I guess the time for a sort of semi-hiatus has come round again.  I have neither the focus nor the dexterity to knit much - though I keep trying :)  Crocheting is less difficult and less painful, but I’m not doing much of that either.

So the blog (and Chatters) is going to take a spring vacation.  I will likely be posting things from time to time, but not on anything like a regular basis.  I will continue to correspond and to comment on blogs and, hopefully in a couple of months, things will be getting back to normal.

Have a wonderful spring my friends - I appreciate your kindness and patience more than I can say!

Sorry folks - I can’t seem to get the chat room working properly so I’m afraid there won’t be any chat this evening.  I know some of you have already stopped by and I thank you for the effert and humbly apologize for the problems.

We’ll try it again next week, eh?

I don’t crochet very often these days, knitting having filled my fiber craft needs fairly well for that last few years :)  However, with the completion of the afghan, I have realized that, for the time being, crochet is easier on my hands.  So I went through my wools and wool blends.  I have lots of ones and twosies of - big surprise - pinks and purples.  I also have several hanks of a medium, heathery blue-green that would compliment them.  I had in mind making another blanket.

However, after testing out a couple of patterns, I couldn’t settle on anything that especially tripped my trigger.  Maybe I didn’t want to make another blanket?

And then, this morning at about 5:00, I woke up with the word scrumble running round and round in my head.  And so, since I couldn’t go back to sleep, I turned on the lap top and went in search :)

This site, Crochet by Sylvia Cosh and James Walters offers a series of tutorials as starting points for scrumbling which is a sort of free-form fabric or item creation often using crochet but sometimes including knitting and other fiber arts.  There are separate sets of instructions for US and British crocheters.  Prudence Mapstone (Knot just Knitting) is also a seminal figure in the field.

There is also an extensive gallery of the work of various talented people ranging from whimsical to fine art.  Kay Adolphson’s Ancient Future and Jeanne Taylor’s From Little Acorns are amazing pieces of art and not what most people think of when they consider crochet.

I confess, given that this is a free-form style, the idea of tutorials and instructions make me a bit nervous.  I mean, how can anything free-form have rules?  But I suppose there are basics for everything, so I will read and learn what I can and I will look at the magnificent work that others have done and be inspired.

And I will play :)

See the “Knitting Chatter” button on the side bar for more information.

Chatters is on for Saturday evening!  Bring your knitting (or crocheting!) and join the fun :)

Happy Spring - and have a great weekend!
Chatters is on for Saturday evening!

This was completed by 8:30 last night :)

This is Chris Simon’s Flowerburst Square and a nicely designed piece it is.

Materials:  Red Heart acrylic in various pinks and purples, cream and black.
Hook:  Size I/9 (5.5 mm)
Finished size (square):  12” x 12”
Finished size (blanket):  60” x 72”

I have no idea about actual amounts because I was using left-overs, for the most part, and trying to use up colors.  I worked with what I had available and didn’t measure anything beforehand.  I will admit, however, to being absolutely abysmal in judging how much yarn I’m going to need - especially for crochet so, in the end, I did have to purchase more black yarn in order to finish the squares’ borders.  It goes without saying that I bought twice as much as I ended up needing :)

Maybe I should make another blanket?

Happy Monday!

I did some dyeing this week.

More information is available at The Dye Pot under Pigeon’s Blood.  I’m so pleased with this color that I can’t wait to get my hands on it!

That will have to wait until the blanket is finished.  At my current rate, that should happen on Sunday.  The final rounds are being worked now and, as I acquire enough, they are being sewn into strips and the strips are being sewn together,  I’m halfway down the length of the blanket, so things are coming together nicely :)  Hopefully, I’ll have a finished item to show you on Monday.

I sorted through the half-way bin a couple of days ago.  This is where projects go when I’m undecided about them - and there were a lot of things in the bin.  So many, in fact, that Myria was getting nervous about them reaching critical mass and staging a coup on the rest of the living room :)  Something had to be done.

I seldom use straight needles any more.  It’s either circulars or double points with point protectors on the ends.  Can you guess how many point protectors (not to mention DPNs) I re-acquired during this exercise?  A bunch :)  I also discovered a circular I thought I had lost and several balls of yarn (and partial balls) I had forgotten about.

As it happened, a bit of blue, left over from The Lake and the Summer Sky, got tossed onto the work basket where it landed up against the yellow I’m using for the top-down hat…

This doesn’t look bad to my eye - what do you think?

Sadly, I think the possible sweater…

...isn’t going to go anywhere.  I should have started earlier in winter, while the cold weather was there to spur me on.  Now that warmer weather is arriving, I have no desire to work on a sweater.  I could put it away for a while and see how I feel later on.  After all, the half-way bin needs filling out again, now that it’s been pared down :)

Don’t tell Myria I said that!

Chatters is on for tomorrow evening.

See the “Knitting Chatter” button on the side bar for more information.

Bring your projects and enjoy the conversation!

And have a great weekend :)

Goldie has taken to waking me between 5:00 and 7:00 AM every morning - he’s been doing it for a week now and it’s beginning to irritate me.  I could understand if he was hungry; Jade sometimes gets antsy if I sleep too late and her breakfast is correspondingly tardy.  She’ll sit and mew plaintively until she’s fed.  But Goldie?  He’s not especially hungry.  He’s not racing around just for the exercise and he’s not trying to get into a difficult-to-access sunny spot.

“Be vewy, vewy quiet…I’m hunting gerwbil…”

Coco Puff doesn’t seem to take any notice of him, however.  If she even knows he’s there, she couldn’t care less.  He can’t get at her no matter what he does and she isn’t inclined to worry about it.  Smart little girl :)

I’m two thirds of the way through phase three on the blanket squares.  I could say that better, eh?  I’ve done the third color rounds on 20 of the blanket squares, leaving 10 more to do.

This is the final real color round.  After this, each square will get two rounds of black to sort of tie everything together and then all the squares will be sewn together into a blanket. 

I’m still thinking about a border.  It will have to be black because I’m going to be completely out of most of the other colors and I swore when I started this project that I wasn’t going to buy more yarn - as I had to with the Skipping stones blanket a couple of years ago.  So far things have worked out pretty well and while the end’s not in sight quite yet, it’s getting closer.

This has been a really enjoyable project.  In the past, I have generally avoided multi-colored crochet projects - especially ones involving squares because I was imagining doing one whole square at a time.  You know, starting with one color in the center, changing to another color on the next round and so forth out through however many rounds there were in the square.  The idea of stopping and starting seven or eight times just to make one square was appalling to me - not to mention the ends-weaving hell it would be!

But the assembly-line kind of procedure has worked wonderfully, one color at a time on each square, and then on to the next.  Not only has this given me the opportunity to play with color in crochet in a way I haven’t done before, it has actually improved my work.  See when I’m crocheting - especially when I’m crocheting squares - my tensions starts out loose and tightens up as the project goes on.  You can see how this might not be such a good thing when my first square is 12” on a side and my last square the size of a postage stamp!  The assembly-line thingy has helped me to conquer that - all my squares (at least to their current state of completion) are the same size!  This means my gauge hasn’t been wandering from behemoth to miniscule and I have more consistently sized squares :)

This is a good thing :)

The degus have settled in wonderfully well and we have grown fonder and fonder of them.  It has been interesting to watch as they (clearly!) grew fonder and fonder of each other as well.  They play together, groom each other, are affectionate with one another and are very clearly a bonded pair.  It’s nice to know that one’s pets won’t engage in bad behavior but lately, we’ve begun to suspect that something else is going on here too.

See, Butch (there in the foreground) has been slowly but steadily expanding a-midships.  I mean to say that Butch seems to be getting fatter while Sundance (in the background) maintains a relatively sleek size and shape.  They both get the same food in the same proportions so it seems unreasonable that one should fatten and the other shouldn’t.  Can you think of an obvious reason why one critter should be apparently gaining weight, when under identical circumstances, the other of the same-type critter remains perfectly normal?

Sigh…we’re beginning to suspect that we’ve been had and that Butch, contrary to what the breeder assured us, is female. And that the amazing, expanding middle might be explained by an impending family.  I guess we’ll see - Butch might be a Bella after all :)

I have been having nightmares this week. Everybody has bad dreams once in a while, but for me this happens oh…say, once every five or six years or so - not twice in one week!  They have to do with some approaching catastrophe about which I could do something if only I could get people to understand or pull myself together enough to focus on what needed to be done.

Feh…

I continue to work on the blanket, about which I won’t bore you again for a while save to say that it is coming along.

The weather is warming and we have sun for the second day in a row!  Little green shoots are beginning to pop up at my father’s house - crocus and daffodils.  We are indeed coming out of winter.  There may be a few more cold days ahead and perhaps even a bit more snow, but they will be the fading protests of a season on its way out :)

Oh, and Daylight Saving Time starts this Sunday at 2:00 AM in the US.

See the “Knitting Chatter” button on the side bar for more information.

Chatters is definitely on for tomorrow evening.  Bring your knitting/crocheting/embroidery - what-have-you :)

And have a great weekend!