Bags!

I have a lot of odds and ends of yarn after making so many bigger projects like cocoon sweaters and blankets, I wasn’t sure what to do with it.  I could do a scarf or a hat but scarves are going to be out of season soon and broomstick lace takes absolutely forever anyway.

I started looking up crochet bags and with a few attempts figured out a method to make them in a few ways.  This one was using a V stitch for most of it:

And this one is basic single crochet for the bottom and double for the sides.  It was a little slow because the pink yarn with the sparkles in it is touchy but I think it came out well.  I just can’t decide to do with the drawstring ends.

One person used pom-poms but those take A TON of yarn for no real good reason so I may just look for puff-balls to sew the ends through.

Another one!

I can safely say I really, really like the ‘virus’ pattern not only because it’s pretty, but because I don’t have to make sure I don’t screw up the edges.

Speaking of edges, I found a very decent edge pattern for the virus blanket but as per usual I had to make slight modifications. The pattern I found called for Triple crochet, double crochet, half double crochet, and single crochet stitches.  I did this on the pink and yellow blanket, but then the edges turned up a bit.  The person who did the stitch was just like ‘oh well it does that’.

Yes but do you know WHY it does that?  It’s because your final stitches on the blanket is a DC+1 and your border has no +1, that’s why. So I started with a stitch +1 on every stitch and that looked weird in the middle where we DON’T +1 in between the arches.

I fixed that by doing a +1 on the SC, the HDC, the DC, but not between the DC, the triple, and the next DC.  That make it lay flat and nice. I really liked the colors I did on this one but I wish I had thought about it a little more before I started.  It should go white, light blue, dark blue, repeat, but I started with the light, then white, then decided to do the pattern.  It’s not a big deal really but, I noticed it when I was almost done.

One for me, one for the store, one to give away

As I’ve been making things, I feel like I always have 3 items going.  I still have the stack of squares I wanted to make a sweater coat from, but the yarns stripes were so frequent it all ended up looking the same so I lost interest for the time being. I wanted to make it for myself but now I don’t know. The hood and about 24 squares are done but you need something like 52 squares total and I got tired of it.

I’ve also  been trying to burn through the yarn my mom gave me.  I don’t think it’s good enough quality yarn to put in the shop, because it’s rather rough and occasionally the strands are actually separating. That doesn’t seem like it’ll be terribly durable so I’m going to make a pile of blankets and then ask my relatives if they want one in my grandmothers honor.  I just finished this one.

I’m also working on a dress for myself but I wanted it ruffle-y and floor length and there’s no way I have enough of the black so, I dunno.

It doesn’t always work until I’ve done a lot of work

This wouldn’t be the first time I had to completely frog (pull apart) an item or even modify the setup.  Sometimes you have to almost finish something before you even figure out it won’t even work, such as the case of the mandala vest I tried.  And oddly enough  you almost never have anyone comment on the patterns or the youtube channel saying “this isn’t working” or “this came out way too long”.

I tried the Annoo pattern for the black dress and I should have paid more attention that in THIS case, people were commenting that the pattern was confusing.  I didn’t really notice it until I got this far:

First off, her video pattern was rather confusing, which is odd because she’s usually very detailed.  I don’t like when a presenter says “in the next stitch do one double crochet (DC) and then another, and another, and another”.  I lost track, how many was that?  She did a lot of that instead of “do 1, 2, 3” or “do a dc  then another and another for a total of 3”.

I’m also very confused about the repeating pattern.  It’s a strange pattern of descending groupings I had a really hard time following, which was made worse when she described how to make a flouncy bottom skirt by adding more stitches.  I listened to that part over and over and still have no idea how to do it right.  It looks like you do 1 DC, skip a few chains, do 5 DC’s in each of the next two stitches, then the next has 3 DC’s… and 4 DCs in one stitch.. I can’t even follow. I started sorting out my own pattern after her original pattern which looks more clean but I still don’t even like it.

I think I’m going to unravel up to the V stitches and then do my own thing on this one.

Clothing

I made the sweater coat for my mom, and prior to that I attempted to make an actual pull-over sweater but, I ended up throwing that one since it stretched out too much.  Shame.

I am now trying to make a dress based off one of Annoo’s patterns but I have to tweak it  because I didn’t have a small enough hook and even with the difference of 1mm, the original chain amount would have been far too big for myself, so I scaled it down a lot.  I need to finish half of one strap and then start on the skirt.