I will survive! Please, please, let me survive!

I swear, it will be a miracle if I make it through the next 4 days without my head exploding.

But one bit of the oh-my-gosh-please-don't-let-it-get-me stress is over, baby. OVER!

That particular bit of stress being the relaunch of my crafty little selling site. My major source of pride in this relaunch is the addition of these awesome tile magnets. I so don't want to sell them, but, seriously, how many magnets can my poor little fridge hold?

Check it out! http://www.thisisspiffy.com

Now I need to:

Finish knitting a bag strap.
Assemble the bag.
Go to Joanns for fabric.
Line the bag.
Prepare a portfolio for TNNA.
Prepare mini-portfolio, self-promotional hand-outs for TNNA.
Pack.
Read up on what I can't take with me on the plane.
Try and find an itty-bitty bottle of saline for my contacts, because I really don't want to have to check a bag.
Get the order in to Webs for the yarn for the projects for the publisher.
Keep the house chaos at bay.
Not go crazy.
Not make children crazy.
Not make husband crazy.


Oh, my. It is all possible, right?

UGH! I just remembered that Adam is cutting the hole in the wall today. And I need a haircut. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

Well, it's official!

I am (or will be as soon as I get the contract printed out and mailed in) an Official Crochet Designer.

I heard back from the people at the publishing company today and they picked up 4 of my designs for an upcoming household crochet book.

Yay! I would like to thank my husband for his patience at finding yarn all over the house, being shushed while I count, and willingness to engage in sidetrips to yarn shops while on vacation. The kids have been great at not touching mommy's work and only doodling on the blank pages of my design journal, so thanks for that. The wonderful people at Crochet Me, who gave me the foolish notion that other people would be interested in my designs in the first place. The ladies at knit club who put up with my incessant chatter about it all, especially Miss Pink and Linda who have hooked me up with yarn and encouragement countless times. And, of course, The Academy!

New Dishcloth Group

I, like many knitters I know, can be rather obsessive about dishcloths. I like them mainly because they are a great way to try out stitch patterns. I don't really NEED dishcloths myself. I prefer sponges, truth be told. But still. They are fun and quick. At first I enjoyed the dishcloth mailing list where you get a few lines of the pattern at a time and get to see the pattern unfold as the days progress. It's a mini mystery and the small doses can make overwhelming patterns seems much more doable.

However.

And it's a big-H However.

For some reason, dishcloth mailing lists are plagued with off-topic posts. I occasionally end up deleting bits of the pattern on accident when I'm trying to get rid of all the fluff emails, which is so very frustrating. I mean, I'm glad that some people out there have found a bit of community on the list and that's all well and good, but, really people, I just want to knit some funky swatches, and 20+ off-topic emails a day gets old fast.

So, I'm starting my own list. C'mon and join in if you like. Looking at my schedule I think I'll be able to start sending out patterns in mid-August. (Summer is crazy, and I'm going on 2 trips between now and then, so I'm trying to be realistic.) In the meantime, I'm going to be sussing out the first few patterns and spreading the word. Feel free to spread the word yourself if you like. This group will have zero fluff. The only emails you will get from the list will be the bits of patterns. A dishcloth list that is JUST dishcloths. The patterns will be available in the archives after the knit-along is over. The first pattern of the month will be a knitting pattern, the second a crochet pattern. We're going to start easy in both areas, so if you are a beginner in either area, this should be good practice for you.

Incidentally, I don't plan on doing many, if any, of the knit/purl picture cloths. I, personally, find them kind of boring to work on, and I get really annoyed when I finish one only to find that it's something I care nothing about. The vast majority of the cloths on this list will be ones that strengthen your technical abilities: lace, relief patterns, cables, etc.

You can find the group here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JustDishcloths

You'll need a yahoo id to join the group. If you don't already have a yahoo id, you can sign up at http://groups.yahoo.com It's free and easy to do, and once you've gotten the id and told them what email address you want your group mail sent to, you won't have to log on again if you don't want to, so it's not a big, scary techno-thing you need to learn how to navigate. Just follow the links and do what it tells you to do.

If you are oh-so excited and want to start stocking up on yarn, I'll tell you now that while many people prefer kitchen cotton, I personally prefer a dk weight cotton, as I find it dries faster and isn't as big and floppy while I'm working with it. I get my DK cotton from recycling cotton sweaters, but Patons Grace works well, too. Some standard worsted weight kitchen cottons are peaches and cream or sugar'n'creme.

So, there you have it. Join up! Spread the word!

Well, it's official.

I'm going to TNNA this year. Woohoo! It's part business related travel and part birthday present. It's going to be a whirlwind trip, flying in Friday and leaving Saturday evening, but it's 36 hours of me-time and that's a good thing.

Knit club was fun last night. Jenny made it and Linda was there and we had a new face in the form of Tristan. Tristan has been undergoing a lot of education recently on the existance of local knit clubs and other yarn stores. So, she found us! And then we had someone walk by while we were there and she crochets and needs help, so she's going to be coming next week.

Crap is relative.

A little while back, I signed up for a Crap Yarn Swap on Swap-Bot. The premise of the swap was, I thought, genius. You send $10 of yarn that has been loitering around the edges of your stash so long that you have come to loathe it. You can't think of a single thing to make with it, and you're sick of the sight of it. Off it goes to your partner. In the meantime, you get crap yarn from your upstream pal. And you, with your fresh eyes, look at your upstream partner's crap and make it into something for your downstream partner.

Brilliant, right?

RIGHT!

This was such a fantastic swap. I can't even tell you how pleased I was with the whole experience.

For my contribution of yarn, I sent of a partial skein of mohair/acrylic blend and a mystery mohair that I'd used to make a poncho for Kai last year and had no idea what to do with what was left. That yarn was seriously starting to feel like a noose, because there was a LOT left and I was feeling some major yarn guilt for not putting it to good use. So, yay, I got rid of guilt yarn! Joy!

My upstream partner was extremely generous. She sent me way more than $10 worth of yarn. She sent a skein of elann Sonata, Sinfonia, Elsebeth Lavold Angora, Bernat Boucle and Nora. (I can't remember the manufacturer of Nora, but it was that train-track style yarn with a squiggle of multi-colored wool in between.)

I poked through my downstream partner's profile and saw she needed a bag for her knitting, so I thought that would be a safe project. I thought I'd use the boucle paired with one of the cottons, but I didn't like how it looked with the colors I had, so I did some stash diving and came out with two balls of Cotton Tots in black and used it with the boucle. I just knit a large rectangle on 10.5 needles until I had a yard of the Cotton Tots left to use for seaming. I folded the bag in half and seamed up the sides and added gussets 1" in on either side of the bottom of the bag.



(Ooh, look! Renovation mess in the background!)

While diving for fabric to line it with, I came up with a flour sack I'd been saving and after reseaming it and lopping off a few inches from the top and bottom, it fit the bag perfectly with the design lining up exactly in the interior. Eeeexcellent... My plan was working... I attached some rattan handles with a bit of grosgrain ribbon, added a snap closure and called it good.



I had tried using some of the Sinfonia and Nora to make a dragonfly motif to go on the front of the bag, as my partner said she liked dragonflies and I thought the Nora would work well for the wings. However, it didn't work with the bulky yarn and looked like dookie, so I left it off. Instead, I used to Sinfonia and the Sonata to make star shaped washcloths for her.





I used the pattern for Beth's Little Star Afghan with an h hook and stopping at the 7th row of the pattern. They came out cute, if I do say so myself. I think I may whip up a bunch for my girls to use with the yarn from the sweater I recycled. They took all of maybe 30 minutes to make each of them. I heart crochet.

With the Angora (oooooh, angora--even as a blend--was so lovely to work with!), I decided to make up some fingerless gloves--another thing my partner had on her wish list. So, I started googling for patterns. Only I couldn't find any that would work with the limited yardage of the Angora. And then I found these. I double stranded the Angora to get the proper weight and used some of the remaining Boucle for the wrists. It was a simple pattern and they worked up easily. I'm not in love with the Boucle. It looks ok, but the difference in feel from the Angora was very noticeable. Unfortunately, I didn't have anything in my stash that would be any better, so they went off as is. I wouldn't be the least bit offended if my swap partner decided to snip the cuffs off and rework them.



So all of those went off the other day and should arrive in the next day or two if they haven't already. In the end, I couldn't figure out anything to do with the Nora. I never really "got" the whole novelty yarn craze and my lack of experience working with the funky stuff ended up kicking my butt. I sent it along with the FOs and figured that the 2 balls of cotton tots I pulled out of my own stash made it ok that I didn't use one of the balls of crap yarn that was sent to me.

And what did I get for a finished item from my upstream pal? Dress-up clothes for the kids!



An apron, 2 crowns and a clutch for them to use to play Cinderella. She left the crowns unfinished so I could size them to their heads, which I thought was very clever. She had quite a challenge with the yarn. I know I wouldn't have come up with anything half as cute. The apron is especially adorable, I think, and it's large enough that it fits them more like a skirt at this point. They LOVE their crowns. Abby went to get dressed this morning and came out with a t-shirt, a long skirt of Kai's that touched the ground on her, and her crown. A little princess, ready to head to Target!

Thank you, partner!!

I would absolutely do another swap like this again. It already has me looking at my own stash with a more discerning eye.

Walk all over me, why don'tcha?

I made a rug last month.



Pattern: My own, using my handy-dandy Harmony Stitch Guides.
Yarn: Some old Aunt Lydia's Rug Yarn that was given to me by my mom.
Comments: I... well, it's a rug, right? Utilitarian and all that. I'm not all that woohoo about it, because I really don't like the colors, but I had the yarn and I was sick of having it in my stash, so I made it to use up the yarn. I was willing to overlook the blah factor of the colors, because it is utilitarian, but you know what? It's not even functioning well as a rug. Yeah, the yarn is a bulky acrylic spun up to be a real workhorse yarn. But, one thing about acrylic is that it's got very little heft to it. And so this rug is constantly getting kicked about and folded over on itself and I'm always having to set it right again. I don't want to use it on the linoleum areas in the house, because it would be too slippery AND folding all over itself and being generally a nuisance. If I had pets, I'd consider using it as a mat under their food dishes, but really, this rug has turned out to be fairly useless. I think it's going to Goodwill. Not only that, but I have a knitted rug on the needles right now with the same yarn that I think is going to Goodwill with it. Maybe someone else will come up with a better use for the yarn.

It's a shame, because I like the look of the stitch pattern as a rug, but I think it would have turned out better in a bulky, rough, wool yarn, possibly felted slightly in some colors that suit my house a bit more. Eh. Live and learn. Perhaps when all the dust of the rennovation has settled and we have the new flooring in, I'll give it a try again in some Peace Fleece.

I'm alive! (So far.)

Well, it's time I poke my head above the construction dust and reassure people that I am still alive. Things are moving along well, thanks to the week long visit from my dad, during which time he put in about 10 hours of work a day on various projects. My dad is the hardest worker I know. Rome wasn't built in a day simply because my dad hadn't been born yet.

I've taken tons of photos and plan to share this week. Lots of crafting, LOTS of home improvements. So, let's begin shall we?

Today, I bring you the progress on the bathroom. Along with the tale of woe. I know many of you have heard this already so just skip to the photos if you've heard it all before. Let's recap:

Tile Man came and continued to work on the bathroom. There was a mix-up with the floor tile, but we just thought it meant it would take another day or two for it to be done. Also, he apparently didn't figure into his estimate some of the minor drywall work that needed to be done to finish the tile. So, that added some time, too, while Adam finished that. (We asked him to give us a quote where Adam had to do nothing else in order for the tile to be done. And he didn't. Or he changed his mind or something. I really hate how contractors can hold you hostage with your house.) Also, he called on the Saturday after he started work wondering if the floor tile was in, because he was moving to California the following day and would come lay it for us if it was in. A-wha?! Adam nearly lost it completely at that point, but we called and figured out that we had had a bad game of Telephone going on where we would say something and he thought we knew and he would say something and we thought he meant something different. So, we couldn't hold that against him even though it would have been nice had he outright told us at least once rather than assuming we knew he was leaving the state.

*ahem* I'm letting the frustration get me all out of order. He put the wall tile in and after the big misunderstanding, he came back from California the following week for a day to lay the floor tile and fix a few things he'd screwed up. When I went in to see the tile after he'd left, (i.e. gone back to California) I noticed that he'd laid the entire floor of the shower stall 1/4 inch below the lip of the drain. So the water couldn't drain. There would have always been a puddle. We ended up having to rip it all up and starting over. That damaged the sheets of tile, so when we reinstall it, we will have to piece in tiles one by one in several spots.

Seriously frustrating. These are the BIG issues we had with the guy. There were plenty of minor things that we just grinned and ignored. We paid him way too much for what he did. Between my mom's home renovation 15 years ago and this experience, I have no trust for contractors anymore. At all.

Anyway, the walls look lovely. Let's see some photos!

First, the photos from before Tile Guy came:

This shot shows the icky floor tile.


This shot gives you a look at the walls for the shower stall.

And, after:

The shower stall. The floor of the stall is white just because Adam used white concrete to raise the floor level before putting the tile in again. It's still not been retiled yet. Isn't the wall tile pretty, though?! I'm totally blissed out with how it turned out. The blue tiles are 1" tumbled glass. LOVE it!



The new floor. I wanted to have black grout so that it looked like a 30's bathroom, but Tile Guy wouldn't do it, because black grout will bleed into the tiles. I don't know what they did differently in the 30's, but I wasn't going to argue. I just wanted it done. (Also, Adam ended up grouting it, because of the mix-up with the floor tile and Tile Guy moving.)

Since these photos were taken, the toilet, sink pedestal, and shelves have been reinstalled. Adam is getting close to being done with that room, though, so instead of doing more in-progress shots, I'll take more photos when it's all done.

The next post will be crafty again, I promise!

Slideshows may be annoying, but they are really fast to put together and post!

Here are all the scary "before" photos from the bathroom. (Click that sentence. Then I had to click to option to go full size before it would play for me.) I believe we started this in January '06. So, a year and a half of bathroom limbo and we're close to being done. Finally. I will post pictures of the tile in progress when I have a few more spare moments. In the meantime, I think you can agree that this room really, really needed some attention.

I cannot think of a subject today.

I have been so busy in the last month that my head is starting to spin round backwards. I do have photos. I just have no time to edit and post them. And that's been getting in the way of my posting anything, but I'm starting to forget things about my crafty projects, so I need to get them down despite the lack of photos.

First, I finished the afghan I was making for the afghan for Afghans Mother's Day drive. It's packed up with a baby sweater I made for my daughter when she was a baby and she never wore and I think 7 hats for adults and babies and will go out in today's mail if I can make it to the PO in time.

Second, I'm taking part in a crap yarn swap over at swap-bot.com. It's a two part swap. You send some crap yarn from your stash--not necessarily crap but something that has been in your stash for ages and you can't figure out how to use--to your swap partner. Your swap partner then uses that yarn to make something for their swap partner. My shipment of yarn arrived on Saturday from my swap partner and a) she sent me a ton of stuff and b) it was, for the most part, fairly awesome stuff. There were a couple of hanks of novelty yarn (ok, I will classify that as the crap. ;) ), but in addition to that, there were 2 different balls of mercerized DK weight cotton, and a hank of ANGORA/WOOL blend! Hi! Angora!!

So, I looked at it all and there were some yarns that clearly would work with some and some that would work with others, but nothing was coming to me idea-wise as a way that I could use everything. I went to my downstream partner's info page and tried to get some inspiration there and was coming up empty.

And then it hit me. I had a couple of hanks of crap yarn in my own stash that I'd been struggling to find a use for. (It didn't go to my swap partner in the first phase, because if I had sent her all the yarn from my stash that I didn't know how to use, she would have gotten a very, very large box.) So, I went and got those two balls, which, incidentally were black, mercerized cotton, and double stranding it with the hank of black Bernat Soft Boucle that came in my package, I started knitting a stockinette rectangle. And, immediately, I was really, really happy with what I saw. The mercerized cotton toned down the boucle-ness of the boucle and makes it look much more sophisticated. I don't want to say what the rectangle will eventually become, because there aren't many people in the swap and it wouldn't be all that hard for my downstream partner to find my blog. So stay tuned on that.

It occured to me, also, that 2 of the other yarns that were sent to me could be used to create a motif of something that my downstream partner says she's very into. So I found a free pattern to make said motif in thread and I'm going to upsize it to work with the yarn I have to put on the project when it's done. I think this is going to turn into a project I'm sad to see go. I'm so glad I signed up for this swap, because I would never, never, never have bought two of the three yarns I'm using in this project, but the premise of the swap made me work with what I got and I think it's going to be something really great. While I was digging around to get the yarn out of my own stash, I was already looking at what I had with more appreciation.

And finally, my Dad is arriving for a visit on Saturday. The Tile Guy messed up the tile in my shower stall right before he left town and so we had to rip it all up and my husband will be redoing it after work throughout the week. And, Wednesday we start framing in the play room to turn it into a bedroom and the carport to turn it into a dining/homeschool room. I need to purge the playroom and figure out how to arrange furniture so that it's out of the way, but our house is livable. While all this is going on, the deadline for the swatches for the book projects are fast approaching. I'm hoping to have all the swatches for one of the projects done by tonight, another project done by tomorrow providing the yarn arrives, and then spend two days each on the swatches for the last two things. My life can be very boring and mellow for months on end and then WHAMO everything will hit at once like this. So, bear with me, but I know right now that I will be MIA for the next few weeks.

Now I feel bad about being all slackery

I was blogtipped today! My slacker, slacker blog was blog tipped! Oh, the kick in the pants that was!!

I haven't been posting the last week, because I have been so. very. busy. We had the means to finish decorating our bedroom, so I jumped at that. But that can't just be an easy task. Oh no. Not when you are a vintage-loving cheapskate like myself. Finishing off a room means scouring the Target clearance shelves and driving to every thrift store in town looking for something juuuuuuuust right. Luckily, it all panned out. I'm waiting on some curtains that were out of stock at Target, but other than that, the room is done. Yay!

We've been living in a semi-limbo, too, with the tile in our second bathroom. We had one of those situations you hear about where two people come together with person A thinking person B knows something and so never says it outright. And person B occaisionally says something that reinforces this belief to person A. But really, person B knows nothing and so one day, they both have a rude awakening. In our case, Tile Guy assumed that we knew that he was moving to California the day aftrer our bathroom was supposed to be done. Unfortunately, some of the tile had to be special ordered, which meant that it would take another week before it could be finished. It was a rather large assumption, and one that left our bathroom 2 days from finished and everything that should be IN my bathroom in the middle of our very small bedroom instead. The situation has all been sorted out. He's coming back tomorrow to finish it. But in the meantime, getting ready in the morning takes almost twice as long and crawling into bed at night is akin to walking through a mine field.

On the craft side of things, I have nothing exciting to share at the moment. Well, at least not with pictures.

I finished Gina's Fat Bottomed Bag for her birthday. It. Was. Amazing. As much as I loved the first one, I totally adored the one I made for Gina. And when we were done, I took the girls to the mall and Kai helped me pick out a flower pin for it that was absolutely perfect. And then I wrapped it up in the back of the Blazer in the mall parking lot and we drove it right over to Gina. And I didn't have the camera. So I have not one single photo. I am totally bummed, and plan to fix that the next time I see her, so stay tuned. I'll give the stats now and then when I have photos, I'll add them to this post.

The Stats:
Fat Bottomed Bag for Gina
Pattern: Fat Bottomed Bag from The Happy Hooker (Modified Green Version, see below)
Yarn: One and maybe a quarter hank of Peace Fleece worsted in Siberian Midnight.
Hook: H
Notions and Sundry: 2 6-inch round bamboo handles, a flower broach from Dillards (because I get my PF so cheap, the broach ended up costing as much as the combined costs of the rest of the supplies for the bag!), fabric for lining.
Modifications: The yarn for this was a bit thinner than the yarn the bag called for. So, I used a smaller hook, worked the increases for 2 more rows, the non-increase portion for 2 more rows, and the decreases for 2 more rows. Then I measured guage and realized that even though it was thinner yarn, I was still on guage. Go figure. Still, it was ever so slightly larger and I really liked it that size, so I'm not complaining. Plus Gina just had her third baby not long ago, so now there is room for a diaper and some wipes if she wants to travel light. Also, while working on it, it dawned on me that wool may not be the best choice, given it's propensities to stretch, so when I lined it, I didn't just line the pouch part at the bottom, but also the tabs that fold over the bamboo handles. It made the bag feel very solidly build and durable. It was very, very hard to give this one away.

At the moment, I'm working on a highly practical, super simple afghan for Afghans for Afghans' Mother's Day drive. I was trying desperately to get it done before some new yarn arrived on my door, and didn't quite make it. It needs to be finished asap, though, so I can ship it off in time, so I'm hoping I can wrap it up in 2 days. I'm doing it as a single crochet granny, but just working around instead of stopping and turning, so I don't have to pay any attention to it. But now that I'm 10" or so from being done, it's taking longer and longer to make it around as the square builds. So 2 days may be optimistic.

And, new yarn at my door? Could it be so? Aren't I supposed to be doing No Yarn for a Year? (ahem... sort of?) Why am I not hiding my head in shame? Well, I feel like sharing today, so I'll let you in on something. Shortly after the last Crochet Me went live, I was contacted by a publisher putting together a pattern book on crochet for the home, and inviting me to submit. After I finished squeeing, I put together a 5-item proposal. (Did I mention we're redoing the decor in our house? I was already planning 4 of the 5 things anyway, so her timing was fabulous.) She liked 4 of the 5 ideas, so I've been swatching and sketching and drawing and frogging and figuring and pulling my hair out and ordering yarn and waiting for yarn and basically trying not to go nuts. I'm still in the process of being accepted, but really, just being invited is a big, flattering step for me. Some of the yarn arrived yesterday and was the WRONG SIZE and I nearly fell over dead on the spot and their customer service was already closed for the day. (One of the joys of living in Arizona...) So I'll be dealing with that today and crossing my fingers that the correct yarn will arrive in time for the swatch deadline.

And that, my friends, is the last week in a nutshell. Today I need to run to the post office and do some yard work and then get crackin' again on the project backlog and sroject swatches. I will someday post pictures again, I promise. I don't suppose there is some young, hopefuly photographer/web designer out there who would like to come get me caught up on my photography, edit it, and add it to my posts?

No one?

Not even for cookies?