Baby Blanket

A coworker of mine's wife is having a baby! Babies are great! At the time that I started working on this blanket, he said they were going to be surprised as to the gender of the baby- so I chose a yarn that was mostly yellow with some rose and blue accents, and a border of yellow. Later he told me that it will definitely be a boy, but too late to change yarns!

Either way, it's dreamy soft, though I used an "adult" yarn for the main part of the blanket, and a "baby" yarn for the border. I also alternated the type of crochet for each row- intermixing single and double crochets. By the time I had used up both skeins of the main yarn, it was still and awkward rectangle, too wide, not enough rows. I made up for this with the border- there are four rows on the long sides, and only two on the short ones (all single crochet for the border).

I don't really have a baby of my own to model this one, but my kitty is the closest thing I have... so I baited her with a couple treats into being my model. (:

"Yarn Blanket"

I've been working on this afghan for a long time. I think I started buying the yarn last fall... and just worked on it between projects or TV time through to about a week ago. It took a long time to finish, but it also spent a fair amount of time sitting in the project bucket while something else took center stage (for example, I made another granny square afghan for my sister for Christmas, and another for another friend at the same time, both of which remain unchronicled in blog form, and likely never will be).

The yarn is brown (bought in the big pound skeins, I needed a lot!), with reddish accent stripes. Stripes are uniform size, but the distance between them is however I was feeling that day. Also, this afghan is enormous. More than long enough to cover all of my boyfriend, who is roughly 6' tall (I didn't ask for specs, but he's taller than me).

This afghan needs a home. I already have enough blankets, and don't need another- if you or someone you know would like it, let me know! If you know a good charity in the Chicagoland area that would take it, let me know!

And then 11 months happened...

Maybe you've forgotten I have a blog. I mostly did too. I'd make projects and think, "oh I should post this to the blog..." < /thoughtprocess >. It didn't ever happen. And then to have to follow up the desk project! That thing took so long. That thing is what my computer is sitting on as I type this post up.

Regardless, blog is back, here is a blanket. I've been crocheting for years, and I'm a wicked packrat, who will not throw away scraps! Neither will my mom- there are bits of the yarn from my older brother's baby blanket in there. And bits from baby blankets made for coworkers, and bits from afghans I made for friends & family, bits of yarn from small skeins that were given to me solo, and bits from skeins I bought for small projects that never left the yarn bucket. So it's a scrap-square-afghan, and it now resides in the apartment of my friend and neighbor, as pictured. (:

Used white to border each square, to hold the design together. May or may not be visible in the picture, but I did end up using a number of different whites. Used a cream color to single crochet around the edge and keep the edges from being too delicate.

Refinished Desk

One day I was walking home, and I saw this desk next to the dumpster in this little parking lot area for one of the buildings on the block north of me. I went in for a closer look, and it was pretty ugly, but not broken. I lifted it up, and discovered it was sitting on roller feet, and was lightweight. A little too bulky to carry home on my own, so I enlisted some help for that.

Once I had it, I starting thinking about what to do with it. I looked at different hardware online, because the plastic/metal/wood combo had to go. I considered painting it plain white. I considered staining it. I knew I had to sand it down first, it did have some old finish on it in the grains, and a couple rough corners. So I took a trip down to Clark Devon Hardware (so helpful!), and picked up some things that I thought might be necessary.

After laying down the cheap plastic dropcloth on my living room floor (I have no basement or garage) I got to work with sanding. Sanding is a lot of work! It took longer than I expected it too, and I ended up with some sore muscles the first time I worked on it- my legs from crouching for a couple hours, and my shoulder and back from the continuous sanding back and forth. Not in as decent of shape as I thought!

About halfway through sanding, a coworker recommended using a stripper- he said that it was really easy, you just wiped it on and wiped it off. It was pretty easy to put it on, as he had said, but getting it all off was a little more complicated. I ended up having to scrape and sand even more to get it all off, and even still, there were still some grains that I just couldn't get to. It was somewhere at this point that I used woodfiller to close up the holes on the bottom drawers so that they would be smooth once I put in the new single bolt hardware.

Once I finally had finished the sanding, I had to make some hard decisions about what to actually finish it with. I was still torn between painting and staining. I wasn't that crazy about painting anymore, but there were still some really deep grains that had retained the previous finish; using a beltsander in my living room would have been a little much, I WAS trying to maintain half of the room as a usable living room. However, my dad recommended that I might as well stain it, if that was what I wanted with it, and if it looked really bad after that, I could always just paint over it. So, I went with stain.

After looking at all of my options, I chose the "Golden Pecan" color, from the 'minwax polystain' collection- theoretically, you should be able to stain and polyurethane with one product. Due to my novice status as a woodworker (I haven't done any of this since middle school) I suckered myself into buying the 'pre-stain' product, for a 'more beautiful, even finish'. I don't know how much it actually affected the finished product, but I used it. I then stained.

When the stain had dried, I decided that I really didn't want to go with another coat of stain, as recommended, I liked the color it was at. But, it didn't quite have what I felt to be an appropriate coating of polyurethane. There were still some places where the polyurethane coating was thin, and where I would feel uncomfortable putting something wet on (for example, there is a nice cold MGD next to me right now), so I headed down for yet another trip to Clark Devon, and bought a little can of polyurethane. AND MAN DOES THAT STUFF STINK! I put all the fans I own on high in my living room, and then took myself out for a movie. Good thing I don't have roommates, they would have really pitched a fit over that.

And then it was just waiting the 24 hours for it to dry completely; after about a day and a half and borrowing a drill from a friend and making the holes for the last two knobs, I moved the desk to its current position in my 'dining' room, another day later, I started moving all my art supplies into it. And now it's useful again (did I mention that the state I found it in, involved some check book ledgers from the 60s? clearly hadn't been used in a while)!

For the complete set of photos, from start to finish- this was a request from various people I talked to mid-project- go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/68414952@N00/sets/72157627282157530/

Red Afghan

Mid-January, I made a trip to Hancock Fabrics. I had just moved, and naturally had to stake out my new fabric store. I got lucky. Christmas items were on sale, which included this lovely rich red yarn with a bit of gold running through it (there was also a really nice forest green, but only one skein, and a bright cherry red, that I wasn't sold on). Lion Brand Yarn, at $1/skein- quite a deal. Naturally I bought all the skeins they had left of it (about 6). Enough for an afghan.

The color reminded me of Hannah, who is a big fan a good, deep red. As I have too many afghans already, I decided to give the eventual product to her (see image).

Nothing too fancy stylistically about the afghan, it's just a plain single crochet the whole way through, nice and easy, relaxing. It took me a while to finish it, because there's been so much else going on in my life, and then a while to get to her, due to conflicting schedules and my need to wash/dry it before getting it to her.

Paperback Sculpture/ Mobile

I've been lazy. Since mid-January I have: moved, resettled, started a new job, not known when I was going to work (which leads to 12 hour sleepathons). Anyways, long story short, projects have either fallen by the wayside, or taken much much longer to complete. I've been pretty lazy about using my freetime productively (except in the area of cooking. Girl's gotta eat.). However, I've got some projects burning around my home, hopefully soon to be completed, and for now, I've got the start of one.

I made this little book mobile out of a free copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (the world will not hurt for one less paperback copy of Harry Potter) and some 'jewels' I got from a friend. It's the test run for what will hopefully become several of these hanging from my ceiling.

I spent several hours watching netflix and folding pages back (quite the sacrifice, there), and then ripped off the covers. After folding all the pages, the binding started to curl, but not all the way around- in the future, I'll have to find books where the binding is better destroyed before I pick it up. I worried that if I artificially destroyed the binding, I would end up tearing the book in half. Ultimately, I used wood glue (I moved, this is what I have) to glue the two edges together, but it's still not perfect- there's a noticeable gap in the folded pages where I attached the front and back of the book.

After that, I punched a hole in the spine with a needle to thread fishing line through for hanging. I then ran some more fishing line through to hang the jewels (this allows me to dictate how far from the book they hang- if I had hung them on the same line, the book would have fallen further down and the spine would have ended up on top of the jewels, if not covering them).

As I said, I hope to have a couple more of these to hang, so that there's a jumble of them against the wall and corner. This one's hanging a little higher than I expected (I always forget how high my ceilings are), but I can adjust that on future ones.

QUILT!

After moving, I realized that I had way more fabric than someone who tends to move a lot should have. In fact, most of it is still sitting in boxes against the wall, as I have less space to spread out my projects now. And I'd been thinking about making a quilt for a while anyways...


So, I found a couple large pieces of fabric that worked together (grasshopper&pink pattern, the green, and the green flannel), then snatched an old pilly blanket from the linen closet at my parents (it was always kind of itchy and a little uncomfortable, and since I upgraded to a full-size bed, I've had ZERO use for it), and an old light green twin sheet for the backing.

I designed an 8-pointed star pattern for the front of the blanket, primarily utilizing the grasshopper pattern and the plain green cotton quilting fabric for the triangles, and using some spare muslin for the star in the center. Due to my faulty measuring (the triangles should have been about another .5" in each direction...) the top piece ended up being a little smaller than I had planned, and so I had to arrange for some extra edging around the outside. I found some green flannel that I had purchased a couple years ago for a project that never materialized, and put it to work!

Then I used cream colored yarn to tie all three layers together at the corners of the triangles, and trimmed all the edges to be about the same, trimming the center piece about .5" more. I turned the edges in around the center piece, and sewed through all thicknesses to create a finished edge.

It was lots of fun! I think it's one of my best-looking quilts yet. I'm still working out some kinks (edging, measuring, pattern complexity), but I think I'm doing alright considering I learned the vast majority of what I know about quilting through reading and doing. However, the name of the game was to get rid of fabric... so I'm looking for a good home for this twin-sized quilt.