A Little Yarn On The Side

Make a note of how the bedspread goes back together BEFORE taking it apart.

The Loden Mist sweater that I started in October but had to abandon for smaller, faster projects.  It really made a good project because even though it's lace, I don't need a chart or pattern to do it. And, I enjoyed the knitting night at the library so much that my friend & I are going back next week.  One of the staff members at the library was there to answer questions and to teach anyone interested to knit, and the library keeps supplies  ready for anyone who wanders by & might want to give it a shot (which no one did, but there was a drumming group in the room next door, and that's sort of hard to compete with on a cool-group-to-join scale, though I have to say that I think knitting-in-public has GOT to be easier & a little more socially acceptable than drumming in public, especially on airplanes and while waiting in line....). So, I am now officially a groupy knitter.  Not to be confused with a groovy  knitter, which I have never actually...

Okay, not really.  Well, obviously.  But a friend and I are going to check out a knitting club at our local library, and I have no idea what knitting to take.  The idea is to talk to people while knitting, right?  So I probably shouldn't do anything really fussy, but then again, I hate to take my super-simple "knit while reading" projects as it seems like a good time to get something a bit more sophisticated moved along.  So, beading?  No, too fussy.  Lace involving charts?  Again, too fussy.  Socks that involve cables but that I'm making up?  Is this a good Knit Night sort of project?

So for Finishing Friday I was really hoping to dazzle everyone with a display of finished projects--and to be fair, the green scarf did get finished late Friday night, so there is a finished project number 10, which puts me slightly ahead of my goal.  Only very slightly, but I have a feeling this year will be a "grasping at anything" sort of year. Finishing Friday is the day of the week when my optimism is at it's highest.  Could I just work on the pink jeans jacket?  Oh no--that would have been far too rational for a woman facing an entire day of crafting freedom.  Instead.........In my very last fabric shopping trip of the year, I came across these: in the clearance racks.  The lavender is 12 yards of nice satin that I scooped up for $1 a yard and will be converted to a Halloween costume.  After one disastrous attempt to make a costume with cheap "costume satin," I have learned that cheap fabrics are never worth working with, so I hunt for good fabric...

It's possible that starting the Project of the Month bags next month  probably wouldn't have killed me.  However, since I didn't realize that until it was too late: there has been some serious knitting going on around here.  I think it might take the entire second ball of yarn, but that still means that I'm more than 50% done.  And what did I decide to do with myself today? A WHOLE NEW PROJECT!!!!! This one really  isn't my fault, though.  Two years ago, we redecorated the guest bedroom when I found this bedspread: We've even painted the walls a nice gold color to coordinate with the bedspread...and cat hair.  It wasn't the most expensive bedding ensemble, but it wasn't cheap either, so you can imagine my joy when several of these popped up.  One of the fabrics was really a drapery fabric, and it was ripping out at every seam.  I tried for a long time to come up with ways to patch it without it either looking bad or continuing to rip o...

A couple days ago, RobinH left some directions for button placement on a women's blouse that I thought were so helpful that I just had to share.  Some of you might have already figured this out on your own, but for those of us that would have struggled along for years with bad button placement, here 'tis: As for button placement- a trick I learned from my mom so long ago I don't really remember when I learned it: Try the blouse on. Mark the location of the largest part of the bust. You *must* have button here or the shirt will gap. Then mark the spot where the top button will go. Then (depending on the distance between them and the size of your buttons) mark spaces for the buttons that will go equidistant between them. Then, using the same spacing, put buttons down the rest of the front until you run out of shirt. These are the places to put the button holes. Once the buttonholes are in, line up the two shirt fronts, pin them, and use them to mark the button location...

After two days of crafting torture, one long-standing sewing WIP is finished: and I hate to have to admit it, but I love how it turned out.  It still needs to be washed, and there is no way I would ever be dumb enough to use microsuede on a shirt like this again, but it turns out that I will NOT be roasting marshmallows over a bonfire featuring this pattern.  However, I shall not confirm nor deny the possibility that Theo wasn't the only one lying flat on the floor when this sucker was finally finished..... It occurred to me yesterday that I really missed picking a project bag every month, so I reached into the bin & was admittedly trying to "cheat" just a bit by grabbing the handles of what I thought was a sewing project, to pull out: which serves me right for cheating, albeit cheating badly.  So....I now have a scarf to finish in 15 days.  This would be a good time for the one-row scarf, so being me, I decided to do something different.  It's a bit ha...