Project Monogamy

I’m trying to stick to one crafty project right now because I have to have it done by Christmas. My Dad’s socks:

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As of last night I’m up to the heels on both of them. I’m knitting both at the same time so I don’t forget how many rows, increases, wraps, etc. I’ve made. There are too many distractions at the moment, and when life gets like that I’m not always good at taking notes that make sense later.

The pattern is the Freshman Socks from Knitscene Fall 2009. You can’t really see the stitch pattern very well in the above pic. There’s a very simple cable twist that forms a zig-zag along the socks.

Whether I manage to stick to working only on the socks remains to be seen. I have a paper craft book heading my way that might seduce me away from yarny duties. And the loom keeps whispering to me.

Dud Rug

Yesterday, my last free weekend day before Christmas, I wrote myself a small list of things to finish, or at least make some progress with. The sketch was one, because I hadn’t got around to it all week. Another was to work on Dad’s socks.

But the main one was the Handspun Wrap Jacket, last blogged about here. Which had already been changed to the Handspun Wrap Vest because I didn’t have enough yarn to weave sleeves. Instead I wove a band with the remaining yarn, to use as a collar.

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I’d had a lot of stuff ups to this point. During the weaving of the three main pieces, I’d suddenly realised that my notes and calculations made no allowance for a gap between them. Not wanting to end up with a warp too short for the third panel I’d put a narrow piece of paper between anyway, hoping I’d squeeze them in. But a narrow strip means a short fringe, which is difficult to knot. I decided to hemstitch instead, and then felt the pieces a little. After all, the brown handspun was still too sticky for my liking, and the hot water used in felting might finally get it clean of grease. Unfortunately, it shrank but didn’t felt well enough to hold together, and the hemstitching was coming undone.

So I spent a couple of hours removing the hemstitching, pushing the weft up to expose more warp, then tying lots and lots of tight little knots.

Then I sewed the pieces together, using blanket stitch.

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And tried the garment on.

I didn’t like it.

The fabric wasn’t drapey enough, the side steams stuck out in a ridiculous fashion, and the yarn was scratchy and still slightly sticky. None of which you’d have been able to see properly in a photo, so I didn’t bother taking one.

So I changed to Plan B. I redid the side seams as flat blanket stitch hems, all the way along, and…

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Made it into a rug. Possibly a picnic rug. Definitely a weirdly shaped rug.

Oh well. Sometimes projects are duds. The good side to this story is that it is OVER. Some of the oldest yarn in my stash has been used. I’ve tried the wrap jacket idea and know that, if I do it again, I’ll need finer yarn and to make a light, drapey fabric.

And now I’m free to weave something else. Perhaps something out of these lovely handspun yarns I bought at the s’n’b end of year party on Saturday:

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But definitely not until after Christmas, when Dad’s socks are (hopefully) done and I have some free time again.

I May Have A Problem

I was cleaning my desk yesterday (which usually implies a certain degree of insanity in the first place) and came across an expired iTunes gift card. I looked from it to the sheets of lined paper with only a few scrawls of writing at the top that I’d put in the recycling…

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Is there such a thing as obsessive notepad making syndrome? And is there a treatment?

Finished Knitting

Over the weekend I finished a few projects. First there was the fifth pair of socks in my Socks For Others Club:

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After which I started the last pair, for my Dad, which I’m hoping finish before Christmas.

I also started and finished a project I recently thought up as a solution to a home decorating problem.

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When we had our house extended, one of the quirky ideas we came up with was to install a urinal in the bathroom. Yes, you can buy white porcelain urinals for the home, and they’re no more expensive than an ordinary toilet. Unfortunately, the dodgy builder hire hopeless plumbers who weren’t much good with working out bathroom fittings they hadn’t encountered before (and even worse with the ones they had) and there were many attempts and a lot of returning parts to the store before the urinal was installed. By the time it was, the pipe had an extra curl in it because they hadn’t lined up the water inlet and drain, and was too close to the floor for your standard ceramic pedestal to cover.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a potter to make one for us, but we never get around to it and don’t want to spend much on something that, it turns out, the man of the house doesn’t use much anyway. So I came up with another solution:

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Which took half a day with a knitting machine and some circular needles to make. And it can be taken off and washed if necessary. It’s not pretty, but it’s better than naked plastic pipes!

Sketch Sunday 5

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At a car club Christmas BBQ I was one of the few ‘spouses’ who attended. There’s only so much blokey car talk you can endure, so I used a little time to sketch one of the fiberglass shells destined to become an expensive sportscar. This drew lots of attention and invitations to draw member’s cars, but to me the shell was far more interesting – like drawing a car skeleton – and also easier than trying to capture the shiny perfection of a finished car.

Paper Lantern Tutorial

Reading too many home decorating magazines and craft blogs has given me the itch to make festive decorations. But I lost the love for traditional Christmas cheesiness in my late teens, and never really regained it. Still, there was that itch. So I went looking for non Christmassy ideas.

After considering bunting and paper chains and origami, a friend’s suggestion I buy Chinese lanterns roused memories of making paper lanterns at kindergarten. I don’t remember them being specifically for Christmas – and they’d certainly suit other holidays, including Halloween.

They’re very simple (they’d have to be, for kindergarten-age children to make them), and I took some photos so I could make a tutorial-style blog post:

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You need paper (I’m recycling knitting pattern print outs here – put the used side inside and you barely see it), sticky tape or glue, coloured celophane, scissors, ruler or paper cutter, sharp-pointed needle and string.

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Cut the paper into squares. They don’t have to be exactly square, and they can be any size. I’ve made mine 5cm square. Fold each square in half.

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At the folded edge, make cuts about 2/3 to 1/4 the way through. They can be quite close together, or further apart, but it looks best with eight or more cuts along the length of the fold.

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Unfold and curl into a tube with the fold running around the middle of the tube. Tape top and bottom. You can use glue, but you’ll have to hold the lantern together with your fingers, paper clip, peg or clip until it’s dry enough to hold together.

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Take a scrap of celophane around the same size as the square of paper.

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Scrunch it up, roll it between your palms, until it’s small enough to struff down into the lantern. (Don’t scrunch it so much that it falls right out again.)

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Thread your needle with string (or yarn, or fine ribbon) and string up the lanterns. You can give each lantern its own string and hang them individually, or put lots of them on the one string. If the string is too fine and slippery you may need to add knots between the lanterns to space them apart.

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Or you may want them to crowd together. You could even string them onto a circular wire, and make a wreath of lanterns.

Me – I’m draping strings of lanterns in my lounge room windows, so the sunlight coming inside makes the coloured celophane look like little flames.

… and more

I woke up feeling very sluggish and tired yesterday morning, so I decided to do something that didn’t take much thinking. And that turned out to be making more notepads. I raided my stash of old calendars and found these:

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1) Some calendars with example pics of the back, 2) an old home decorating magazine freebie diary, 3) a rainforest calendar with a title page and pics on each month that were perfect for making notepads, and 4) a Lonely Planet calendar that looked very promising, too.

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As it turned out, I was right about the rainforest calendar – I got several good looking notepads out of it – but was wrong about the Lonely Planet one. I suspect travel pics aren’t going to be as generally appealing as animals, art, landscapes, etc. unless someone has actually been to the place in the image. But in playing with that calendar, I realised that not only could I look for images that could be cut into strips, and had something interesting on the bottom section, but I could also fold the notebooks sideways, and so anything that had something interesting on the right-hand side was good, too.

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The best source of notepad covers was the diary, from which I got lots of good-looking notepads ranging from pooches to food, landscapes to gardens and interiors.

I have a LOT of notepads now, but I’ve already given away most of the previous batch. I’m going to put these in a bowl and tell visitors that they can take as many as they want. I was also thinking of posting them instead of Christmas cards.