I’m Not a ‘MEMEr’ But…

I picked this one up at Bezzie’s blog and it looked like fun. It was interesting to see how many things I could check off, and which ones I’d done that she hadn’t.

Things I’ve Done (In Bold)

1. Started my own blog
2. Slept under the stars - not intentionally, but we couldn’t find the cover for the peak of the tent.
3. Played in a band - for years…
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower - more than once.
6. Given more than I can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightening at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning - but it was from this awesome Mongolian BBQ…soooo good…
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown my own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort.
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors - you…mean…Oklahoma?
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight - and it was gorgeous.
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted - art class.
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain - any day it’s raining.
53. Played in the mud - I’m sure.
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business - small but true
58. Taken a martial arts class. (Go go, Yellow Belt!)
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy - I have a little bucket with things from my childhood
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial - I’m putting this down as a maybe. Mom?
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades - no, but we did go inner-tubing down a crocodile-infested river…
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle - all th- I mean…no…
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book - no, but I’m in a published book!!!
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car - we once bought a car that was only a year old.
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible - *cough* um…no.
86. Visited the White House - maybe?
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating - near enough as makes no never mind. Although I avoided hatchet duty.
88. Had chickenpox - check.
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous - He’ll be famous someday.
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one - no one really, really close, but yes.
94. Had a baby - twice. Bonus points!
95. Seen the Alamo in person - and got sunburned there, too.
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit - sort of. But they settled.
98. Owned a cell phone - Of course.
99. Been stung by a bee - no. Yellow Jacket? Yup. Hornet? Repeatedly. Wasp? Frequently. Bee? No. I’m trying to avoid it, too.
100. Rode an elephant. - Thanks, Mom!

So that was fun. Life is exciting.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just wanted to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving! The boys and I are spending the day over at a friend’s house. Bring on the pie! But don’t forget…

Christmas is coming.

And suddenly -

Ta-da! Ridiculously adorable, and absolutely perfect for a little baby boy. I did run into one little snag - it wasn’t until I’d cast off that I realized there were no buttonholes of any sort written into the pattern. Oops. Fortunately, (as I was mulling over the course of action I should take in the fastener department) I got the news that the baby shower had been postponed. The woman who was going to be surprised found out, and requested a different time…and then shortly after word was passed along that she wanted to wait until much closer to her due date so that her mother could come. Fair enough. (I also found out that the reason for the extremely short notice in the beginning was that a friend of hers wanted to help plan it and be here for it, and as she’s moving soon the shower had to be sooner rather than later. Again, fair enough.)

Anyway! I let the little sweater sit in my basket, almost completely finished, for about two days, before I decided to go for it and add some buttons. I made three little figure-eights with the yarn (crochet chains, five chains for each side of the loop), sewed one side of the eight and a button to one side of the sweater, and a button to the other side. They are beautiful, beautiful buttons, too.

Gorgeous. I bought them at the Daiso, 10 buttons for 100 yen. Hah. It was really difficult to get a decent picture of them. It was pretty dim outside…because it started snowing!

It was the year’s first snowfall, and Max noticed it first. “Mommy, what’s happening out the window?” I’ll tell you what was happening. Big, fat, huge white snowflakes were falling down as thick as thieves. The boys were ecstatic. They immediately headed for the door and I had to drag them back for coats, shoes, and mittens. Snow…there’s just something magical about it, and especially for children (who don’t see snow and think about things like shoveling, and icy roads, and frostbite, and the months of cold ahead…) it holds an irresistible fascination. They danced in the snow. They laughed and spun. They tried to catch snowflakes as though they were bubbles. But you know what? You can’t really see the snow very well in that picture, let’s see if the next one shows it more clearly…

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EEK! That’s only four hours after the snow started. I honestly didn’t think it would stick. I mean, I was walking around in short sleeves yesterday. Last night it rained, and everything was wet - but I guess 9 hours of snowfall (yes, NINE hours, it is still snowing and it has not stopped since it began this morning) will have its way.

This is a picture I took seven hours after the snow started. Thanksgiving may still be a week away, but with snow this deep, I think Max said it best: “Mommy, it’s time for CHRISTMAS!”

Procrastination Makes it Happen

I’ve often observed in the past that procrastinating a task makes me exert extra energy in another area to make ignoring the first task easier. For instance, If I’m putting off a phone call, I might wash the dishes. If I’m avoiding scrubbing the bathroom, I might fold the laundry, or sweep the floors. And if I’m trying to put off designing a sweater -

I might launch into a project that seems easy only by comparison. What you see here is the first third (maybe first two-fifths) of a long-sleeved lace shrug. It’s gorgeous. I’m using fingering weight yarn (Red Heart Lustersheen! Unexpectedly cottony texture), it’s got a very long cuff which will have buttons, but the shape I’m shooting for is like the slouchy shrug Drew Barrymore wears in Music and Lyrics. (Which I watch all the time. Good movie.) I’m ridiculously pleased with this project. Another nice touch is the lace pattern, which when stretched out…

reveals a subtle floral pattern that I think is just beautiful. Now, I would have a lot more of this done than I do, but on Wednesday one of my friends found out that the baby she’s having is a boy. The email containing that news was quickly followed by one from another friend, saying that we were going to surprise her with a shower…in a week! (A week? Don’t they know I need to MAKE THINGS?! …I was indignant for a while, but someone else told me that the rush is so that another of our friends who is moving in about a month will be able to come. Fair enough.) Anyway, I decided to make a BICO, since it’s billed as a three-hour baby sweater, so I could be sure of finishing in time. I had some yarn I thought would work back in the bottomless stash, I found the right hook, and got to work! And, I mean, I totally finished it, but it’s a little…how do I put this…

Froofy? I mean, it’s a little…floofy. For a boy. For someone else, especially, whose boy-froofy-level-tolerance I do not know. (She has daughters but this is her first son. I don’t know.) Add to that the fact that it turns out Red Heart Baby Clouds is perceptibly thicker than the Homespun called for in the pattern, so that I created by accident a sweater more likely to fit a 12-18 month old than a 6 month old, and it grows even less…possibly appropriate. Bother. Fortunately, I began far enough in advance that there was still time for another project!

I thought about crocheting another sweater, but I’ve crocheted three baby sweaters in the last month. Free, appropriately sized, unisex and CUTE patterns are a bit thin on the ground for crochet baby sweaters, so I decided I’d go for a knit sweater, even though I’m a slower knitter. After all, how long could something actually called a ‘5-hour baby sweater’ take?

Why yes, those needles ARE a bit short for this project, thanks for noticing! I’m making the Baby Boy 5-Hour sweater, which eliminates the little lacy holes you see in the classic 5-hour baby sweater to make it more masculine. But it’s cute, right? And clever. I haven’t had to reattach the yarn once. You knit from the center front to the sleeve, knit the sleeve flat, slip stitch up to close the sleeve and bring your working yarn back up to the level of the rest of the stitches, knit across the back, work the second sleeve the same as the first, knit across, and then work the body flat. Ingenious! So, the sweater is taking me longer than I think it would take a more accomplished knitter (or someone without children…) but I should be finished in good time, and that thing is adorable.

Sweet, Sweet Avoidance

Well. Sweater design is proving a worthy adversary: despite hours of work, we have returned to 7 unused skeins and thus have nothing to show. (Well, unless you’re interested in seeing one skein re-wrapped in its own entrails. But I don’t feel like photographing, formatting, and uploading that just for giggles.) So, while I regroup, I’m distancing the problem by whipping out lots and lots of small, easy projects! For example:

Magnet cars! We saw a little boy with some of these in church a few weeks ago: it’s just felt sewn around a round magnet with four small buttons for wheels. They’re fast, fun, and well-loved. (I’m pretty sure the peanut gallery is going to demand more colors.) So that was this morning…last night I tossed off two versions of a design I’m writing up to submit for Crochet Uncut’s last-minute project issue, due out in December. (If you’re not familiar, Crochet Uncut is a new crochet e-zine that’s just starting up.) Obviously I can’t show you pictures yet, but trust me - it was fun.

Now I’ve put away the buttons and felt and I’m very carefully not looking directly at the sweater yarn glaring at me from the side table, thinking that surely, there must be one more thing I can do before I go back to that…oh, well. I suppose I have some mending that I could do…

Stop - Sweater Time!

Break it down.

Here we have another baby/toddler sweater of questionable aesthetic value made for no one in particular. (Seriously, I have two words for you: tricolor pasta. It’s kind of hard to see the olive green in this picture, but I was having spinach noodle flashbacks while I was working on this.) The pattern is Kelly’s Sweater from Bella Bambina Knits - although it is, of course, crocheted - and the yarn is the same Daiso brand of ‘Space Dyde’ yarn as I used in the Magma Sweater. I had to modify it slightly when I ran out of yarn: the sleeves are edged with a round of slip stitches instead of single crochet. (Yes, it was that close. Darn it.) Here’s another picture, because I spent a week on it:

I would have liked to use more buttons, but the package only came with five, and I used two on my panta and one on something I made for Charlie’s Halloween costume. Which I will now show you because I don’t care if it is November, cute is cute.

Cute children! I made Charlie a little tool belt in about thirty minutes before we dashed out to a party and I used the third button to secure it. I think it would have stayed put a lot better if those overalls had belt loops, but they do not. (I made Max’s fireman costume with black sweats and cheap yellow reflective tape I bought at the Daiso - love that place. Sadly, the tape has now been removed.) Anyway, I think the above sweater looks fine with just two buttons.

But what, you may be asking yourself, is up with all the random and pointless sweater-making? Melissa, don’t you have a mile-long list of things to make that will actually be *used*? Why yes, yes I do. But I wanted to practice structuring sweaters because I want to get better at designing them - and it’s go time!

Can’t touch this.

Takin Care of Business: Contest Winners!

Wow, there were so many great entries that it was really difficult to pick out the best three. Fortunately, I was able to disqualify one excellent poem because it was written by my sister! (Whom I suspect of simply being drawn helplessly to a poetry challenge, but hey! If you want the patterns just let me know, I’ll send you any you like.) Let’s read that poem now:

Let’s have a round of applause for that excellent poem and honorable mention! Now, for the third place winner: Aimee!

Congratulations, Aimee! You will be receiving free copies of my Good News Newsboy, Shooting Starf, and Sweet Cocoa Cloche patterns. I hope you enjoy them!

Let’s move on to our second place winner, Holly!

Holly, for that excellent haiku, you will be receiving a Toy Bundle, which includes 5 patterns: Chaco, Lloopy Llama, Silly Monkey, Scarlet Macaw Hand Puppet, and the Jungle Bugs! Happy hooking!

Our first place prize goes to an entry so well written, lengthy and … humorously up-front about it’s purpose, that it was an easy pick for the win. Congratulations, Joe - and therefore, Jackie.

Congratulations, Joe and Jackie! You’ve won a copy of every pattern I currently publish. (Joe, that’s gotta count for something.)Winners will be personally contacted as soon as possible and delivery arrangements made. Thank you, everyone who entered! It was a blast - I hope you enjoyed it, too.