Introducing neon UV reactive Donegal nep! This black with multicoloured nep that glows under blacklight is called “Squirrels at a Rave” after a wooden sign I picked up at @wombatswoodshop at @wonderwoolwales last weekend.
hello hi!! i have a ship request!! its for my boyfriend and i hehe
sonic and shadow ( sonadow ) from sonic the hedgehog, with colors being pink and purple if possible!!
pink stims preferably being technology/soft things and purple stims being space/slime/glitter!!
if you cant do this its ok!!
Heh– you tried to destroy me in the past too, remember?
A little more than two years ago now, my grandmother passed away. She and my grandpa had moved down to my home town a few years before so we could take care of them. I brought them groceries once a week, helped them write checks, fixed tvs, and found lost things. I was really close with my grandma.
In addition to her hilarious personality and dry wit, one of my favorite things about her was that she was a painter and a crafter like me! She used to crochet, and I took her to the craft store a couple of times so she could get more yarn and books on crochet. But her arthritis and the shaking in her hands kept getting worse, so she eventually had to stop.
She kept her most recent project, a granny square blanket, safely packed away in a plastic bin. She told all of us she was going to finish it one day.
Her hands never got better, and when she got sick, and we found out it was cancer, she rapidly deteriorated.
After she passed, I went to work helping my mom clean out my grandparents apartment so we could move my grandpa in with her. In our frantic cleaning, I found that bin again:
DOZENS of granny squares, dozens of half used skeins. I asked my mom what she wanted me to do with it, and she said she didn't care. I set it aside and later took it home.
Maybe a month later, that tumblr post about the Loose Ends Project was going around. It felt like a sign--I was never going to learn to crochet in order to finish my grandmother's blanket. But they might be able to help!
So I filled out the interest form. They got back to me SUPER quick. And maybe 2 weeks later, I was paired with volunteer in my state (only 2 hours away!) and the box of yarn, granny squares, and my grandmother's crochet hook were in the mail. That was at the end of January this year.
Over the next couple of months, my "finisher" emailed me regular updates on her progress, and asked me questions on my preferences for how she constructed the final blanket.
At the end of August, the blanket was done!
I had always intended the blanket to be a gift for my mother. So I cleaned it up, put it in the only bag I had big enough to fit it, and drove to my mom's. I gave the blanket to her and she was gobsmacked. I explained to her all about Loose Ends, and how someone volunteered to finish the piece for us. She was speechless. (I was quite pleased with this, because I am not the best at giving gifts, so this was a pretty exciting reaction!)
She said that it was the most thoughtful gift she had ever been given. She said "your grandma would love this". To which I replied, "yeah, I know she really wanted to finish it a couple of years ago". But that was when my mom dropped the bomb of a century on me--she told me that my grandma had started making those granny squares OVER 30 YEARS AGO. She had started the blanket when my grandpa was staying in the hospital, but that was back when my mom was younger than I am now! My grandma had packed them all away, planning on finishing it, when my grandpa was sent home from the hospital. Then it went from house to house, from condo in Chicago to their apartment in my hometown. All that time and my grandma had wanted to finish it, but couldn't. First because she was busy, then because she forgot how to do it, then because of her arthritis, and then because of the cancer. My mom said she had given up on expecting my grandma to finish it.
She said I brought a piece of her childhood with her mom out of the past.
And really, all of this is to say, if you have seen or heard about the Loose Ends Project and have an uncompleted project or piece from a loved one who has passed away--these are your people. They were so kind and treated my project with such care. That box probably would have been found by my own grandkids one day if I hadn't heard about Loose Ends.
Five stars, absolutely worth it!
(From what I understand, you can sign up to volunteer too! If you have time to share, it might be worth checking out!)
When I was in middle school, I tried to learn how to crochet. I knew how to knit already, so I figured ‘how hard could it be’ and used my Christmas money on a brand new set of aluminum hooks and a how-to book.
To say it was difficult was an understatement. I spent hours pouring over my book, begging to gain some inkling of understanding from what felt like incomprehensible runes. My reward? One lopsided trapezoid of lumpy fabric and a resolve to never pick up a crochet hook again.
And so life went on, I finished middle school and high school without giving crochet so much as a second glance. In college, I read about how crochet couldn’t be replicated by a machine, it was unique in a way that knitting and many other fiber arts weren’t.
For Christmas last year, my girlfriend gave me what I now consider to be my most prized possession: a crocheted plush of my favorite pokemon. I raved over her skills and, since she never learned how to knit, we decided to have a yarn date at some point and teach each other our respective skills.
We never did get around to that yarn date. She passed a few months after our declaration, leaving me to inherit what was left of her yarn.
Nearly a decade after my initial attempt, I got ready for the toughest battle of my life. My weapons? One skein of yarn, a YouTube video, and a crochet hook that I had somehow never gotten rid of.
I slowly made my way through the video, redoing my work a couple times until I was satisfied with my product: a small, slightly misshapen rectangle.
I looked at my pristinely-made pokemon plush with hope for the first time in months and thought to myself, ‘maybe crocheting isn’t the hardest thing in the world, maybe you were just 12.’
Maybe this isn’t the hardest thing in the world. Maybe I’m just 21.
I'd like to introduce to everyone this horrid thing I created about a year ago but haven't shown many people yet (probably for the best).
This is Baby. AKA The Monster. AKA Sight Tremendous and Abhorred, AKA Vile Insect, AKA A Thing Such As Even Dante Could Not Have Conceived, etc, etc. It's made from bits of scrap fabric I scrounged from various sources and is roughly the size of a human toddler. Its design is based on Mary Shelly's original descriptions of Frankenstein's creature.
But that's not all! Behold!
You can dissect this little abomination to reveal a full set of crocheted, knitted, and scrap fabric organs, all hand-stitched by yours truly!
It has a heart, stomach, lungs, liver, small and large intestine, kidneys, bladder, and, of course, a brain! So it can ponder the horrors of its own existence!
I used this pattern by Less Than Three for the heart. I ended up felting it because I screwed up most of the stitches (I was relatively new to crochet at the time). The result was a bit of a blobby mess, but oh well.
So yeah. This thing lives in my house now (my family hates it). I have yet to reap the full consequences of my hubris.
One of my posts keeps getting reblogged with hashtags like
It's funny because a while ago, I made a few KNITTING patterns that purposefully look like CROCHET.
I call it faux-chet.
Off the hook shawl - yes, it's knit.
Some of you may find these patterns interesting, they're all I cord based stitches. I know that most of these would be basic projects to crochet, but not everybody knows how. I designed these for people who want the look but don't have time or the desire to learn a new craft.
Loaded Taco Shawl
Another advantage of these faux-chet patterns is that they use a lot less yarn than crochet. The taco above uses i cord like chain stitch, it only weighs 85 g. The boardwalk wrap and top below mimics fillet crochet openwork.
All of these faux-chet patterns are made with a technique that I call the lattice stitch. I made a YouTube playlist of the basics and sometimes teach classes on this topic.
I named this pattern Definitely a Knit Shawl to avoid Ravelry mods relabeling it AND included photos of it on the needles to prove that is actually knitted. I have had arguments with people who think that I just crochet poorly and that's why my stitches look funny.
If you think the stitch is interesting, you should definitely check it out. The YouTube videos are free and I have plenty more patterns on my Ravelry page that use this technique.