Color Filters are Evil

Someone on reddit posted a bunch of witch hats she made and I was impressed with most of the colors.  The orange one in particular and there was a comment saying she used a burnt orange and Red Heart Super Saver Ombre in Cocoa.  I loved it so much I tried to duplicate it.  So, for the record this was the hat I wanted:

And I’m almost to the brim and this is what mine looks like:

I am not happy with it at all and will probably frog it.  She must have selectively cut the strands or something because Cocoa does not change from very light brown to very dark brown in just a few yards, or that wasn’t the yarn actually used.  Or, used a filter that made the colors look different.

Elekk Plushie FINALLY finished

I started this guy like over a year ago but got irritated with the horns and just did one.  I finally decided today to finish it up.  I sorta wish I had velvet yarn but hey! This was a first try.  This was the Gustav the Balancing Elephant pattern from Amour Fou but I dropped off the ears, tail, used pink buttons for eyes, and free-handed the horns and tusks. I made them curve by doing a row of 4 dc, then 4 hdc, then reverted back to SC decreased for the point. So one horn was chain 8, connected, about 7 rows of sc, 4 dc, 4 hdc, 1 row of sc, 1 row of sc decreases until it’s hard to do any more, than tie off. The tusks were the same thing but just a few less rows.

… I may move the tusks up a bit though.

First Thing in a While

I haven’t been crocheting for a bit now.  Two reasons, the biggest being I’m just out of yarn.  I mean I have some odds and ends like 1 skein or half a skein but as we all know, you can’t do a lot with that.  The other reason is, I don’t have anything I want to make.

That being said, I did finish another cocoon crocodile stitch project though.  I frogged a small virus blanket I was making with the Wishing Well Lion brand Mandala yarn and I made it into this instead.  I love this stitch, super cool.

The mandala looks good to a certain point but once your rounds get too big, it starts to look bad because the stripes of color don’t match up.  For example you might have the darker beige for two entire full rounds of virus loops, 1 entire round of light beige, but then only 90% of the white round completed in that color and only 50% of a round in the light blue.  As you continue on you end up using 1 entire color for just a single row and you get way too much striping.  If it’s a subtle fade like dark dark green to light light green, that’s fine.  But not when it’s a soft fade to 3 entirely separate colors.

Anyway!

Here is the finished version! In my shop now!

Other Etsy Shops

I decided to do some holiday shopping on Etsy but I honestly was curious how other shops would do, as far as shipping and presentation.  I’ve been wrapping my items in white paper with a thank you sticker but that gets hard when it’s a big item like a cocoon sweater and the sheep/alpaca are too big to fold one of the sheets around them.  I would love to find a gift box that would fit perfect without spending like 12 dollars per box.

That being said, I made 3 Etsy purchases recently. The first one was some rainbow stones I thought would be good for a kid to decorate a garden bed or something.  They were shipped in a small poly mailer, wrapped in tissue paper.  Not like a padded envelope, but a poly mailer with bubble wrap. The items were tightly packed into the package and when I took them out it looked like this:

Is that a good impression?  It looks like I just pulled wads of toilet paper out of the bag.  Did the items get to me safe? Yeah but, presentation was a zero. They wrote on the packing slip that they gave me an extra stone, so that was nice.

The second thing was from a shop that sells candles, soaps, lotions, things like that.  I ordered on the 23rd and so far, it hasn’t shipped.  I’ll have to come back to that when I get it.

The third item was a drop spindle, which shipped super quick (came from one state away), was in a proper box, also used white paper like I do to wrap it, had a packing slip, and a sample of fiber with a little business card. Perfectly nice.

I cannot wait for the second shops items, I bought two different sizes of gift bags and a candle.  It should be here in 3-7 days but as I said, so far a week later it hasn’t shipped so we’ll see.

Where’d the yarn go?

I decided to revamp a few of my older items with better accessories but I’m having a real problem finding certain yarns. Caron Simply Soft for example, at Walmart, Joann’s, Michaels.. there just aren’t any colors! Maybe 7, or 2! It’s the weirdest.  I wanted to make my big winged pony have rainbow hair but any store around here has no colors.  So bizzare.