Tag Archives: acatherinenoon

Make Something Monday

Knoontime Knitting
What’s In YOUR Wallet? or Bag?

Happy Monday, Dear Reader!  I’ve gotten some of my design mojo back and have been playing with some different knitting designs.  This morning, as I waited for the bus, I checked the Bus Tracker tool.  It said the next bus wouldn’t be there for 27 minutes.  Aside from making me late for work, that meant I had time to get some knitting done.

Then, mid-row, what do I see but a bus? Holy crap.  Try stuffing size 10 needles in an already over-stuffed knitting bag and grabbing everything to get onto the bus.

MONDAY!

WIP

This is what I’m making with my size 10 needles.  One of my books has an afghan on the cover that’s made out of triangles.  I decided to take a twist on that idea and using a base of 35 stitches, make a sampler with leftover yarns and different textures.

This is a Turkish Stitch done in Lion Brand Homespun.  It’s a boucle-type of yarn and difficult to see stitch definition; however, I like the less dense look of the fabric.  I find the juxtaposition of the bias pull of the stitch with the decreased edge for the triangle to be an interesting opposition.

What are you working on?

The Eyes Have It

Knoontime Knitting
The Sun

Every year, I struggle with Christmas and the holidays and what they mean to me.  Much like my forays into 3-D, my forays into what the holidays “should” be like are colored by the past and by expectations.  I remember when my parents separated when I was ten, and I believed my mother “ruined” Christmas.  The magic was gone.  I couldn’t understand why my father couldn’t be there and we couldn’t just celebrate like we had in years past.

Tolstoy said that every happy family is happy in the same way, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  Melanie Beatty said that in alcoholic families, everyone’s angry: Mom’s angry, Dad’s angry, even the dog is angry.  That last one stuck with me – even the dog?  She’s right; my dog knew something was “up.”

Why do I bring that up now?  As I learn how to make the holidays mine after all these years, I’m finding that the past is much with me.  Which brings me to the Ojos de Dios, or “Eyes of God.”

The Huichol people believe that these amulets bring blessings and luck upon the person for whom they’re made.  When a person is born, an ojo is made for them in the central temple.  Ojos are also made at the inception of new business projects, marriages, and other beginnings.  It’s a way to attract the benevolent attention of the deities onto one’s own life.

Enlightenment

A friend of mine suggested some years ago to make the ojos using cinnamon sticks and embroidery floss.  The idea caught fire in my mind and I love the shiny effect of the weaving.  By varying the weaves, you can create more complex structures; but just by using a simple overdyed yarn you can achieve beautiful effects with relatively little effort.

Water

I made these ojos for my office.  I wanted to bring blessings on our work, and to remember that it’s the holidays.  I’m trying to capture some of that sense of magic they had when I was little.  I’m not sure what made it magical, which is part of the challenge; I don’t know what I’m searching for.

Fire

One year, my cat Marina kept batting down all the ornaments I’d put on our tree.  She broke several of them and made a mess.  By end of the holiday, all the ornaments were grouped in the top 18 inches of the tree, leaving the rest to the lights.  The next year, I made ojos for the whole tree – a whole canister of them.  It made me incredibly happy to do.

That’s part of the magic, then – making things.  I think that we humans are crafty creatures and that making things with our hands is part of what satisfies us.  So our holiday this year has centered around handmade things – from food to decorations.

What about you?  
What makes the holidays magical for you?

Yarnglee

Knoontime Knitting

So, I’ve been on a major yarn hiatus.  I’ve been doing calligraphy like a madwoman; I’m filling notebooks with the stuff (and no, that’s not a typo; yes, I mean more than one).  Let’s just say I had to order a second set of practice markers because I used up the ink in the first set.  See what I mean?

But I’m feeling the bug again.  I’m beginning to see that this is part of my normal pattern (which only took me fourteen years to figure out, but let’s not go there, kthxbi).  I seem to set knitting aside around May or June and pick it up around September or October.

We celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary this year – yay! – and went down to southern Illinois and St. Louis to poke around.  One of the shops had some lovely Lana de Oro and I had to get some.  I’m thinking socks.  50% wool, 50% alpaca.  Michael picked heather grey, I picked heather lavender:

The lavender has bits of other colors in it, more as shading than a true ombre.

The lighting is weird because I took these outside.  I tried to get a close-up and the camera changed the coloring.  Sigh.  Must.learn.Photoshop.

Can you tell I’ve been playing with the grey hank?  ~blush~  But this is the grey with the lavender; I’m thinking that I’ll use a small mosaic in the cuff of each sock in the opposite color.

It’s really not as pink as it seems in this picture.  But I’m excited.  I may even use the toe-up technique, though I think I should do the first set with practice yarn first.  We shall see.

A Journey Into 3-D Notebook – Hats!

Knoontime Knitting

So I’ve been playing with knitting from the top down.  I started a sweater and have been wrestling with it (which I’ll share later), but for now I want to share my newest creation:  a hat!

My first hat was almost a decade ago.  A friend asked me to make a hat for her friend.  I did so.  It was large enough to fit her, her friend, AND me – and not just our heads.  It was not, shall we say, a success.

Since then, I’ve successfully mastered all kinds of things in knitting:  sweaters, sleeves, socks, lace, design…  So why not hats?

I asked myself that and then gave it a shot.

This one is fun because the increases are one-off from each other so that they swirl around the head.  I did the crown with a merino wool, then the sides with an alpaca and mohair blend that’s fuzzy and whisper-soft.

I even like how it looks on me.

And you can see it from the back.

I want to try making another hat that’s a little smaller, so it stays tighter on the head. In fact, I started one, but that’s a post for another day! 🙂

Stashbusting – The Ugli Bag

Knoontime Knitting

This picture is a bit yellow, and the middle of the bag is beige and not lemon.  But behold, my friends, the Ugli Bag.

The top is super soft, fuzzy furry overdye with a thick central filament of a bulky yarn.  I didn’t have much of it, so I couldn’t at first figure out what to make; then I decided on a gift bag.

Then I ran out.  What to do?

The beige stripe is the leftover marino and alpaca blend that I used for a lovely scarf wrap that I’ll feature in an upcoming article.

Then I ran out of that.  Uh-oh.

Enter the blue.

Hrrrh?  The bag is a mixture of browns, pumpkins, and beige.  blue?  BLUE?

Well, orange’s complement is blue, and so it’s a natural choice.

Sort of.

Then it hit me – do the strap in blue, too.  The prior picture shows the top of the strap so you can see the texture.  This one shows the bag.

I didn’t realize, though, when I put in a 2-stitch edging of garter stitch that I would cause the strap to fold in on itself.  It worked to my benefit, actually, because instead of being ultra wide, the strap is now just the right width and the double-thickness means it will be stronger.

You can get a better idea of how obnoxious the blue is next to the orange, though, in this shot.  It’s not quite as neon blue as in the image, but it’s somewhere between muted and neon (how’s that for precise?).

I’m going to line the bag with muslin to give it some strength and I’ll show pictures once that’s all done.

Knit on!

Saturday Showcase: Elizabeth Brooks Answers the Question

Knoontime Knitting

Elizabeth Brooks is amazing.  She’s talented.  She’s a writer and an editor and a darn fine human being.  And when I asked her, do you craft, she laughed.

Laughed.

Here then, is Elizabeth Brooks and “Sampler Platter.”  Enjoy!

Sampler Platter

So Noony put out a call, asking for blog posts about all kinds of things, including crafts.

Do I craft?

Oh, do I! I’m not actually that good at any of them, though, mind you, because I take a rather “sampler platter” approach to all kinds of crafts: I get interested in something, and I get deeply invested in it for a while… usually just long enough to learn the basics and assure myself that yep, I can do that… and then I lose interest and move on to something else.

I’ve done latchhook and needlepoint and embroidery. I’ve made my own clothes (both everyday — which were mostly miserable failures — and some fantasy/sci-fi garb for cons). I spent most of grad school making a counted cross-stitch piece involving a dragon on a castle in a lake that was huge and gorgeous and by the time I was done, I never wanted to see another cross-stitch pattern again in my life. (To this day, I haven’t seen a pattern that’s made me want to pick it back up again.) I’ve been an on-again, off-again amateur photographer since my parents gave me my first camera at the age of ten, and of course, with all those photographs, I got into scrapbooking for a good while, too.

There are tons of other crafts that I’ve toyed with, but never quite gotten fully into: cake decorating, jewelry-making, and assorted flavors of ethnic cooking, to name only a few.

But yarncraft, oh my goodness, yes. I learned to crochet when I was 13, more or less shamed into it by my great-aunt, who made gorgeous pieces despite being blind. I learned to do little bits, then dropped it for a decade, only to pick it back up after that cross-stitch overload I mentioned. I’m terrible at maintaining a gauge, though, so I mostly made things like afghans, where that’s not quite as important. I made about four afghans (they make fantastic gifts when you’re fresh out of school and poor), then transitioned to crocheting thread instead of yarn. I made a whole slew of lace-covered Christmas ornaments [photo at left] and some breadbasket cloths before dropping it again. After that, I decided I needed to teach myself how to knit, so I did — I made a scarf and a couple of Christmas stockings, but I found it lots slower than crochet, and then I had my first kid and my free time went away, and I put all the yarn away.

But my kids are older now, and just a few months ago, the (unintentionally) combined efforts of several friends and acquaintances got me hooked (hah! I love puns!) on making amigurumi (crocheted toys, essentially).

I love that they’re generally small and easy to make — my favorite pattern is a palm-sized octopus that I can whip out in about an hour and a half, but I’ve made dozens and dozens of different things in the last three or four months. I started with food, then made flowers. Then it was Easter time, so I made a bunch of eggs and bunnies.

I’m an enormous geek who’s just gotten into a Doctor Who obsession, so I made a bunny with a fez and bow tie. Then I made a couple of Daleks in wacky colors, and a weeping angel.

Then I found a little chibi-Cthulhu pattern (did I mention I was a geek?). And after I made one for myself, a friend of mine made some crack to me about Cthulhu porn (“Cockthulhu: The Throbbing Tentacles of Pulsing Purple Passion“) and just to punish him for putting that image in my brain, I made him a chibi-Cthulhu with penises instead of tentacles. (No photo for that. You’re welcome.)

Just about the time I was finishing that up, my friend Lynn showed me this picture of some adorable Elder Gods.

It rather lit a spark in my brain, and now I’m trying to make all of them, though since I’m working without patterns (except for the Cthulhu, of course, since he was already done), it’s a bit slower-going. I’ve got Hastur done, and Nyarlathotep, and Yog-Sothoth. I’m doing Shub-Niggurath now, though it’s slow going because working in black yarn is hell on my eyes. I’m saving Dagon for last, because he’ll be the easiest, actually. But here’s a picture of my Little Horrors family so far:

…Yeah, I’m not quite right in the head. I know. But just for enduring my wrongness, I’m offering up a contest! Leave a comment, and in 1 week?, one random commenter will be drawn to receive an octopus in a color of their choice! (NB: you need to be willing to send us a private message with a working mailing address that can receive a smallish package.)

And if you ask really nicely, I just might include a top hat for him.

* * *

Masquerading by day as an uptight corporate cog, Elizabeth spends her nights concocting gleefully smutty stories. She writes erotic romances for a wide span of worlds, genres, and orientations, and is also a senior editor for Torquere Press. When she’s not writing or editing, she loves a wide range of generally nerdy hobbies, including reading, photography, tabletop games, geeky yarncraft, and silly smartphone games. You can find her online at her blog or on Facebook.

Elizabeth’s latest release is Foxfur, available from Torquere Press on November 13.

Blurb:

Pleasure-slave Cheng takes no particular note of the red-haired woman when she purchases his services. But the morning after her departure, Cheng is taken into custody by the Emperor’s own guards and brought before one of the rare and terrifying Chained Mages. Already frightened and confused, things go from bad to worse for Cheng when the mage reveals the demonic nature of the red-haired woman. Now not only Cheng’s life, but the lives of everyone around him, depend on their finding the fox-demon as soon as possible.

As a Chained Mage, Jin is at best feared, and at worst, despised. But he can’t allow his personal feelings to interfere with his mission, not even when his admiration for the slave deepens. In fact, Jin’s love may result in a disaster. The fox-demon has placed a spell in Cheng, a spell designed to turn his sexual energy to a murderous ends, endangering himself and everyone around him. And worst of all, they’re not the only hunters on the fox-demon’s trail!