New Year...New Start!

Life hasn't stopped my crafting, but it did derail my blogging for a while. Actually, I did manage to keep my other blogs more up-to-date than this one. Check out the activities of my middle school knitting group, Stitch for a Cause. I've been really proud of the girls this year. We just completed a scarf project for our local women's shelter and delivered 110 scarves just before Christmas.

I'm still trying to decide what we'll start with after the holidays. I have a few of them working on squares for blankets and we'll continue that, but I always like to do something fun in the winter to keep the enthusiam up. This year we don't have any boys in the group and in past years I've had as many as half the group made up of boys. That makes me think I need to come up with a guy-challenge this month... One year, we had a "Real Men Knit" challenge with boys knitting against some male teachers (mostly just one) to see who could complete more squares in two weeks. They beat him by one square and were so excited. Since I don't have any guys coming right now, I think I will start with an "Eye Spy" challenge. Any boy I see knitting each day will get entered in a drawing for something cool. Got to work out the details, but that's my idea for now...


Another new crafting endeavor for me was started by "Santa" this year. Santa brought us a hamster for Christmas named Twyla. My daughter adores her and loves to play with her. I have been reading a lot about hamsters on the web and noticed some people have been making little pouches for them. You can put the hamster in the pouch for some lap time or even put them in cages for a sleep bed. Oddly, you can't find these pouches in stores. I'm pretty crafty, so I put my minimal sewing skills to work and came up with my own version of these pouches and have been calling them Hammy Sacks!

I have put a bunch on Etsy and have supplies to make more. I even made a little logo featuring Twyla. I've seen other people expanding the idea to rabbits and ferrets, but right now I'm sticking with hamsters. Hopefully I'll sell a few! If you are interested in one, visit my Esty store. I'm open to custom orders and am posting new sack patterns (for boy and girl hamsters and owners), so hopefully you'll see something you like.

So, my New Year's Crafty Resolutions are:

1. Increase my completion percentage for my projects (aka, finish what I start)
2. Blog at least once every two weeks
3. Put more time into my Esty shop and hopefully increase sales (so I can buy more craft stuff!)
4. Inspire others to be crafty too!

Happy New Year's everyone!

New Beginnings

A new day, a new start on the drop stitch scarf. Trying to put the horrendous catastrophe of the scarf behind me, I chose this pattern from my wish list and cast on today. The picture of the finished scarf is gorgeous!

So far so good! I think I like the look better anyway. I tried this pattern back in December with some ribbon yarn, but frogged it, not because of the pattern, but because I had trouble with the yarn. It was a ladder yarn and my needles kept getting caught in wrong places. My only trouble with this yarn is that the nylon content keeps snagging on my embarrassingly rough hands. I suppose that's my cue to get some better lotion or use more of it...

Drop Stitch Gone Horribly Wrong

Today was a sad day, but it started really well. I finished my Hufflepuff hat last night and was on my way to finishing the drop stitch scarf ("Magic Scarf") this evening. Two projects done in two days! That almost never happens. The scarf is for charity too (I rarely keep anything I knit) and will be part of our fall fundraiser for Stitch for a Cause. Now, I've never done a drop stitch scarf but have been eager to try this pattern. I thought I followed everything to the "t" and it looked pretty good after I had cast off. You can see the stitches on the left starting to run down the length of the scarf (as they are supposed to).

Now, the first problem I had was that at the second to last row, I was supposed to purl a stitch then drop the next. This was little freaky, but it went fine until the end of the row. I was supposed to be left with 21 stitches, but found I had 22. I decided to knit the last two together and bind off on the next row according to the pattern. Didn't seem like a big deal. I would have a row next to the edge that wouldn't drop, but I didn't think it would be very noticeable. As I started to pull my scarf lengthwise, you can see the dropped stitches running just like they should.

Then things started to go wrong...really wrong. In a few spots, I got big loops of yarn that seemed knitted o.k., but were just REALLY loose. I figured I had just knit a stitch too loosely. As I continued to pull on the scarf and use my fingers to help the dropped stitches, it looked very pretty, but I noticed some of the other rows that were not supposed to drop, starting to come loose. Ahh! What was happening? So I stopped pulling and laid it on the table again. This is what I had.

I felt sick. All I could do at this point was frog the whole thing. I am planning to knit the scarf again, but may use a different drop stitch pattern. I'm sure it was something I did wrong in first rows, but since I'm not sure what... Part of my problem came from working with a slippery yarn, so the next time I try it, I'll try a different yarn. In the meanwhile, I'll go back to knitting more hats...sniff...