feeling a little crafty... and froggy

Last week, a friend asked if I'd be interested in testing her new pattern and of course, I said yes! I was especially interested once I saw what I'd agreed to knit. lol

Isn't it cute? I jut love the little cabled owl that has been popping up everywhere the past couple years.

With my limited stash in the rv, I didn't have the super bulky yarn she used for hers, but I did dig around and came across some Jo Ann Sensations Caribbean in a sparkly variegated green and held that double. I wasn't quite thick enough, but made a nice little sleeve for my iPad. After the photo shoot, I decided a handle would be useful so I single crocheted around the top and added slit handles to turn mine into a bag.

Details and a link to the pattern page can be found here.

I also finally pulled the crochet purse/bag out and finished it!

It became a nice little basket for the bathroom cabinet to keep items organized. I love how the variegated yarn flashed on this! I think I'm going to use more of this yarn to knit or crochet a net bag to tote my shower items to/from the shower building at the rv parks.

I also have been working a bit on my alpaca blanket and was working on block #4:

I kept feeling like I was wasting my time though. An alpaca blanket in a household with critters? Not very practical. Add that to the fact that the yarn is so thin it's knit up on US6 so the progress is going at a snail's pace? Yeah, not so excited. I love the yarn though so a couple days ago... I frogged it! 

At this moment I have exactly ZERO items in progress. lol Deciding what's next. I have yarn for 2 sweaters and some miscellaneous yarn as well. Decisions, decisions...

a little yarny goodness

Ahhh, I finally got a bit of an urge to play with yarn again and pulled out my bag of WIPs last weekend.

Since I moved at the end of July, I've worked on a crochet bag (Ravelry link) a bit. This is what it looks like right now:

Yeah, I'm not impressed either.

There are also a pair of cotton socks in the WIP bag... that look exactly the same as they did when I posted about them last April. heh

The last thing on the needles is a blanket. I started the Moderne Log Cabin Blanket (Ravelry link) last April. Yeah, almost a full year ago and I was still maybe 2/3 of the way through the first block. lol That's what I've actually been working on a little this week. Now? It's about 16" x 20" and looks like this:

It's not massive yet, but it is garter stitch and done on a US6 so really, there's more knitting there than it seems. =) I'm liking the color combo though.

Weather's been crazy here, vacillating between snow, 70s, hail and torrential downpours (that we're having right now), but we have had some sunshine and critters are happy about that:

Mellow... with a pop of color

Wow. Four posts in five days!?!

Last night, I cast on for a log cabin garter stitch blanket. I debated whether to use my Lavish alpaca in these colors:

or maybe go with some of the variegated wool I have in my stash for a brighter blanket. Neither yarns are machine washable and I don't have enough of anything else in my stash that is... I refuse to go out and buy more yarn, so that's not a deciding point. =) After playing with some color layouts, I decided to go with the alpaca. Since I used just over 3 skeins of the darkest colorway already on other projects, I felt more secure limiting myself to these two choices for my block layout:

I like both, but I think I like B better. As long as I have enough yarn, I'll do some type of edging on it as well - maybe in crochet. It'll be awhile before I need to think about that though. heh

I've apparently gotten over my one-project-at-a-time thing. =)

Not huge... but it's progress (for me, if not for the publishing industry)

I'm up to about a 17" square... and I'm liking it so far. I'm alternating the number of rows of each color, though I need to keep larger stripes of the tan multi since I have so many more of those than the others. 

A nice, easy, mindless project to work on while watching more sports these two weeks than I have in the past year! heh Yep, I'm a total sucker for the Olympics.

It's a nice balance for my techy side.

Thankfully, I had a gift card from hotel points and downloaded a few books to my nook soon after I got it... and I'm not a super-fast reader so most are still unread. Publishers are in an uproar over ebook pricing, thinking they're losing a lot of money on hardcover book sales. Apple did their part to screw up pricing with the iPad as well by agreeing to higher prices with the publishers. Ebook prices on B&N have jumped significantly over the past week... and many I've seen continue to rise even after the initial increase. Two books I splurged on (whew) and purchased for just under $10 apiece... are now $18-19 each! Ridiculous. I don't know about others, but I can't even recall the last time I purchased a new hardcover book so they're certainly coming out way ahead on me. I refuse to pay those prices for something I'll read once and give away. I already thought many ebook prices were too high since the publisher/bookseller is already saving in printing and shipping/packaging costs on these electronic files, but now? I'll definitely be watching the mark-downs and occasional freebies offered on B&N... aking with the large number of always-free ebooks available online from various sources. Raising the prices just means fewer sales... from my end at least. The majority of my prior book purchases were either inexpensive paperbacks... or more often, used paperbacks. The only books I'll buy soon after release are occasional must-have cookbooks, but even those are most often paperbacks. We'll see how long this lasts. I have to think that at some point, the publishers will wake up and realize they need to embrace the new technology and cater to their customer base rather than trying to hold onto the past. Times change, businesses need to change too. Have book publishers learned nothing from the music industry?

First shot at granny

Tried my hand at my first granny square last night. I brought along some Lion Suede with the intention of crocheting up a blanket while watching the Olympics. I liked this square and once I figured out that the pattern was using UK abbreviations and not US ones (heh), it wasn't hard at all! This one's still a bit messy since I didn't trim/weave in ends yet. I wanted to be sure I liked the end results before committing with the scissors. =) 

I'm thinking about using this as a center and working out from there. What do you think? I'm thinking some sort of striping in these colors. I have way more of the variegated than anything else.