Yarnification

I really wanted to get the Pineapple Square Thingy starched and blocked last night, but it turns out that my blocking board is too small. Oops. Didn’t even think about that.

Out in the garage there’s a big (maybe four feet by four feet) piece of really thick cardboard. The friend who gave us a whole bunch of them used to drive a truck for a living and said something that I didn’t quite get about it being a lining at the back of a truck. Anyway, I plan to use this one as a blocking board, but last night I just didn’t have the wherewithal to go out to the garage, find the cardboard, bring it in, dust it off, cover it with a ton of waxed paper, and then pin down the Pineapple Square Thing.

It was just too hot. Once I got home, apart from running another load of laundry, I couldn’t really bring myself to leave the upstairs where we had the fan and the little window air conditioner running. Soooo hot outside, and downstairs, too. Anytime I left the upstairs I started to feel like I was wilting.

But I did find the mistake in the Prairie Star. I had to frog eight and a half rounds. I’d just finished round 24 when I noticed there was a problem. The mistake was in the middle of round 16. I had a gigantic pile of thread Ramen when I was done with that.

I got back on the horse, though, and I’m back up to round 23 now.

The critters (Lena and Cat, the cats, and Loco, the dog) have been awfully needy on account of our hardly being home last week, and I think they were all surprised when we turned up before dark last night. Lena usually comes and meeps at me wanting to be petted just as I’m drifting off to sleep, but last night she did it three times. Cat, who usually only likes to be petted when it’s cold out, was all over Don. And Loco was Super-Huggy-Pup, wanting to give us hugs and kisses. He’ll stand on his hind legs and give you a hug if you ask him too, but when he starts offering hugs around when we haven’t asked for one you can tell he’s been a bit lonely.

Oh, and by the way, in case I’ve never said so, Cat isn’t called that because we were too lazy to think up a name or anything like that; he’s named after The Cat from Red Dwarf, with whom he shares many personality traits. But usually we call him Kittycat. That’s what he answers to.

I should definitely have time to block the pineapple square thing tonight. The house is clean again, or as clean as it ever gets. Don washed all those dishes (actually mostly water cups since we subsisted on sandwiches and fast food last week), the cats are now speaking to us again since I cleaned their litter box (they were getting mightily upset about that, definitely went too many days in a row without scooping), the laundry is done, the towels that got washed and dried over a week ago but never made it out of the dryer afterward are folded and put away, and other things that were let go last week got done.

I still haven’t frogged the Prairie Star back to the point where I made the mistake because I still can’t tell where I did it. I’m planning on taking a look at it tonight; the last few times I picked it up I was so tired that I couldn’t be sure of where it happened, and I didn’t want to just frog it back randomly (though I do think it happened about seven rounds ago), start again, and then find out later that I never found the mistake. I will cry if that happens.

I get to leave work in ten minutes and I’m bored, so it’s quiz results time!

Guess it shows that I grew up in New England. For the record, I’ve never even been to Australia, prison, or the Victorian Era, and I’ve only been to Canada once, briefly, so those 25% scores are probably the result of my picking a random answer when I was clueless as to what the question meant. The 50% southern thing is probably from living with Don and Sara, and I guess (since I’ve never been to the UK either) the 50% score on British slang is because there are a few British authors I really like. That or more guessing.

Okay, no quiz results today! The other day I was getting caught up on reading blogs and one of the many, many things I hadn’t checked for quite a while was the Blogthings feed. You all can consider yourselves lucky I only posted the results for two of the quizzes; I took about ten of them. Some of them with embarrassing results. The “How extroverted are you?” quiz more or less implied that I hate all other humans. Which is not true at all. It is true, though, that I tend to get all shy and weird and twitchy around people I don’t know well. Years ago, when I was working in a bookstore (yep, I am morbidly shy yet have spent most of my working life in retail, go figure), a book about finding a career suited to your personality came into the store. I took the test in it, and among the long list of results for my personality type were lighthouse keeper and shepherd. No kidding. It really said that. (Can you really still get a job as a lighthouse keeper? I kinda thought that was done by computers now.)

I finished the fourth pineapple square last night. They’re all joined, just need to weave in the blessedly few ends, then starch and block it. That might happen Sunday night, maybe not until Monday though. This has been the week from hell here at work; the guy who works part-time for us is on vacation this week so Don and I have been working 12+ hours a day every day since last Friday (apart from Sunday—we close early on Sundays). Today is the last twelve-hour day, then there’s eight hours tomorrow and then (hooray!) Monday we have only have to work till around four or six o’clock.

I am exhausted, let me tell you. Not really from lack of sleep; I’ve been getting about as much sleep as usual. But every day for the past week now (apart from Sunday, that is) I’ve gotten up, gotten ready for work, gone to work, worked about twelve and a half hours (we’re using the word worked a little loosely here, since I’ve taken plenty of down time, but I’ve had to be here all that time), gone home, had about an hour to wind down, then gone to bed. Since we’ve spent practically no time at home this week the house is a mess, the cat box hasn’t been getting scooped as often as it should be and is stinky, there are a ton of dishes in the sink (Where did they come from? It’s not like we’ve had time to cook!) and so Sunday evening will probably be spent cleaning the house, even though I very much need some time to relax and unwind and not be at work.

On the plus side, I did get out of the store yesterday long enough to go to the library. I meant to go on the way to work but forgot to stop, and since they’re only open three days a week due to incredibly poor funding, if I didn’t go yesterday afternoon I wasn’t going to be able to get the books they had on hold for me until Monday. I hit the jackpot; I have a bunch of books that I’ve requested on interlibrary loan (again with the funding; they never get new books apart from a rotating collection that gets shuffled from one library to another around the county) and three books by my very favorite authors came in: Eleven on Top by Janet Evanovich, Oh My Stars by Lorna Landvik, and Killing Time by Linda Howard. Yay, stuff to read!

Oh, and recently I did an update to the Blogs I Read page, so it’s a lot closer now to being the same as my actual Bloglines blogroll. While I was updating it, I thought really hard once again about just replacing it with the automatic blogroll you can do through them, but I really do like all the pretty link buttons, so I’ve decided to keep it this way until it gets to be too hard to maintain.

Anyway, there are a bunch of links on there without buttons; if you happen to see yourself there and have a button I can use, please let me know where I can find a copy of it…

Slow and Steady

Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy. They see you as very cautious, extremely careful, a slow and steady plodder. It’d really surprise them if you ever did something impulsively or on the spur of the moment. They expect you to examine everything carefully from every angle and then usually decide against it.

Whee! I’m a super-genius. Heh. Now if only I could get things done…

Your IQ Is 140

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Genius

Found this site through Trish’s blog.
I’m not sure if Tennessee counts because we were passing through, but we definitely ate there and may have stayed overnight at a motel. (Also, I may have been to Iowa, but I’m not sure so I left it off. If I was there, it would have been the little corner bit near the border with Missouri and Illinois.)

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

I’m finally getting back to a project I’ve had in progress for ages. It’s going to be used as a hanging inside the glass door to a cabinet in my bedroom. I’m making it up of four pineapple squares, the one on page 70 of the Harmony Guides 300 Crochet Stitches book. I’ve been joining them in the final round since any kind of joining that doesn’t leave ends is just dandy in my book.

I’ve had the first three squares done for quite a while, but I kept procrastinating about starting the fourth one. Last night, being frustrated with my tatting attempts (more on that below) and my poor Prairie Star, which I haven’t been able to bring myself to frog yet since I’m still not 100% sure where I went wrong, I decided I needed to do something non-frustrating and picked up my ecru thread and got going on the fourth square. Haven’t gotten all that far with it yet, just four or five rounds, but there are only 17 rounds total.

Tatting, tatting, tatting. I’ve apparently been doing something quite wrong. I’ve gotten to the point where I can make a respectable-looking ring, though I can’t seem to make picots that are the same size. But—and this is a big but—I have apparently not been successfully doing this esoteric “flip” thing that makes the knot form on the shuttle thread instead of on the ring, which means that I can’t close the ring by tightening the shuttle thread. (I misread somewhere, and I’d tightened the ring by tugging the other end of the thread, so I didn’t realize at first that I was going wrong.)

This means that I can’t get a second ring to close at all, either, until I figure things out, which leaves me stuck for the moment. Essentially I’ve been doing macrame in #10 thread. Heh. Anyway, I’ve found some sites, in particular Jen’s Tat-ra Sutra, that go about the beginner explanation from a completely different angle, so I’m going to try that once I chill out about it a little.

I’m trying to remind myself that I once found crochet to be this difficult, too.

On the plus side, I finally did get a real shuttle, and it was on sale even though I didn’t have a coupon, so it was only $2.00.

The sudden obsession with tatting? It’s because of this: tatted Celtic bookmark. This bookmark is amazing. I must make one.

It’s probably going to take a little while before I’m good enough at it to make this, but goals are good, right?

Just thought I’d share the pain. This is the incomplete Prairie Star, which I believe is going to have to be frogged back something like five to seven rounds (sob!) in order to fix the mistake I made:

On the tatting front, after I got home from work last night, I dug out the Reader’s Digest needlework book and sat down with it. I got a little further this time. It’s still awful but more like the beginner awful that I’d expect to come up with on a first try, as opposed to the horrific tangled mess I came up with earlier. Note the homemade cardstock shuttle. It’s a little difficult to use, so I really do need to run to Joann’s and get one of their cheapie shuttles. (Apologies for the extreme blurriness; this camera does not have zoom or megapixels or anything, and the directions say it won’t focus properly unless it’s two feet away, but it was too little to show up well from that distance. Er, never mind. I took a picture that’s a bit less blurry.)

There are three picots on there, even, not that there’s much visible difference between the picots and some of the looser stitches. I actually got a little worse as I went along, but that’s probably to be expected since it was after one o’clock in the morning and I was tired (but determined to finish that ring!)

I couldn’t figure out what to do from there to start a new ring based on the instructions in the Reader’s Digest book. I believe I’ve finally justified the $3 I spent on this one several months back:

I couldn’t resist picking it up, even though it duplicated a lot of the things I already had in the Reader’s Digest book. And now it’s definitely turned out to be useful because the tatting instructions seem to be a bit clearer. The other book seemed like it was missing a step somewhere (or maybe I was just tired!), but this one seems clearer, and it has photos instead of illustrations which is sometimes helpful for me.

Maybe I’ll run out to Joann’s and pick up a shuttle during the day today; I already have to go to Walmart for cat food and dog food, and Joann’s isn’t that far. I’ve tried Walmart, but they don’t seem to sell tatting shuttles. Or maybe they just hide them, who knows? I just the other day found where they hide the sale yarn, and the day I went in looking for Red Heart Tiki I found it hidden on the bottom shelf at the cutting desk. Crazy.

So. Long time no post. I’ve been meaning to post for days because I actually have finished projects. I keep flaking out and not having enough time, though. But here I am. And it looks like I’ve got a long-ish post to make up for lost time. I promise to try posting more!

First, more recent news. A very kind Crochetville Fairy Godmother suprised me the other day! Don came home from the post office with a box. A box from Herrschners, with my name on it! At first I was confused because I hadn’t ordered anything from them, but while I was opening it up it dawned on me that it was an RAOK package. Lookie what was inside:

(click for full-size images)

Inside there was a gorgeous pattern and all sorts of yarn: Red Heart Holiday in blue, rose, and red/green; Caron Sayelle in white and off-white; and Bernat Handicrafter Cotton in ecru, pumpkin, warm brown, citrus fruits print, and seashore. I am a very happy camper!

Thank you, fairy godmother! You totally made my day!

I also have some thread FOs that I finished up probably last week but haven’t posted yet. The first one is Angela’s Cornflower Bookmark, though mine is definitely not a cornflower what with it being yellow and all. (Again, click for full-size; I’m trying to get in the habit of using thumbnails for bigger pics…Pattern info should be there on the gallery page at the link, too.)

And here’s one I’ve been working on for ages. I kept getting away from it to finish the afghan and other projects I had going on, but then recently I buckled down and got it finished. This is the first doily I’ve made, and it’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever tried to block. I do think I messed up the blocking some and made it look weird in places (now, I did make a couple of mistakes along the way, but they were pretty minor things; mostly the reason it looks odd in places is that I didn’t do a great job of blocking).

So I plan to wash out the starch and have another go at blocking it. I could use the practice at that, anyhow!

Right now the major thing I’m working on is the Prairie Star doily from freepatterns.com. I’m at the end of round 24 of 27, but when I got to the end of the round, I found that I’d made a mistake somewhere. The whole round was v-stitch in chain space from the previous round, 5 dc in next chain space, lather, rinse, repeat, but when I got to the end I ended on a v-stitch instead of 5 dc like I should have, so I ended up with an extra chain space in the previous round somehow, and who knows how many rounds I’m going to have to frog to get it right. I’m going to need to take a good long look at it to try to figure out where the problem is and then start frogging. Ack.

In other news, tonight I’ve been trying to teach myself to tat while I’m minding the cash register. I’m using a homemade shuttle that I made by printing out a printable tatting shuttle that I found on BellaOnline since I have not actually gotten around to buying a shuttle yet. (Bad me—I had 50% off coupons for Joann’s that were only good on Friday and Saturday but didn’t make it over there…)

So I’m using this shuttle made of cardstock and instructions I found here (this one has been more helpful because it has left-handed illustrations, too) and here.

And, erm, it’s not going so well at the moment. I mean, I know it’s going to look awful at first, but there’s awful and then there’s awful. I think I’m doing something wrong. Not sure what, though. I have two books at home that explain it though, the Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Needlework and the Good Housekeeping New Complete Book of Needlecraft, so between the two of them I should be able to figure it out. I may just need to stare at some different illustrations before it clicks. A real shuttle probably wouldn’t hurt, either, since the cardstock one is a little floppy and tends to get a bit tangled in the thread (probably because I don’t fully know what I’m doing!)

It can’t be too hard, though, right? Just need to practice until I get it right. I’m trying it out with #10 thread, figuring that would be a whole lot easier to learn on than the #80 thread I found at the flea market. Once I get the hang of things I want to make some itty bitty flowers.

Or maybe I’ll get impatient and crochet them :->