julee’s sharing needles

Archive for the ‘crochet’ Category

champagne sweaternova

Friday, July 9th, 2010

A few holiday seasons ago, I made wine bottle coozies for many of my aunts. They’re fun to use to tote your wine around, or fun to give away with a bottle of wine.

My husband Ty, who likes white wine suggested that they could help keep the white wine cool when taking wine to a summer party.

When I found out my sister-in-law was getting married, I offered my crafty services. She wanted me to make two types of felted items for her:

1) A Dollar Dance Bag
I’m constructing this out of white boiled wool.
2) Champagne Coozies
My sister-in-law (Darcy) and her fiance (Tim) are having an outdoor wedding. They are planning on having a champagne toast, and need something to keep the bottles on the tables cool.

The Champagne Coozies are perfect, the wool adds some insulation, but also absorbs any moisture on the surface of the bottle. As the moisture evaporates, it actually helps the bottle to stay cool, much like when pioneer women put a wet towel around the milk pitcher.

Darcy’s colors are pink with orange and green accents, I’m going to mix in a little cream/white for some pop. After she had outpatient surgery in February, Tim took her by the second-hand clothing shop, and she stocked up on old sweaters in bright colors for me to use. It sounds like she had a good time picking out sweaters before all of the surgical drugs had worn off!

So….I’m constructing 20 champagne coozies, and embellishing them with embroidery and crochet. I think Darcy only needs 17, but there may be a problem with one or two. Who knows, maybe I’ll even put it up in my defunct etsy shop.

So far, I have 15 structurally sound, and the other 5 are just hacked off sweater arms.

Posted in crochet, recycle | Comments Off

she likes to rock

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Spent almost all of my spare time this week working on my Halloween costume and practicing with my band, The Conway Twitties. We played a benefit for the Exquisite Corpse Annual Journal, and had a lot of fun rocking students and professors alike.

Robin (in pink) owned the pink wig, and Sam saw the blue one and had to to get it. That left me to make my own wig. I used almost an entire cone of Mary Loe’s Solo Green acrylic yarn (fingering weight?). I used Red Heart in the same hue to create a skull cap. Then I attached yard-long sections of the yarn to the skull cap. I was thinking about having a down hair do, or braids, but then the nerdy fun of Tina Fey’s Princess Leia buns popped into my head!

We played three originals and covered “The Monster Mash”. I’ll put up a video soon. Thanks to everyone who came out to the show!

Posted in acrylic, crochet, husband, music | Comments Off

hooking the elephant

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

My elephant project marked the end of my life of leisure. I started working on it before I knew I would have a job, and now I am so involved with work that I almost didn’t have time to put the finishing touches on it.

Last Thursday I took the elephant to work so I could take some pictures with some co-workers for a costume contest.

Friday was the big rainy day out for the pachyderm. My friends and band mates Robin, Sam, and Sujith, all helped me stretch the elephant to a full 10 yards in length. Robin’s friends Gabe and Mike also helped out, as well as a new friend Jacques!

We made an initial rainy walk up Front St. where we stopped by and marched through some of the galleries, making sure to get some cheddar dill soup from the Oak St. Bistro stand. It is a weird restaurant, because they are only really open for lunch, and I told them they needed to have a Sunday Morning Bloody Mary Bar. Luckily, they’re moving buildings soon, and promised they would do it at the new site.

We headed back down to Toad Suck Square for a super secret special flashmob/dancemob. I was at the tail, but Sam was at the head, and she kept marching us closer and closer to the dancers, as if we were going to become apart of the show!

We walked around some more and crashed Melissa Gill’s art show at the end of the night! One of our friends was playing music on a bass, and so we even danced around on the parquet floors a little bit.

The one down side to the ArtsFest was the weather. We were somewhat protected from the rain under the Chinese Dragon-like train. The inflatable 31 feet tall “Painted Pachyderm” did not make it out that night. I would have liked the two to meet.

On the way to have a nightcap, we all walked down Front St. picking up the pylons walkingconway.com had put out to redirect the foot traffic into each gallery. Someone started singing through one, and eventually, we had a pylon band. I was once involved in a spontaneous kazoo parade that was supposed to march on the capital building one night but only ended up going around the block. The kazoo parade and the pylon band were very similar experiences.

My friend Robin even wore an elephant sweater!

I feel like my entire crafting experience was building to this point. The elephant was on a huge scale. I basically knew what I needed to do, but I was unsure how it would all come together, or if it would even come together in time. It felt a little like a dissertation. I knew a bunch of people were going to see it, and that it was going to be doing something more than promoting my crafting and fabrication skills. And then we paraded it around town! If you see any fun crochet contests send them my way and I’ll enter it!

Posted in acrylic, activist craft, crochet, double-takes, sewing | Comments Off

assembling elephants, chairs, shelves

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Yesterday was my first day of work from home. Everything went well, I was able to connect to the network, do some training, install some software, handle things that happened in the office, and even field calls from co-workers. I felt very accomplished, and worked through the time that I would have been driving. The one drawback was the gigantic pain in my back at the end of the day.

People who have visited the tower know that I enjoy backless chairs. I used to sit on a Rubbermaid tub full of fabric scraps and yarn. I upgraded to an ottoman with three inches of foam on the top. It obviously isn’t made from the correct foam, because it obviously didn’t keep up with my support needs.

So today is a day for putting things together! I bought a computer chair, some shelves for extending the life of our garden plants, and some parts to finish up the elephant/Chinese dragon for Conway ArtsFest.

Here is my TODO pile:

For the elephant, I’ve got to connect the ears to the head. The body is a long piece of fabric. That’s got to be assembled, and I purchased irrigation tubing to create hoops under the fabric. I am going to use this hoop tutorial to create the hoops. The instructions suggest 1 or 3/4 inch tubing, but Lowe’s and Home Depot only had 1/2 inch tubing. At Lowe’s I met a really friendly guy working there with a sort of notorious Confederate General/KKK Grand Dragon name. We talked about how I got to the south and how I’m liking it. I told him I loved the growing season and the football, but I could do without the dry counties. He proceeded to apologize for the roots of his name (white supremacy, confederate generals), and everything responsible for making Faulkner, Conway, and Cleburne counties dry counties. He was intrigued about using hula hoop instructions on irrigation tubing, and he was super friendly!

This week, I used fabric stiffener on the elephant head. The product I used had an embarrassing name.

Right now I’m trying to figure out how the head will be worn by a real person (probably me). The options below show the head with and without my arms inside of it. I’m also trying to figure out how to get some trunk mobility, and in a dream last night I had an excellent idea about water noodles! The noodle should take care of the weird kink in the nasal bridge.

Ok, off to get things done!

Posted in Amigurumi, crochet, domestic maintenance craft, The South | 1 Comment »

Poetry and Pachyderm Update

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

I have loads of blog posts to get too. In a little while I will be able to explain the backlog.

Our friends Dave and Neal came down to visit Labor day and took me back to Nebraska with them. I have some great pictures of the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, MO to post. This week, our friend Zachary Schomburg visited us while working the Hendrix-Murphy Progam’s Shop Talk series.

He’s put out two books of poetry. His debut The Man Suit is filled with concrete whimsy. His latest book Scary, No Scary came out two weeks ago!

I’ve also been working on my crocheted elephant. I got my friend Sam to model the head sans ears for me.

Posted in book club, crochet, englishy, husband | Comments Off

Trunk Update

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Just attached the jaw to the trunk!

The piece is about 30 inches long right now. It will probably end up being 50-55 inches in height. Just went down to a G hook from an H hook so the nasal ridge and forehead ridge will stand up properly. Crocheted through the Broncos game last night and the tight stitch really wore out my hand. Also started opening up a slit in the back of the head so someone can actually wear it.

Posted in Amigurumi, crochet | Comments Off

pachyderm crochet

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Working on the elephant sculpture. I got the idea to crochet the elephant head from the mask I made for Ty as an anniversary gift.

I created the mask with some recently acquired free form crochet techniques. The top is a riff on the granny hexagon. The upper lip looks a bit weird, but the nose came out exactly how I wanted and even stands straight out when someone is wearing it.

These guesses on the nose gave me the confidence to start a trunk-up elephant head.

After making a sketch of the head, I started working from the trunk up. I knew I would have to change the size of the stitches to make the trunk curve, and increase the number of stitches to extend the trunk into the head.

My initial attempt was done with a hook one size smaller than the yarn called for. I was also using a dense double crochet stitch. When I had 1.5 feet of trunk, I realized that it wasn’t free standing, even after decreasing 4-6 hook sizes!

My second attempt was done with a hook 5 times smaller than the yarn called for. I also doubled the yarn, and switched to a more structural fillet stitch. The results are drastically different than the intitial trunk, and I hope they continue to be.

Tags: artsfest09 pachyderm
Posted in crochet | Comments Off

Eight Bit Scrubber

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

My friends Katie and Amos have almost every video game imaginable. Whenever I go over to a party at their house, there is always someone playing their tabletop video game console, full of Galaga, Ladybug, Donkey Kong, Burger Time, and Pacman.

As a thank you for putting me up over the weekend, I crocheted them this Ms. Pacman tawashi eco scrubber.

Maybe I’ll post a pattern later. Free form crochet for me is becoming less and less trial and error, and more and more derivation of formulas. I did the bow in a crazy figure-8 in a combination of single, double, and triple crochet stitches.

Posted in acrylic, crochet, design, travel | Comments Off

Using less soap: Tawashi

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

While visiting my friend Jen in Nebraska, I admired her Eco-Tawashi. In Japanese, a Tawashi is any sort of scrubber: a brush, certain types of sponge, or synthetic sponge.

Craft Magazine had a pattern for one in Volume #9 that seemed fairly simple, but then I got Jen’s secret pattern. (It is just a circle with a chain handle, but soooo cute!)

The Eco-Tawashi is crocheted out of acrylic yarn with a hook that is much smaller than the recommended gauge. This makes the acrylic even scratchier. The taught microfiber of the acrylic does a wonderful number on all sorts of stains and stuck-on gunk with little water and even less soap.

Here is an awesome collection of Tawashi patterns.

This Spiral Tawashi has been translated from Japanese.

I found out that I didn’t really need a pattern, just a formula in my head for keeping a flat surface. I made all sorts of wonderful shapes that I can’t show you because they’re gifts. I can show you a picture of my best interpretation of Nintendo’s Excitebike Power Modules (the arrow shaped ones).

I have used my Tawashi on the toughest soap scum and southern mildew in our shower, and it takes it out! It gets into creases that a regular brush cannot enter. The best thing about the acrylic is that it does not stain! If it is discolored, it means gunk is still on it and just needs another rinsing out. Such a thing is perfect for cleaning a single coffee cup. I know I have said this before, but you’re all getting these for Christmas.

Posted in conservation, crochet, domestic maintenance craft, holiday gifts | Comments Off

granny’s leftovers rug

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

I inherited a small trunk of acrylic yarn from a lady who was like a grandmother to me. More acrylic yarn was given to me by an overambitious weaver. This resulted in many skeins of durable, unwearable yarn in all sorts of colors and even patterns.

My craft ideas aren’t always big, but this is the largest gauge I’ve worked with in crochet. This is the closest I’ve come to any sort of extreme crochet or extreme craft.

The pattern is forthcoming. I even took step-by-step pictures. The hooking was done with a 15.5 mm tool.