

I had no idea what I was doing.

Undirected art tends to look like undirected art, and this is no exception. It at least looks like holly, but I'm going to spend the rest of today looking at other people's work on pixellated holly and try to mimic that next.

Holly 01, digital; 2020

However, you don't wanna hear me mope about not understanding how to do digital art when I still have pencils and pens in my room and could make traditional art if I tried, so I'll instead tell you what I learned from today's attempt!

1. If you do a pencil outline first, it's easier to lay colors with the paintbrush, even if you end up having to touch things up with various brush sizes
2. There is no function I can find in Paint.net to blend two different adjacent colors, so I'll have to plan my color rings out properly in the future!
3. Holly leaves are a very difficult shape to render in anything approaching a realistic manner unless you take a lot of time to research, trace, practice, and then attempt them
4. I like playing with the color shifting functions on Paint.net
5. I really, really, really want to get better at pixel art, not so that it's "easier" or "faster" but so that I like what I produce more. I just want to be able to lay some pixels down and know that I didn't do a bad job.
6. I think I've finally got the ratio of pixels/cm down! 10 pixels/cm seems to look good and produces a clear image!

I think that'll do it from me today, guys :)

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

TEA REVIEW: CHOCOLATE MINT

 

In Which I Tried New Tea!

I do not shop often in the current climate (not that I shopped often before...), but every so often, I am invited to pop downstairs and tag along with my mom when she's heading out. this time, we went to one of the great local chains that really hasn't updated its inside look since about 1999 (which I view as a 100% positive feature), and we picked up some gifts for the niblings (gender neutral term for the children of siblings, if that hasn't crossed your vocabulary yet!) and eventually wandered down the tea aisle.

We weren't in the mood to dilly dally, obviously, and I was limited to one box of tea, so when it came down to the wire, my choices were for a lemon tea and a chocolate mint tea. A close third was a holiday themed chocolate tea, but I wasn't sure about "chocolate with lavender and mint", so I stuck to the other two. In the end, I knew that I could find a lemon tea in a local shop or just... order it easily off of Amazon or something, so I chose the chocolate mint tea!

The Tea in Question

I brought the tea home (along with a cheap pound of packaged mill ends of yarn for Christmas present creation) and immediately decided to make a cup.

The first thing I noticed was how heavy the teabags are compared to my chamomile tea bags. The second thing I noticed was that you get two less bags than with the Bigelow chamomile, which... bummer. The ingredients are nowhere near as simple as the single-ingredient chamomile, either! This tea contains: oolong tea, cocoa powder, peppermint, natural chocolate flavor, and carob powder.

It smells... divine. It smells like Andes' Candies or Thin Mints.

I was so excited to try it that I slammed the kettle on and grabbed a mug. I could've run upstairs for the teapot, but... I just wanted it that badly. I chucked the bag in the mug and that's when things got... spicy.

The cup and the culprit

Turns out, the tea smelled so good to the cat that all she wanted to do was bat the tag around! I couldn't take any more pictures because she was going bananas over it and I had to hold the string against the cup lip to keep the teabag from being yote across the room by an overstimulated tabby. It was in this flurry of movement and stressful time that I may have made an error.

The steeping time recommended for this tea in 8oz of hot water is between 3-5 minutes. I have no idea if I let it sit in the water too long or not long enough, but... well... despite having a rich dark hazel color (dark brown shading to almost a greenish brown along the edges - the mint?), it was quite faintly flavored. At first.

You see, after removing the bag and leaving it for the cat to buffet around, taking the mug of tea upstairs, and then getting into an in-depth conversation with someone, I had let the tea cool a bit after that first sip. My second sip was a bit more flavorful, so let me tell you how a slightly-cooled cup of this tea tastes.

You could tell there was chocolate in this tea because it smelled like chocolate and there was a faintly bitter taste I recognize from cocoa powder, but there was also an odd sweetness that I think came from both the "natural chocolate flavor" and the peppermint. It wasn't bad at all, just a strange taste. I could taste the oolong, which had its odd, round, vaguely herbal essence, and it all finished with a gentle, cooling sensation from that peppermint.

I was, of course, slightly disappointed that the chocolate flavor wasn't more pronounced. I don't need it to taste like a Hershey bar, of course, but a touch more chocolate punch would've been appreciated. I have to wonder if the subtlety was caused mostly by me either not steeping it properly (I did not check the temperature of the water, did not heat the cup first, and didn't time the steep!), or perhaps it requires milk to be added to have the full chocolate effect?

I will have to investigate this tea further, much like the Morning Thunder.

Thanks for dropping by to hear me blather about tea!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

ps: the "something" this week is... possibly the best advertising for tea ever?

Fiber Monday: Cozy and Scrappy

 

In Which I Made A Thing

I have probably annoyed you all at this point with my repeated harping on my recent descent into tea drinking, but here's the thing...

It's getting cold, and I hate cold tea that isn't supposed to be cold.

Solution: Tea Cozy!

But there's one other problem - my teapot has a vertical handle, and 99% of the patterns I've found for tea cozies are for pots with handles on the side, not the top. 100% of the vertical-handle patterns I did find and could read needed money, which I respect, but could not afford at the time!

New Solution: Make my own pattern!

So I now present to you - possibly the ugliest tea cozy on earth.

Made with leftover yarn I cannot identify

Here is the free version of the pattern:

TEA COZY

MATERIALS

• Yarn (any size – pretty sure mine was DK/Light/3)

• Hook (I used a 3mm)

• Yarn needle

• A ribbon or other closure (optional)

STITCHES (US TERMS)

ch = chain

sl st = slip stitch

sc = single crochet

hdc = half double crochet

dc = double crochet

INSTRUCTIONS

START: Ch as long as you need to go around the narrow bottom of your teapot, sl st to first chain to form a loop, trying not to twist. I needed 90 chains – yours may be different depending on hook, yarn, and teapot!

Round 1: Ch1, sc in each ch, sl st to first sc

Round 2-?: Ch1, increase around evenly (so if you have 90 ch, you sc in the next 14 sc, then sc twice in the next sc, repeat around), sl st to first sc of each round, ch1 to start the next.

When your sc increase rounds reach the bottom bulge of your spout, we’ll switch from crocheting in the round to crocheting in alternating rows!

Remember to fit to your teapot constantly so that you don’t get any nasty surprises at the end like “oops, too small, no cozy for you!”

Pattern Rows

Row 1: ch1, sc across

Row 2: ch 1, turn, sc in first sc, then alternate dc and sc stitches around, making sure the dc stitches pucker outwards like a bobble or popcorn stitch! My pattern was sc in first sc, *dc in next, sc in next 2 st repeat from * until last 2 stitches, then dc, end with sc. You may want to have more or less sc stitches between your dc stitches, depending on how wide your rows are.

Row 3: ch 1, turn, sc across

Row 4: ch 1, turn, hdc across

Row 5: ch 2, turn, dc across

Row 6: ch 1, turn, hdc across

Row 7: ch 1, turn, sc across

Repeat from Row 2 until you pass the top of where your spout attaches to the pot

When you pass the top of your spout, sl st in to the first stitch to resume crocheting in the round. Repeat the pattern rows until you reach the top of your pot, hopefully ending on a Row 5, 6, or 7 repeat so you can use that for your ribbon.

When you’re done, just tie it off and weave in the ends.

If you don’t have a spare ribbon or cotton strip laying around, you can, of course, make one by crocheting a long chain in the same yarn or one that would look nice with it and tying that off, weaving in the ends, and using that as a cinching tie. I prefer my cotton ribbon because it isn’t stretchy.

You should have a nice sweater for your teapot now!

Go Enjoy Something!

Thursday Art Walk

 

It Might Snow, I Dunno

It's been a heck of a week, and I've been super busy, but I did manage to whip up a couple of simple pixel drawings to share with you guys!

"SM01"

"Egg of Layers 01"

With the Snowman, I'm thinking of going back into the image and giving his arms an outline, then basically cutting them out and putting them on their own layer, same with his hat and the front of his scarf. Then I want to practice making a sprite sheet for him so I can maybe animate it!

As for the egg, I just wanted to experiment with different fill qualities, shading, etc. I'm gonna keep experimenting with shapes and lighting!

I think I'm gonna go play with more pixels and crochet a bunch of stuff lol.

I'll post some more stuff next week, but this week was busy as heck, which is why I'm so far behind!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC