First Day of School

The first day of school was a delight. I found that my new parking space was in a surprisingly close proximity to the building where I worked! With all the construction there were terrible rumors that we would all be shunted out to the hinterlands and of course we believed all the rumors. But frankly, I thought, that is not a battle I am going to fight. I didn't make a peep when lower division kicked us to the fence several years ago in an effort to get their people closer to their lower division building. There are just some battles that you know are not going to win. That was one. Well, actually, I did peep quite a bit. I just peeped to myself and to my friends sotto voce and stomped around on occasion.

But back to the first day. It went very well. There was the madness. People rushing around. Children crying, missing classes. Schedules were read wrong. Some parents actually sent their children to school without a book back, without sharpened pencils, without their schedules. These weren't high school kids, this one in particular was a 6th grader. That wasn't a bright spot on the day. Poor little guy. But other than that child's really stressful day, which the warm and fuzzy middle division took care of, my day was a relative oasis of calm.

So yea!

Stress Times Ten

Well, I did ask for it. I did ask for a puppy to raise for the Southeastern Guide Dogs for the Blind. I did ask to teach a class on interviewing WWII vets and filming those interviews and turning them into a documentary to be turned into an end of the year premier event. Go Web 2.0 and new technology! I did ask to continue all my current job responsibilities and library director and department chair, and lead the book club, advisory, sponsor four clubs, be on the board of a professional organization and be the technology director. I did offer to write an article for a library journal. I did offer to do a one unit challenge with two colleagues on the media and new technology and its affect on the 24 hour news cycle.

I did ask for it. So I shouldn't be surprised that I am a bit stressed by it all. School starts today.

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.

Creative Crochet Lace: A Freeform Look at Classic Crochet by Myra Wood

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Excellent book for the crocheter who wants a guiding hand to explain how to freeform. Myra Wood explains the technique behind freeform crochet and gives you some sample patterns to try out and venture forth. She breaks it down into five forms: funky filet, doodle lace, tossed salad, wild Irish crochet, and organic lace scrumbling. She shows you major projects she created with each type of freeform along with a basic outline of how it was done. She then talks about embellishment.



She goes through some more projects that vary in difficulty and then profiles different freeform masters and shows examples of their works. This is a must have book for anyone interested in freeform crochet.




View all my reviews.

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.

Where I was when I first heard about our SEGDI guide dog puppy!

On Thursday at 2:45 pm at Bok Gardens and Tower in Lake Wales I saw that I had a voice mail message, so I listened to it while I was waiting for our 3 pm tour of the Pinehurst Estate, a lovely Spanish-style house from the early 1930s that is also part of the Bok Gardens. It was from Chuck Heitala, the SEGDI area coordinator for Pinellas county, who had left a very casual message asking that I call him back. I thought he might need a puppy sitter and since we had my parents visiting and were already sitting a friend's pug (Kaia, see earlier post) I thought briefly about not returning the message since we couldn't puppysit, but then realized that wouldn't be polite. So I called him back.

When I got him on the phone he got right to the point and wondered if I might be interested in taking home a male, black lab puppy! OH MY! He said that he would be ready for us to pick up on July 21st if we were interested! WOOT! Talk about doing a happy dance out in public. That was me. In the Bok gardens, in front of Pinehurst, doing a happy dance.

So the next step is to call SEGDI and to set up an appointment to sign the papers. Once we sign the papers, we can start visiting our puppy for private puppy hugging sessions. Yep, that's the ticket! Earlier this week I went with mom and dad on a secret puppy scouting mission to see what kind of puppies they had and to hug some of the puppies, but was bitterly disappointed by the puppy hugging: see photo at right. There were four puppies and about 30 people in a circle all vying for puppy time. It was awful. I felt really bad trying to get a puppy's attention from a child. I mean, what kind of person does that? So, I didn't. One of the volunteers, brought a puppy down to our end and gave one of the black labs to the lady next to me (could it have been my black lab? Perhaps?! ;-). She kindly passed him to me for a cuddle. I passed him to the person next to me. Then stood up and looked in the kennels and told mom and dad we were leaving. I really just wanted to find out the types of puppies that they had: mostly labs and goldadors and one litter of collies. So I just crossed my fingers and hoped for a lab or goldadore as that is the kind we have the most experience with and lo and behold that is what we got! And a black lab at that! The kind we love the most! How fabulous.

Buddha and Thud and Matt and Bear would be so happy.