Finished: Hairpin Lace Shawl
Pattern: Woman's Hairpin Lace Shawl from Coats & Clark
So I finally! Finished! My first hairpin lace shawl! As UFOs go, this one wasn't too bad — less than a year old when I finished it off. Ha. ;D And it also conveniently illustrates the fact that with a camera that I can actually change stuff on (you know, like the aperture! And the shutter speed!), I can finally take photos of my projects draped on random other stuff. (I can also fail to remember to take the cluttery porch crap out of the first few photos I take, and then end up liking one of the early photos.)
Finishing this shawl made me want to go crochet other stuff — but most of the hairpin lace projects out there that I want to make involve paying for patterns, and right now I don't have any spare pattern money ... sniffle. I may be forced to design my own hairpin lace something-or-other just to get a fix.
Finished: Three-String Headband
Pattern: Simple Crochet Headband from Creativeyarn
If I want to design my own hairpin lace, though, it'd probably be useful to actually kind of know how to crochet. (Since hairpin lace is a kind of crochet and all. Yeah, yeah. You know it already, right? ;)) So I'm sloooooowly re-teaching myself to crochet by doing easy things, instead of jumping straight to hard things I don't understand that will confuse me and turn into UFOs sitting on the mountainous pile of temporarily abandoned projects. Here's one of the easy things in question (and look! I can take pictures of my own head with the new camera! ::hugs camera::).
Finished: Heart Coaster
Pattern: Heart Sachet from Lily/Sugar'n Cream
One of the things I loved about crochet when I first started doing it is that it's fast. And it's pretty easy to make cute shapes if you actually understand what you're doing (which I didn't then and kinda-sorta do now — a few years of knitting seems to have helped out with my understanding of things like increases and decreases ;)). So having no money + needing a Valentine's Day gift for B = crochet to the rescue! Voila, crocheted heart coaster!
In Progress: Epic Socks
Pattern: "Bling (Arkansas)" by Adrienne Fong, originally published in 50 Socks (50 States & More)
And I finally cast on the second pair of socks I'm knitting as a trade for yarn — officially the pattern is called "Bling," but I'm calling them the Epic Socks because of a comment someone made about how they sound. ;) They're lace and beaded, and can I tell you a secret? Shh — I've never beaded lace before. In fact, I can't remember beading my knitting before ... at least not successfully. Unsuccessfully, sure; I have a bunch of yarn and beads sitting in a basket in the craft room that were meant to turn into a beaded shawl. But both the lace and the beading on these socks are turning out to be way easier than I expected. Is my knitting mojo high this month, or was that just a contrast to the fact that it took me almost three hours to knit the hemmed beaded cuff? Yeah, that's the thing in the photo right here. Three hours, 'cause it's folded in half and knitted to itself with multiple sets of double-pointy objects that had to interact with each other in friendly ways.
So there it is. That's what I've been doing lately. Let's pretend this is a Craft or Bust update and you guys can tell me what you've been making now, too — right? Right??? Talk to me already! ;)
