busy as a bee

"One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best."  from Persuasion

Halloween is upon us and for the first time ever my little girls don't want to be princesses or fairys! When I think back to our trips to the grocery store when they would wear huge princess dresses because I couldn't get them to agree to normal clothes, it amazes me this day has actually come. This year one of my daughters wanted to be a cat and the other a bumblebee.

I wanted to try and piece together their costumes with stuff we had instead of buying them and was happy with how it worked out. For the Bee I had her wear a black t-shirt and tights with and yellow and black striped skirt and a flower pinned onto her shirt. Then to make it really bee-y I knit her yellow and black armwarmers and legwarmers and they totally MADE the costume. I am so happy with how it all turned out.  I made them on 6mm needles too so they went really fast which is a good thing when you have a ton of planned Christmas presents to get to.

There were tons of patterns online for legwarmers but they all called for different gauged yarn than the black and yellow yarn I already had, so I just made a pattern up myself. Isn't it funny how often that happens? We always think we know best, or at least like think they way we do it would be better.

I will post the pattern I made up later but I doubt anyone will ever use it. Nevertheless I will put it up, so you can read it and think to yourself "Why did she do it that way? My way is better I think I will do it like this..."

Quickie Dishcloths

"Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be."   from Emma

this quote just makes me laugh.

Maybe they would be more healthy if they used some cute butterfly dishcloths. I whipped a few of these up for a friend of mine who was getting married this past summer. They knit up so fast and easy and turned out really great.

It kind of makes me wish I used cotton dishcloths because they are all so easy to make and there are soo many cute patterns, but seriously cotton dishcloths?! Who uses them! They just end up stinking and I gag thinking about all the microbes and germs stuck in them, and how often do you have to wash them? doesn't it seem wrong to have to wash a washcloth? Who even uses any kind of cloth now that they have invented the scrubber thingy that holds the soap in the handle?

...now that I think about it, it was kind of the worst wedding gift ever, I am the worst! Whatever at least they were fun to knit.

Hello Kitty

I feel I have let enough time pass for you to mourn the loss of my knitting masterpiece with me.

It's time to move on.

I intend to do that with a splattering of blog posts, I will write every other day until the pain if it all is but a distant memory.

Today's special is HELLO KITTY!

I love Hello Kitty! What girl doesn't? and when I am asked where does she come from, is it a movie? a show? I respond "it does not matter. It's Hello Kitty. She is awesome."

As you may or may not know I have two little girls and they share my adoration for Hello Kitty, so much so that we are currently repainting and renovating their  bedroom from a Princesses Room to a Hello Kitty room.

To continue on with my adventures in crocheting I thought I would try to make a hello kitty purse! I found the pattern on ravelry and it was fairly simple, a lot of single crochets with a few doubles in the mix, a perfect pattern for me to practise the stitches and become more comfortable in the crocheting universe.

It only took me four tries at making the face shape until I had two that were actually the same size and would line up properly to make the purse (the other two have become strange looking potholders) and it all went along fairly easily, with no real big problems or confusions.

I was happy and proud of my first real crocheting accomplishment, but not as happy as my girls were who shrieked and screamed and danced around the room hugging and kissing it.

Knitting Depression

There has been a lack of posting on my blog lately and I will tell you why. It's because I've been depressed about my knitting. I finally finished my epic shawl/scarf and promptly ruined it in a matter of hours. Well it was somewhat ruined already, but I had come to terms with the earlier mishap and was happy with it until I further destroyed it more. I can't even put any effort to making this a witty or exciting blog post to read, I've decided I just need to post it all out and then I can get over it.

The first mishap was realized after I was an hour into my second ball of yarn. You will never guess what when wrong because it is something I am intense and obsessive about, something you would never imagine me screwing up because I preach about it all the time. Can you guess, it's not gauge, but close, the dye lots. Perhaps I had aneurysm while I was in the yarn shop, I don't know why, all I know is that as I was painfully knitting along I found that one ball of yarn was slightly darker than the other. BOOOO!!!!!  I was not about to pull out all the work I had just done, and there was no way the store would have any of the same dye lot left so I soildered on. I cut the yarn our halfway, knit my next ball of yarn and threw the darker one in again to make a sort of thick stripe pattern, not very attractive but I could do nothing else. I was not going to LOVE the look of my shawl, but I would like it, the pattern was still really cool and I loved the shawl/scarf versatility of it.

HOURS and HOURS of knitting passed, through night and day and in and out of weeks. Finally I finished it, so proud of my work, I had grown to love it after all the time we had spent together. I was so excited to block it out to straighten out the pattern and make it beautiful. I filled my sink with mild water and gently submerged my scarf into the water. "Whoa!" I thought the water is so blue! So astonished was I that I took a picture of it. All was thought well until I pulled my precious scarf out of the sink. Understanding dawning I realized why the water was so blue, it was all the dye from my scarf just floating away, except for the yarn from the different dye lot, it was as if the colour was leaving the first yarn and soaking into the other. The slightly different coloured stripes morphed into a super dark stripe next to a hideous washed out bleached lighter version. Just gross.

I couldn't even look at it or my knitting needles for days.

There is no happy ending to this sad little tale, I bought some fabric dye and will attempt to put some colour back into my scarf but I have not the littlest bit of hope that it can be saved.