Yarnification

playing with yarn in the middle of the night

Thwarted

Filed under: Craftybabble, Quizzy things — daisy at 12:34 pm on Friday, July 29, 2005

I keep finding myself thwarted in making snowflakes this week (for the Snowflakes In July Along). I have a snowflake finished, and I’m halfway through another one but having trouble with the pattern. Also just worked three 12-hour shifts in a row (well, not in a row. three days in a row), without as much break time as I usually get during the 12-hour days, so I’ve been tired and had less time to crochet.

Today is a short day for me, so maybe tonight I’ll finish up this one (or abandon it), possibly even get a couple more done.

A quiz result:


Your Irish Name Is…

Roisin O’Callaghan

I like that. I’m not sure how to pronounce it (I think it’s something like “rosheen” but I’m not all that sure), but it looks pretty.

That is all, I think. I am so very groggy today. Must have caffeine. I have an almost overpowering urge to curl up in a ball underneath my desk and take a nap.

Quizzes

Filed under: Quizzy things — daisy at 11:58 pm on Tuesday, July 26, 2005
You Are 60% Weird

You’re so weird, you think you’re *totally* normal. Right?
But you wig out even the biggest of circus freaks!
You Should Learn Swedish

Fantastisk! You’re laid back about learning a language - and about life in general.
Peaceful, beautiful Sweden is ideal for you… And you won’t even have to speak perfect Swedish to get around!

Snowflake

Filed under: Craftybabble, Life, the universe & everything, Technobabble — daisy at 1:49 pm on Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Note: Yesterday I changed the code that inserts the project progress bars over there on the side of the page so as to make it XHTML-compliant and to add alternate text so that anyone who doesn’t have Flash installed will see a text version of the percentage instead of a broken thing. I checked it in Mozilla and Internet Explorer on my system and in Lynx (text-based browser, so as to make sure the alternate text version would show up) through my shell account, but if the progress bars seem to be broken in your browser, please drop me a line or leave a comment, okay? ( yarnification@daisywreath.net ) And if you’re using these same bars and want a copy of the compliant code, I’d be happy to pass it along.

I’ve got one snowflake done so far for the Snowflake Crochet-Along:
Triple crochet snowflake photo
(clickable for full-size version and pattern info, but the full size one is super blurry)

The Kittycat Progress Report: Cat seems to be almost entirely better. He has more energy, he’s running around and playing, and he’s fighting back about taking his pill twice a day (at first he just lay there and took it, all dispirited-like), all of which is really nice to see. Though not so easy to give him the pill now. And this morning he finally realized that he could pretend to swallow the pill, then go spit it out in the corner, so we’re having to watch him like a hawk to make sure he actually swallowed it.

He’s not constantly straining to pee now, and he’s not peeing in inappropriate places. (Hooray!) He’s still peeing more often than usual, but we were told to expect that for a while, and that as long as he’s peeing and not straining he should be fine. He has another week of antibiotics to go, too.

We’re giving him (and Lena, since there’d surely be hell to pay if we tried to give it to just Kittycat) a half a can of wet food in the morning and a half a can at night, too. They are all in favor of this. We’re planning to cut back to a quarter can each in the morning and at night, so they’d each be getting a half can a day, because they have shown no sign of slowing down with the crunchies and we don’t really want them to turn into Kittyzillas. We’ll see how it goes. Loco thinks it’s patently unfair that we’re giving the cats something so yummy-smelling and not giving any to him. I tried explaining to him that the cats didn’t get to eat the equivalent of half a hamburger last night in combined bits from the three of us, but he does not buy this excuse and feels that I should run out to Walmart and pick him up some Alpo.

On the tatting front…

Filed under: Craftybabble — daisy at 3:54 pm on Wednesday, July 20, 2005

I don’t have a photo—it’s just a little bit of a thing and I know from experience that this camera doesn’t like to photograph anything this small—but I have successfully done a tiny piece of tatting. A whole ring, with all the stitches ending up on the right thread so I could close the ring! The picots are a little wonky (what is up with me and picots? Even though they’re totally different than crochet ones, it seems like picots are just plaguing me lately!). I definitely need to figure out how to get them to come out the same size.

But the stitches themselves are fairly neat, and I only had to pick apart and redo one stitch that ended up on the wrong thread. I’m very happy about this. Now to get some more practice and learn to do chains and things and then hunt down some beginner patterns…

It’s hard to believe I finally managed it after how much trouble I had in the beginning. Especially considering I hadn’t touched it at all in weeks. Maybe that’s what I needed, just to leave it alone for a while and let the information soak into my brain, because I picked up the shuttle and just made this little ring without even looking at the instructions again.

In other news: Cat should be coming home today (fingers crossed!) but I don’t know for sure yet since the vet was out for lunch (as opposed to out to lunch, which would be a bad thing) when I called. I’m supposed to call back shortly and find out more.

Prairie Star

Filed under: Craftybabble, Project pics, Life, the universe & everything — daisy at 3:44 pm on Tuesday, July 19, 2005

After lots of struggling with the picots, I finally finished the Prairie Star doily. I’m still having a tough time blocking doilies, but I seem to be getting better at it. I need more pins, though. I put about 300 pins in this thing. I think I have another two boxes of 50 each, but I definitely cannot block the Pineapple Squares Thing with only 400 pins if this doily took 300…

(Pics are clickable for full-size.)

Prairie Star doily photo

Thought I’d put up a photo of the doily in its home in a corner of my bedroom, too. Don did the flowers a while back…
Prairie Star with flower arrangement

That’s all for now. One of my cats, Kittycat, is sick and at the animal hospital, and I’m leaving soon to go visit him. He should be coming home tomorrow. The vet says he’s pretty much better now, but since he had a urinary blockage and his bladder got all huge, he wants to keep Cat there with the catheter in for an extra day to make sure his bladder gets back to normal, or something like that.

Kerchief

Filed under: Craftybabble, Project pics, Life, the universe & everything — daisy at 2:07 pm on Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Thanks for the comments on the hiking photos :) I still haven’t finished writing up my account of the trip, so it may turn up at some odd time in the next couple of weeks. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, but I still need to take little mental health breaks here and there throughout the day so I read blogs and write a little and read message boards during that time. I tried cutting myself off for a couple of days and I was getting nothing done by the time the day was half over; I’d just feel all frazzled. So I’m using my timer again, setting it for half hour of work, then ten minutes or so of play.

I’ve seen this in a few people’s blogs and decided I needed to make one because it’s just too cute. (And while visiting the blog whose author wrote the pattern, I found someone else to add to my bloglines list!)

Photo (someday I will learn not to photograph dark items against a dark background, but apparently today is not that day):
Winged hair kerchief photo

It’s done in Bernat Handicrafter, warm brown, used up most of one ball. The pattern is here: Winged Hair Kerchief, and I think you really ought to make yourself one because it’s super cute. I’m thinking I may make one out of thread; I figure I’d be able to use the same pattern but just keep going until it’s the right size. I have most of a ball of green thread that I think would look pretty done in this pattern.

Is it just me, or does hearing the word kerchief make you automatically want to reply “Bless you”?

I may make a flowerdy thing and attach it on; I like what she did with the one in photo with the pattern. If I ever quite get the hang of tatting, I think a group of little tatted flowers would look good on there. (If, that is. I’m close to having the hang of tatting, but just when I’m moving right along and think I’ve really got it this time, I start screwing up again. But I’m still working at it…)

This was the first time I’d ever attempted bullion stitches, and you should’ve heard the cussing until I got the hang of it! I think I was wrapping the yarn too tightly the first bazillion or so times I tried it because the hook would go partway through and then get stuck, and at that point I’d have to give up and try over because once it got stuck, even if I eventually got it through there’d be a big mess. (Whew. Longest sentence ever.) Anyway, I caught on eventually, and by the end of the part with the bullion stitches, I was only screwing it up about once out of every three times. Are they supposed to be that hard, or am I just a doofus?

I’m also still working on the Prairie Star doily. It’s coming along, but I haven’t been working as steadily at it as I was. Just needed a bit of a break from it after all that frustration and frogging, though I’m back on track now and am probably within two or three rounds of the end. (Woohoo!)

I also still need to block the Pineapple Squares Thing. Don brought in the giant slab o’ cardboard from the garage, and it is now taking up a big chunk of real estate in the mud room. I need to cover it with waxed paper before I can use it, and it’s so big that I’m thinking I may just wait to do any blocking until the Prairie Star is done and block them both at once.

I do not know where I’m going to store this cardboard behemoth when I’m not using it (right now it’s blocking off the countertop island thing in the mud room and all the little cupboards underneath it), but it’s definitely nice and big! Unless I lose my mind and decide to make a bedspread out of thread or something like that, I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t be able to block on it.

Rocks

Filed under: Life, the universe & everything — daisy at 11:25 pm on Friday, July 8, 2005

I’ve been away camping in the mountains for a couple of days. I took a book and a crochet project with me but didn’t touch either of them the whole time (gasp!) I have the account of the camping trip about half-written but haven’t had time to upload more than a few of the photos yet. Meantime, couple of photos we took at Seneca Rocks:

The rocks, as seen from near the trail head (all 3 clickable for full-size, but the full-size ones are ginormous, something like 1152×864):
Seneca Rocks from field

The rocks, as seen from the top of the trail. We stopped there, wouldn’t have been wise to go any further without helmets and gear and more experience at climbing than either of us have.
Top of rocks

And, okay, I know I’m not very photogenic in the first place, but bear in mind here that I’d been camping and hiking and sweating and all that. ’Kay?
Me at top of Seneca Rocks

I was really proud of us for getting to the top. It’s not a terribly long hike, about a mile and half, and the trail is highly maintained (gravel, 3-4 feet wide), but it’s steep, rises close to 900 feet over a mile and a half, and we are not in the greatest of shape. I was really grateful that my back and neck didn’t stop me from doing what I wanted to do during this trip :)