Runaway October

Still try­ing to decide if all 3 of these would work well together. Flow­ers and Stripes is City GIrl by Berna­tex and Giraffe print is Happy Trails by Bernatex.

We’d love to have you join the fun. Check out Tamara’s blog 1/4 of an inch for info!

So, is a crochet-a-long really a crochet-a-long (CAL) if no one else is cro­chet­ing with you?

When I saw news of the Lion Brand CAL pop up in the blog-o-sphere I knew I wanted to par­tic­i­pate, espe­cially since most “A-Longs” are for knit­ters. The pat­tern selected was for a sam­pler afghan, which is cool because it might have kept my atten­tion. Of course I don’t have much of a yarn stash so I had to wait to get yarn until the spouse was in an agree­able mood. I decided on using a Bernat Berella “4” in a nice heathered gray. Typ­i­cally I steer very clear of acrylic yarns, but it was on clear­ance. By the time I had every­thing together I real­ized that I was already weeks behind on the CAL. 

The orig­i­nal pat­tern turned out to be 10 blocks each of three dif­fer­ent pat­terns. Meh. I decided to ven­ture on my own, so I picked up Basic Cro­chet Stitches — 250 Stitches to Cro­chet by Erica Knight.

The book is well writ­ten and dis­played. It gives a brief intro­duc­tion to sev­eral basic stitches and how to read cro­chet­ing dia­grams. It doesn’t cover every stitch used in the book, so I have had to go look­ing for some of the more obscure ones. But so far so good. As I near the end of a cur­rent square, I become anx­ious to start and learn a new one. With 30+ squares in this afghan it’s essen­tial that I keep interested.

This color is more true to the actual color.

I def­i­nitely want to get my hands on more of the Har­mony Guides, such as The Har­mony Guides: Edg­ings and Fin­ish­ing Stitches: 250 to Cro­chet,

and The Har­mony Guides: 101 Stitches to Crochet.

They even have some inter­est­ing look­ing knit­ting books — The Har­mony Guides: Cable & Aran Stitches: 250 Stitches to Knit. I do love a nice cable.

I fig­ure that if it comes out nicely I can give it away as a Christ­mas present, and if it doesn’t… well, the boys wont mind a few wonky squares as long as it’s warm and snuggly.

Oh! And what post is com­plete with­out pic­tures of my helper?

Thanks for read­ing.

What projects are you cur­rently work­ing on?

Yeah, I seem to be in a blog­ging slump lately. It seems like every­thing I see that’s cool is not new or has been blogged a bazil­lion times before. Not much is going on in our lives, not much craft­ing because I’m too lazy to clean the kitchen table off, same ol’ same ol’, ya know?

I orig­i­nally started this blog with intents to post things that I had sewn or cooked, but I don’t do nearly enough of it to post often enough. I want to warn my read­ers that my Grandma yells at me if I don’t post enough. (Love you grandma! ) Now I’m think­ing that maybe I’ll just post the stuff that I think is cool?

What do you guys think? Should I stick with crafts and kids, or expand to include extra stuff?

And here’s a lit­tle eye candy for those of us who can’t go out­side with­out fac­ing 3^rd degree burns.

Images [Via]

That if you sub­scribe to my blog through an RSS Feeder that you can get a daily update on things I thought were cool enough to book­mark? For those of you who are a.) into crafts and sewing or b.) have strange quirky senses of humor it will totally knock your socks off! Check it out!

Isn’t this quilt to die for?

You can win it just by going to this blog and leav­ing one sim­ple com­ment. You can bet your sweet bippy that I already did! http://oldredbarnco.blogspot.com/2008/07/win-this-quilt.html