Teddy Bear Hat: A Real Bear to Make

You wouldn't think that the hat above would be that hard to make, but it was. I actually made the hat three times before I made it correctly. I made it once without first doing the so-called magic loop. I didn't think I needed to do that. Big mistake. I just crocheted five SC and SL them together. Then, because it said you don't connect them ("Do not join rounds"), in my head I was thinking, Oh, turn! But it didn't say turn. So I ended up with a hat that had a huge gap in it. Stupid me.

I realized that it was a spiral. It would have been super helpful if the instructions had SAID, this hat is done in a spiral, rather than, Do not join the rounds. That really threw me off. As I mentioned in the beginning, there is a thing called a magic ring or adjustable ring, but I was too stubborn, so I tried it twice without and got this wavy crappy frisbee like thing. Man does my stubbornness suck!

Finally, I took the frisbee thing in to work to show Christina who has made oodles of these hats and said, what am I doing wrong. And she said, "Did you do the magic ring?"

"Uh. I don't know how to do the magic ring."

"Just go to Youtube. I learn everything from youtube!"

So here is how you do the magic ring. It's how I was able to do the hat AND the ears. If I didn't know the magic ring, I would have three small frisbee things and one unhappy Canadian friend with a baby with a cold head. Thank God for youtube. And this lady at crochet-mania.blogspot.com for making a tutorial. I'm not going to give you the pattern because it's written really poorly and I don't think I will use it again. But if you really want it, it's on ravelry. Search Osito Baby Hat, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Crocheted Baby Items

I am throwing a baby shower for a friend and am finishing up her baby gifts. I couldn't resist using Her Royal Highness Berkeley as a model and you can see what she thinks of the idea. I think she looks cute. I was thinking she looked more Snoop Berkeley, but a friend pointed out that Queen La Berkeley would be more appropriate. Either way, she's a cutie. I have finished up the blanket and only have the monkey faces to do now. Here's a peek at how it looks:



Both the afghan and the hat came from the Stitch and Bitch Guide to Crochet, which I highly recommend. Here's a look at the border, which I really like. The border came from Nicky Epstein's Crocheting on the Edge. I've made this afghan twice and made it with two of her borders. It's nice, because it makes each afghan a unique gift. One was a more boyish border and this border seemed more girly and flowery.



I also made another hat with pink yarn from the monkey pattern and some booties to match.


I had to use my other dog Willow as a model, just so she wouldn't feel left out. 8-)


Now, I have to start cooking food for the shower! It'll be a tea party for 17. Woot.

Crocheted Wedding Dress

My friend sent me a link to 100 Layer Cake where they describe the beautiful wedding dress that the bride crocheted for herself out of doilies! It is gorgeous. The photo below is from 100 Layer Cake as well and is a close up of dress.


Read their blog for more details! It was quite an achievement.

Don't Get Crafty Friends Gift Cards to Jo-Ann's!

For Christmas I had asked for some items from Jo-Ann's craft store, so my brother and sister-in-law got me a gift card thinking that I could shop online or in the store. WRONG! Due to an incredibly stupid programming error on Jo-Ann's part, they have set up their website so that you have to enter an electronic card number and pin number and a plastic card number and pin number. ALL FOUR NUMBERS. If you only have a plastic gift card, you won't have the electronic numbers and if you have an electronic card, you won't have the plastic numbers. So you can't use the gift cards AT ALL online.

Of course, if you are a knitter or a crocheter, this is a big deal because Jo-Ann's carries very little stock of crochet and knitting paraphernalia. Ball winders: online purchase only. Stitch holders: online purchase only. You get the picture.

So when I called, two weeks ago and complained about this problem, I was told it would take 4 days to fix and I could go to store and use my card or wait 4 days and use it online. I waited 6 days. It still didn't work. It's been 2 weeks. It still doesn't work.

I guess I will go into a store and use the card or I won't be able to use my gift card at all. I hope this screw up is costing Jo-Ann's an enormous amount of money because they certainly aren't trying very hard to fix the problem and their customer service people are not very helpful.

Next year I will request stitchdiva gift cards instead. They have excellent customer service and actually understand the concept of gift cards.

Freeform Continued

I decided to do my freeform ruffle in Noro Aurora
#8, which is a really cool yarn that has a metallic bit to it (you can see a little bit of sparkle to it in the close up). I thought that two hanks would be plenty. But I underestimated the amount of yarn that freeform takes.

By the time I had done the chain stitch and about a third of the ruffle, I had gone through most of the two hanks, so I figured I needed about 6 more hanks. Problem was, Noro had discontinued the color! Say hello to Ebay. I found this yarn store on Ebay: A Yarn for All Seasons. They had the Noro I needed and they had it for a GREAT price.

I wanted to show you all how it was coming along. I also wanted to give you a feel for what you can do for your freeform projects should you ever choose to do any. At one time, I was fascinated with flowers and was doing lots of them just for the fun of it. I ended up with bowls of crocheted flowers and no place to put them. I think I have found a place for them!

So here are some photos of the ruffles, of the ruffles with some of the flowers and an overview of the ruffle with the flowers plopped down on them.

Freeform Project

I made a purple shawl quite awhile ago and it needed a bit more to it. So after reading Myra Wood's book, I decided to add some freeform embellishment. She calls it a surface crochet ruffle (p. 55). I think it is a form of doodle lace. The first thing you have to do is set your guide line out on the shawl, scarf or whatever piece you are working on. I used a black thread and pinned it onto the shawl. Here's an overview of the squiggle and then I also have a close up shot of the black thread being pinned down. The pinning was a bit of a pain and they did fall out. I'm wondering how to do that in a better way next time. It didn't seem to be very efficient. It also didn't seem to facilitate crocheting the yarn to the shawl, but I am getting ahead of myself.


The next step is to start chain stitching and to randomly attach the chain stitches to the shawl so that it will resemble the shape that your guide thread has picked out. You can incorporate your guide thread into the look or plan to pull it out later when you finish (I pulled it out).

If you look at the top photo again, you can see in the lower left hand corner that there are some chain stitches starting. The process was not an efficient one, as I started to say. There was a lot of turning the shawl this way and that trying to get the right angle. But perhaps that is just a quirk of freeform.

I have now finished the entire chain and pulled out the guide thread and have started on the ruffle and am now getting really excited about the whole project. I've looked through the basket of crocheted flowers I have made in the past and there are quite a few that will work for this shawl. I am using a lovely Noro yarn for the ruffle and I think it will be quite a piece of work when it is done.

Finished Scarf Present for a Friend

Bernat has a wonderful free pattern for a long, crocheted scarf out of
one skein of their alpaca yarns that I have used several times to great
effect. It is also quite a quick scarf to make. Here is the Bernat photo to the right.

I used a hand dyed yarn from Nova Scotia that I picked up in Toronto. The yarn is a lovely shade of blue green, and is very soft. It has alpaca in it, which will make it a very warm scarf as well. It is also a bit of a novelty yarn, almost an eyelash yarn, but not quite. An eyelash yarn has yarn that sticks out like little eyelashes, but this yarn has little circles of yarn, small circles, kind of odd, but very pretty. It just makes it hard to work with as the pattern is mostly double triples with a picot. When I took the photos, I am not sure if color came out quite true. But it is close enough for you to get the idea. You can see the end of the scarf on the photo to the right. That's the closing circle. It's very fuzzy. Then the whole scarf veers off into the half circles and is quite charming. The whole scarf is quite long and wraps around several times. I like a long scarf.

My friend Sandy is off to Alaska to visit her son for two weeks, so she really needs a warm scarf as living in Florida, we don't have much call for cold weather clothing. The thing about this scarf is, it is surprisingly warm. You wouldn't believe how warm an alpaca scarf can keep you, especially, this one! It rocks! Try it. Makes a great gift and I kept one for myself.

Booty Call

I found a great pattern for baby booties. The only problem was that there
was no gauge and so the first one I made was for Gigantor's baby (see pink booty next to the green one of a normal booty. The ankle of the gigantor baby must be about 5 inches around! Yikes! But I carried on and did another one with much tighter stitches (a little strain as I am mostly not a tight crocheter) but the results are really cute, I think. I have two friends who have had babies whom I will give the green on and another I am making with a multi-colored Italian thread. The green booty was made with bamboo thread, which is really soft, but tends to unravel a bit and if you are crocheting tight, is a bit difficult to work with. I topped it off with a ladder yarn with sparkly green and blue bits.

Here is a shot of the in progress booty.






I also finished up one of my student's scarves! Woot for me! She selected
a bobble stitch scarf from Fun and Funky Crochet by Sophie Britten. It is made with a soft blue chunky wool yarn and is quite warm. She goes to Northwestern, so it should do its job of keeping her nice and toasty warm. It was a fairly easy scarf to make, but I, personally, don't like the bobble on a scarf unless there is something on the back to hide the indentations. I think this scar is made to be worn so that you flip one side over your shoulder and only see it bobble side up. It's really long. The bobbles are very pretty. I don't have consistency on them, but that is the problem with starting a scarf and then finishing it 7 months later on a pattern you have only done once. I need to make one first for practice, but really, who has time for that? It will have to be "handmade" in the true sense of warts and all!

Mom and dad visited over Thanksgiving and they brought Willow a ver cute hat that should keep her cool when she plays frisbee. She seems to like it pretty well and kept it on while we all took countless photos of her.

Now it is back to cleaning out the Holiday decorations to get the tree up.Yea Christmas!