In Your Face, TorKnocker

Today my buddy Tork told me that I should take up needlepoint. As if I don't already have a craft that I can use to construct completely sweet things he can't even figure out. Yeah, needlepoint is cool, but I can only concentrate on so much at once.

Besides, crochet allows me to make awesome things.

Recently I created the Awesomest Thing I Ever Made. It has even unseated the previous Awesomest Thing I Ever Made, which you haven't seen since I never got around to taking pictures of it.

I got a couple of pictures of the new thing, though.

This, in case you can't tell, is a cat tunnel. I bought five 11 (or so) inch brass rings and crocheted around them to construct this thing for my cats to run though.

This wasn't my idea, by the way. I got it from pictures of one that somebody else posted. The "pattern" I used* recommended 9" rings, but my cats are fatasses and I didn't really see how they'd be comfortable in a tunnel that small. I think the size rings I got came out just about right.

*I looked at a pattern, but you don't really need one for this. If you have any experience with crochet you can do it. There are 14 rows between each ring, alternating half double crochet and double crochet. That's about as much pattern as you need, and that much structure isn't even necessary.

So I made this thing over the course of many weeks and finally set it out for the cats fully expecting them to ignore it forever.

Two of them did.

But sweet dumb Felix decided to make it his second home.


Sorry about the censor bar. My blog is cursed. Pets whose pictures I post tend to disappear forever. I like having Felix around, he appreciates my art, so I had to take steps.

I'm really happy with how this came out. It used up a lot of scrap yarn that I had lying around (much of this yarn was remainders of previous projects featured on this blog) and got to make a cool place for Felix to hide from my dog. It's really awesome and I'd recommend this project to any cat owner who crochets.

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My Grandmother had a Cat Named Socks

He was a real booger, too.

(By the way, I'm testing out a new blog editor, so things may or may not look or act weird. So if the blog's screwy, this is why.)

So the title is just a "clever" way to say I made some socks. I've made them before, and always planned to make more. Now I've finally gotten around to it. Both pairs I'm showing you today I made while at school. It's a convenient time to make smallish things.

The first pair is the project I mentioned before, that used horrible atrocious yarn. Take a look at the finished product:

Scary, huh? I think so. But as I told my horrified students, (the sensible ones were horrified, anyway, there's always one or two who will say, "I think they look awesome!") it's not like I'm planning to wear them to the Queen's Garden Party. They're slipper socks to wear around the house, pretty much, and they work fine for that.

Making these socks was mostly pretty straightforward. I do have one nit to pick, and that's that the people who wrote the pattern are under the impression that women do not have calves. The cuffs go in a straight tube up from the ankles leaving no room for the natural curve of a woman's leg. Yes, the stitch used on the cuff is stretchy, but it's not that stretchy. It took me a long time to finish these socks because I knew if I just stitched up the cuff like I was supposed to I'd never be able to wear them, and I was undecided on how to go about solving my problem. I thought about a couple of options with creative lacing and whatnot, but in the end I just went back in with my hook and added to the cuff. They're pretty comfortable, now.

The little colored thready worm looking things are a part of the yarn, lest you think (like some of my students did) that I went in with a needle and thread and added each one individually by hand.

As you can see, it's just regular yarn and there's this colored thread in there that every so often emerges in this brightly colored protrusion.

It seemed like a good idea when I was buying it, and I'm sure this kind of yarn has its place in the world, but it didn't thrill me while I was working with it. Not great sock material. As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I was in a hurry the morning I decided to use this for my new sock project.

I know those thread tumors look like they'd be uncomfortable to wear, but fortunately they seem to naturally form on one side when you're crocheting in the round. You just have to make sure that side is the outside. Observe:

That's the inside of my sock, and while I had yarn maggots appearing on the inside of the cuff, on the darker part where I was crocheting in the round they all stayed on the outside where they belong. These socks are pretty comfortable as long as I don't do lots of marching around in them, which I wouldn't because look at them:

And now, to prove that I'm capable of making things that are not horrible, my other pair of socks:

I absolutely love the yarn I used, though it's too expensive for me to make anything big out of. It's even more colorful than what you can see in these pictures, with the yarn being made up of three strands of differently colored variegated yarn that nevertheless seems to work together to make a nice rainbow effect. The pattern goes for so long, though, that you can go through a whole ball of yarn and not get back to the color you started with. This can make it hard to change yarn seamlessly, as you can see in the toe of the right sock and just after the heel in the left sock.

(I still had plenty left in my yarn ball when I changed yarns for that left sock, but it was all coming out so dark and so... green! I wanted something brighter and with less greens in it. And then the new skein, after being nice and orange for a few rows, had to go right back to the green again. Doh!)

This is awesome yarn, even if the skeins never match even when they come from the same dye lot. You should buy some:

True story. My 12-year-old (half Mexican) cousin was feeling all full of himself and snarky, as 12-year-olds often do. He asked me to show him what I was working on and looked at the yarn and we had this conversation:

The Boy: Eww! Your yarn smells!

Me: That's because it's Mexican!

The Boy: Um... I was just kidding. It doesn't actually smell. I was just saying that.

Ha! That's how you put an insecure adolescent who is testing out his sense of humor to get a feel for what's funny for the first time in his place!

The yarn isn't actually Mexican, by the way. The label says it was manufactured in South Africa, so I guess in a way I just played Sun City. I love these socks.

I used the same pattern on these that I did on the other socks. This time, though, I knew ahead of time that the cuff would be a bastard. In order to fix the problem before it became a problem, this time I made the cuff shorter. It's only half as long as the pattern tells me to make it, and so these socks fit perfectly.

As a side note, I never tried these socks on until I was taking the pictures for this blog entry. They fit really well, though, and I'm still wearing them right now.

Socks!

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My toes get cold.

So I was visiting my grandmother last Summer, and one of my cousins came by the place for a visit. He was about 11 at the time and wanted me to show him how to crochet. I was glad to, so we searched the house for some cheap yarn he could use. (My grandmother knits, but we didn't want to use her nice yarn just to teach crochet.)

We finally found some Red Heart Super Saver in the bottom of one of her closets and set to it.

Unfortunately neither of us counted on two simple things:

• I have many fantastic teaching abilities, but I suck at teaching crochet.

• He is 11 and has a very short attention span.

So he was holding the yarn and the hook wrong, but I was powerless to show him how to hold them correctly or to explain how he was holding them wrong. (In fairness to him, there are numerous accepted ways to hold both the yarn and the hook, but he was still holding both wrong.) He managed to chain a bit and then get a few stitches done, but couldn't work up the ambition to keep going.

So ended the crochet lesson.

Not one to waste an opportunity, I frogged his work and used the yarn to make these:


Socks!

My grandmother's yarn is the purplish, bluish, pinkish variegated yarn. As you can see, I ran out of yarn near the end of the second sock. I wasn't too overcome with love over the color of the yarn (I did find it at the bottom of a closet, after all), and I didn't want to buy a whole new skien of it just for the last couple of inches of toe, so I used some other yarn I had lying around. You may recognize it as the yarn I used to make this blanket. I don't remember which project came first.

I kind of like the one red toe. For one thing, I always know which sock to put on my left foot. For another, when I wear these socks it kind of looks like I've recently suffered some horrible foot injury, which is kind of cool.

I know the socks look awful lying on the floor like that. They're not so bad on:


They're more slipper socks than anything else. The yarn I used is too bulky for the socks to fit inside most shoes. The knobbly stitch is kind of uncomfortable to walk on for too long at a time anyway. But for just hanging around the house on a day off from work? These socks rule.

I definitely have more socks on my list of future projects. I'd have to use a finer yarn, though.

Some day I may show you a pair that I started and then aborted, but there's not really enough of that to fill out an entire post. Maybe I'm due for another post of failed projects.

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Thrift Store Sweaters: Revisited

FINALLY, I'm ready to tell you how my sweater unravelling went! It took forever because of camera-related technical difficulties, but I've finally done it.



I'll start out by introducing you to one of my favorite tools ever, and one that came in very handy for this project:


My trusty seam ripper. I love this thing. I've had this very seam ripper since I was a little kid and my grandmother was teaching me how to sew. As its name might imply, this thing is perfect for taking seams apart. Just jam the pointy end in there and use the sharpish part in the crook to cut the threads. (Easier to do than to explain). Then rip the seam open as far as you can (fun!) and repeat. Every crafting person should have one of these. They're great.

They're good for shoulder pads too.



Lots of times a shoulder pad will only be held on by a thread or two. It's way easier to remove shoulder pads with a seam ripper than with scissors because with scissors it's easier to accidentally snip into some of the yarn you're trying to save. Don't even get me started on how well they work on removing labels. Yay for seam rippers!

So while I ripped up many sweaters, the only one I'm going to give you the step-by-step for is this one:


The reason for this is that this sweater was the biggest pain in the ass, so there's the most to tell.

Before I get too far into complaining about this sweater, there is one reason I liked it. The yarn was big, which made it easier to photograph. This is pretty much the only pic of a good seam I got where you can kind of make out the seam:

You can see near the top where I've started pulling the seam apart. If you're lucky, the seam will be crocheted and you can just find the correct end of the magic string and pull and the seam comes apart. (This does NOT reduce the usefulness of the beloved seam ripper! You never know when you might get stuck! Besides, it helps when getting those seams started.)

Anyway, there's a reason this sweater was a bitch, and you can barely see it in this pic:

Fuzz. Lots of fuzz and lint all over this sweater. It had actually melded itself into the fibers of the sweater and made the deconstruction a much more difficult prospect than just pulling on a string.

My preferred method for unraveling is to unravel straight to a yarn ball winder, like so:

If you have a cooperative sweater you can just turn the crank and it will just pull the yarn along and do most of the job for you. This sweater wasn't so cooperative. The lint made the yarn stick and just turning the crank to do the unraveling would have threatened to break the winder at worst, and wind the ball far too tight at best. Besides that, I don't want to wrap up all that lint.

That meant that I had to pull out long sections of yarn by hand (which in some cases took a surprising amount of muscle) and then go over every inch and pull off any large hunks of lint.

After a while I had big balls of fuzzy lint floating around my table and that became irritating, so I broke out the scotch tape:


The tape was good for wrangling the lint and keeping it out of my hair. That doesn't look so bad, I know, but this is what I ended up with after doing one sleeve:


And this is some very densely packed lint!

One sleeve later, and this is what I get:


And work goes on and on. Five sweaters later, and here are the results (with some comments thrown in):

One ball of yarn for each sleeve, and two each for the front and back.


The white sweater was also a pain in the butt, but not because of lint. This yarn wasn't twisted very tightly when it was spun. You can kind of see this in the one piece of yarn trailing off the bottom ball there. This meant that if at any time I pulled the yarn too overzealously there was a very good chance that I would tear it apart. Very annoying.


The green gave me no trouble, mostly, except that the seams around the shoulders were bad seams and that cost me a lot of yarn.


The pink yarn came from what was once a GAP sweater, which according to one of my sweater unraveling tutorials, is a good kind of sweater to rip up.

Nothing much to say about the red yarn. I just like this tower I built here.


And so concludes, at long last, the great sweater odyssey. I already have a project in mind to use some of this yarn up (from my crochet calendar, no less!), but I'll have to finish a couple of other things first. I can hardly wait!

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Some Hats for my Brother

My hat model Vena is back, and this time she's modeling some hats I made for my brother!



But first, check this other hat that has nothing to do with my brother:


I used two different kinds of yarn for this. It looks like I used a pink yarn and a purple yarn, but actually I used a purple yarn around the base and a purple/pink variegated yarn for the top. Yeah. Like you care, right?



Actually, although I think it looks ok, I'm unsatisfied with this hat for a few reasons.

The first is that the pattern just plain sucked. The hat is actually supposed to have a puffy little pom-pom thing on the top, but when I tried to make it the pattern was so confusing that the resulting mess looked less like a pom-pom than like a purple and pink crocheted booger. The picture included with the pattern was no help since the hat was photographed from an angle that didn't show the pom-pom. I didn't have a clue how I was supposed to attach that to the top of the hat and make it look ok, so I left it off and I think the hat is better for it.

Secondly, this town is crap for buying yarn in. The hat required sport weight yarn, and the only sport weight yarn I could find was in baby colors. I didn't really want a purple and pink baby-colored hat, but there wasn't much I could do about it. The worst part was when I asked the girl in the yarn section at Jo-Ann's if they had any sport weight yarn and her reaction was pretty much, "Spore...t waaaait?" It's a pretty basic yarn size, and it's somewhat disheartening when the person who works at one of your key yarn suppliers has never heard of it. I believe it's possible to buy non-baby sport weight yarn in this town now, in Wal-Mart of all places, but it's been a while since I've needed to buy any so I could be wrong about that.

Finally, the hat just doesn't fit. It looks like it fits, but it's too small. These things are supposed to loosen up a little with wear, so I've let Vena wear it for a few months now to try to stretch it out, but it still leaves divots in my forehead whenever I try to wear it. I should probably just find some little girl who likes purple and pink and give her the hat.

But anyway, on to my brother. I've made many hats for him, and I'd like to share them now. In case you're interested, the patterns for all the hats that follow came from the excellent Stitch and Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker.

This is the first hat I ever made for my brother. He picked the pattern and the yarn.


He liked the earflaps. That was one of the main reasons he picked that pattern. He wanted something unusual.

He told me he really liked the hat.



Since I made him the hat my brother has become a trucker. He's away from home for long periods of time. Often he has to sleep in very cold places and it's not like you can just leave the truck heater on all night. It gets very cold in there sometimes. He tells me there are mornings when he wakes up and he can see his breath in the air before he even gets out of bed. Seems like a good place to have a hat, right?


So how come over Christmas while I was poking around in his room I saw the hat sitting there and not with my brother on his trip in his cold truck?! Huh?! (The hat was in plain site-- I'm not so nosy I was digging around or anything)

He says it's because the hat is too big and it falls off his head. Huh. I can see that when I put it on Vena, but Brother never mentioned that until it was obvious he wasn't wearing it. Before that he told me he wore it all the time. He never told me it was too big. Hmph.

Anyway, I guess that the last two hats are in the bad hat category, but so you don't think I'm completely incompetent, I have managed to make good hats.

Despite his total dissage of the earflap hat, Brother did ask for more knitted caps (knitted? Hmph!!) for Christmas. I decided to give it another shot. Since he was going to be out of town on Christmas day, I had a little extra time to finish the hats before I needed to fork them over. Here we go:


I made it big and bulky on purpose. The idea is warmth. It's not too big, though. I tried it on myself before I gave it to him and it stays on fine. It comes down over the ears, which is nice.


I think I was in some kind of 70's mood when I bought all the yarn for these creations, by the way. You may notice a sort of 70's color theme. This hat, for example, matches my couch. The big hat came out in some kind of cool camo-ish stripy patterns, which was entirely unintentional. Just like the stripes on the next hat.


A more traditional basic beanie hat.


I really like how the colors look here. I think they go well together.

Though, as I said, the stripes were completely unintentional. They just came out that way. You can tell when you look at the top of the hat. It's all smooged and random up there, and that was how I'd hoped the rest of the hat would come out. I'm not opposed to the stripes, though.

Speaking of stripes...


This hat was intentionally striped. I used one of those self-striping yarns. Red Heart Strata.


I really like how this hat came out. It's one of my favorites of the bunch, and a hat I'd make for myself. The next hat is my other favorite.



Finally! A yarn that didn't insist on striping itself against my will!


After my other yarns striped, I was glad when this one chose to come out in a nicely randomized pattern. This is another hat I'd actually wear myself. I am, of course, speaking as somebody who is not really a hat person.

Here comes the last hat:


This one was finished well after I gave the other hats to my brother. In fact, I only finished it this weekend and haven't had a chance to give it to him yet. As you can see, it's another bulky hat.


I think the single color works well with this hat. It's nice and plain and understated.

Brother claims to like the other hats I've given him. He darn well better. I worked hard on these! He tells me that on especially cold nights he'll layer all the hats at once, with the big bulky one on top. He's going to stretch them all out if he keeps that up, and then he'd better not complain to me that they're too big! Then again, it's possible he's not wearing them after all, and is just saying he likes them to make me feel better. Who knows? I like them, though. And now you can judge for yourself.

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