Yarn Over

Am doing my first real show on Sunday, here. (Here’s an article about it.) Am nervous and excited, just hoping for good weather and decent traffic. Have been ridiculously busy trying to get ready. And have come up with several new hats for the show, and eventually for purchase in the shop.

The ladybug hat:

And the other ladybug hat:

The giant-ass flower hat (still working on the name):

And I have several variations on the pumpkin hat, as well as scrunchies, headbands, flower pins and hair do-hickies (that’s a technical term). Will be up late tonight, and have recruited a babysitter for part of the day tomorrow so I can finish stuff up and work on tagging and things like that. Ack.

I think my stuff is pretty cute, and reasonably priced; I’m doing decently with Etsy and special orders. We’ll see what happens IRL.

Yeah, it’s been one of those summers. I have several projects in process (including two blankets which I REALLY need to finish) but I took a break to work on something tiny and cute. It turned out tinier (and cuter!) than I was expecting. I didn’t work from a pattern, just looked at pictures of similar (knitted) hats on Ravelry and went from there.

I hope that in future versions of this I’ll be able to clean up the green crown a bit; I’m not happy with the way some of the green showed through, but I was using stash yarn and the green is a slightly heavier weight than the orange so that probably had a lot to do with it. Finished with a basic picot edging in the green, did a couple of curlicues for vines, and brown stem. Next time I will probably make the stem shorter as well.

I don’t know anyone who will have a baby this tiny (it turned out only 14″/35 cm in diameter!) by fall, so I’m offering it up for sale here and on etsy. It was a test piece, so I’m asking only $12.

barefoot sandals, originally uploaded by JenEx.

Or both? I can’t decide. My husband thinks they’re weird. I think they’re cute. Foot fet*sh people on flickr have looked at them quite a bit, but I don’t think I can really use that as an accurate judgment tool. Also, I took off the “barefoot sandals” and “foot thongs” tags on flickr because it was creeping me out — just a little bit, really, but enough. I suppose I should have known.

I used a “triangle granny” motif and added an ankle tie and toe loop. These really were fun and quick to make and didn’t seem to suffer from my weird “I cannot make two things exactly alike” quirk that prevents me from making slippers and mittens.

Mimi wants some. In purple. I’m not sure of the appropriateness for a five-year-old.

Doris Chan has a blog!

I love her.

That is all.

Phew! Now that things are settling down a bit, I hope to get back to posting here more regularly. Time will be short again next month while we get ready to move, but once we’re moved I’m hopeful that I will have even more time to get crafty stuff done. For one, I will be more organized, and two, I will have actual space in which to DO crafty stuff.

So lately I’ve been doing a lot of these instant gratification preemie hats for the “Knitters for Obama” group on Ravelry. I am, needless to say, NOT knitting them, because ever since I started crocheting again in the fall, I think I have picked up the knitting needles maybe once. I’m hooked on crochet (hah! I made a funny!) and am finding it much more satisfying than knitting for some reason.

This is the one that certain people immediately observed looks rather like a penis cozy instead of a baby hat, only because I used a pop bottle as a prop. And I only used the pop bottle because I finished these off at lunch today and wanted to take a picture to upload to Rav before I sent them off this afternoon. Be assured, next time I will find a better prop to show perspective. Sheesh.

Anyway. Preemie hats for charity drive. So easy! They take me about 20 minutes start to finsh, if I can work on them uninterrupted which isn’t actually that likely. But I did four this week and have two more started so I think I’m doing well. Good for stitch practice, too; the first few I did were straight double crochet, but I’m starting to get creative with them now and add more interesting stitch patterns.

Also finished and sent off a custom order hat last week, and have two baby blankets in progress. Whee!

New items in the shop: these supercute hair scrunchies I came up with the other night, while casting around for something quick and easy to work on.

I love instant gratification projects. And if I do say so myself, these are great, because crocheting around the band gives it more grip in your hair. It stays put without pulling, which is fantastic for, say, kids like my daughter, who has really fine hair that all but the tiniest of bands slide right out of. She cannot wear barrettes at all, and her ponytails always fall out. It drives me nuts.

Anyway. Scrunchies. For sale. I’ve made about 20 of these already, so I hope somebody wants to buy some soon, before I am overrun.