Newborn hat

Here's another hat...crocheted with Bernat 100% cotton worsted-weight and a 4.5mm hook. The pattern is, of course, a free Ravelry download. Love the flower detail on this one: it's removeable!

By the way, I took the photo late at night. The colours are actually pink, gentle green, and a lovely purple/lilac, NOT blue!

Weekend at the Cabin Granny Pillow

Years ago, when I spent a summer in Germany, Susanne Loechel made me a pillow. It was gorgeous and I loved it, but somehow, part of it got scorched. (Maybe it fell against the heat register? I don't know.) So I had to get rid of the cover, but the inside was still in perfectly good shape. I washed and dried it (feathers all over the place!) and then decided to give it new life.

I chose the colours for this pillow based on this photo that I stumbled upon online. My colours ended up being darker, and I'd like to try again for a lighter feel, but I'm happy with this one. I used a granny square pattern from the Edie Eckman book Beyond-the-Square Crochet Motifs, free-styled a border, and made a giant simple granny square for the back. The last bit of edging is from this pattern.

I still have a bit of left-over yarn, so maybe I'll make a smaller pillow with plain grannys. Who knows?

And another wee one

Same pattern, just reversed the colours and added a band of single crochets at the bottom.

A wee hat

I had left-over yarn from crocheting my niece's blanket, so I found a free pattern on Ravelry. This one only took me about 2 or 3 hours (scads faster than afghans!). I yoinked the flower from another Ravelry poster.

The madness continues

Gotta get all the stitching in that I can before school starts again! I've got 3 projects going now: the granny square blanket I showed in the previous post, a blanket, and this scarf...it looks crazy, but it's just 2 kinds of stitches! Thanks to Yarn Muse for her great video tutorials.

And if you flip it over, the back is kinda cool...as you can see, I'm not 100% sure how to move from one row to the next, and I've tried a few different ways...I don't think it shows on the front though. This is going to be a very heavy duty scarf!

Apparently

I crochet. Am still fighting with the whole tension thing, and I only know how to do granny squares, and patterns make no sense to me (YouTube is a great teacher!), and I need to buy a good book (any suggestions?) to learn some more, but for now, I'm churning out those granny squares. Hopefully, I'll figure out how to join them all together, and they'll make a cozy blanket in time for winter.

A shower card...

I used a Mojo sketch for inspiration and pulled colours I thought would work with my new Papertrey Ink Friendship Fillers stamp set. The red was an afterthought, and I'm glad I put it in...it makes things 'pop'.

I coloured the seashells with Copics...a lot of E's for the brown tones, a yellow to underlay the starfish, some E pinks for the inside of the conch, and some blues for the sand dollar.

The papers and inks are all SU! in Baja Breeze, Kraft, Riding Hood Red, So Saffron, and Early Espresso.

Some detail shots:

He's almost in preschool...

but I hope to have this framed for him by kindergarten! (Note to aspiring cross-stitch pattern designers: there is a dearth of boy-themed birth kits. Please remedy!)

I still have some backstitching to do, as well as some french knots , and, of course, A's name, birth date, and birth weight. And then it's on to the next project(s)!

Cross-Stitch Fever

It would seem that my craftiness goes in spurts...baking...x-stitch...paper. Right now I'm on a x-stitch roll!

This is a Janlynn chart, Winter Sampler. It's a ton of fun to stitch because it's mostly full x-stitches, and only 2 blends. At the suggestion of the shop lady, I'm adding a bit of metallic thread to the white where snow is represented. (It's hard to see in the photo, but it's in the top border and in the snowflakes in the heart.) It's a huge project, but because it's a sampler, it's easy to do in sections.