Craft Week in Review

Tales of near disasters, crafty crimes, and one emergency amputation.

1) Crime or Disaster (Jury is still out):



I started above pictured project on Thursday. I finished the back yesterday evening. I cast on and completed the first four rows of the left front and hit a dead standstill. The directions read "K 4 slip stitch to right needle wrap and turn". I am stumped. Is this a short row direction? Do I then knit back and repeat? This goes on for 34 rows. I cannot imagine that it is a short row instruction. Initially I proceeded as though it were not a short row and ended up with a hole in my knitting where I had wrapped the stitch. This does not look good. These wrapped stitches are spaced 4 apart on each right side row. I think it is supposed to add a stitch, but how???? Why do I have such problems with Rowan patterns. I can read. I am articulate. I taught myself to knit. I can even do passable regional British accents (Yarkshere, Saf Lunnun, BBC speak). And yet these patterns trip me up. Gah! I will make another attempt to tackle this pattern this evening.

Then of course there is the lettle problema that I might not have enough yarn to finish above-mentioned pattern. I am using stashed yarn. When I first started to knit I would go hog wild at the LYS. Piggily buying up colors and fibers that I liked. I had a rule of thumb - "buy 6 and that should be enough". This was before I discovered that yardage/fiber width and weight/needle size (ummm that pesky little notion called gauge) are critical to having enough yarn to complete the project. Ha! I am trying to use my stash, but I find that in general 6 of any given fiber is 2 too little. I figured that a bolero would be a perfect use of 6 skeins of GGH Samoa, but I have already used up 2.5 on the back... Will a bolero vest look too dorky? Sounds like the perfect top for a pair of corduroy culottes, and reminds me far too much of 1979 and many a 6th grade fashion faux pas. I guess I will only find out if I have enough yarn when and IF I figure out what the wrap stitch is all about!

2) Natural Disaster:



Well I felted the bag for my friend B. It looks horrible. I deviated from my original pattern. I wanted to make it bigger, better, faster. Mistake number one, the proportions are all out of whack. Ugh. Mistake number two, I used two different Cascade yarns; basic 220 for the main color, and an alpaca/wool blend for the contrasting color. The wool felted like a dream, the alpaca felted up like a big fuzzy, angry, spitting Camelidae, all tight and gnarly (Ok I know that I am stretching the limits of analogy suggesting that spitting mamal is also tight and gnarly, but I have worked with the alpaca's larger cousin the llama. Believe me Maggie, the llama of my aquaintance, was uptight and when she was busy spitting munched up carrot in your face it was pretty gnarly - STREEEEEEEEEETCH). Yech. I knew I didn't like alpacas!

Back to the drawing board, and back to using one kind of wool to felt per purse.

3) True Crime:

The Perp:



Method: eviscerating plush toys. Even as a tiny pup his goal was to get to the squeaker as fast as possible. His method: tear up the toy, scatter filling everywhere, ingest some of it, destroy and eat squeaker. (Only once did this result in a 4am trip to the emergency vet, where in we learned that not only did our four-month-old puppy eat a large quantity of stuffing, but he had also consumed a whetting stone. Apparently the whetting stone was the cause of his discomfort, not the polyfill. We were told, "it will pass"... and so it did. But I digress)

The Victim:


Adores her plush toys and treats them as tenderly as a four year old whirling dervish of a chocolate Labrador can treat a plush toy. She carries them with her everywhere, plays with them, and even brings them to bed. It is heartrendingly endearing. Makes me think that she might have been a very good mom dog (again I digress, and there really is no point in speculating about what can never be... )

The Crime:



And another view of the Crime Scene:



Godiva's beloved Lamb torn asunder, bits of foam and stuffing littered around, squeaker nowhere to be found. We gave her a substitute toy, which she played with dutifully but without a lot of joy, clearly she missed Lamb. So I performed surgery using my trusty surgical tool kit; gathered the stuffing and re-stuffed the lamb, amputated the nearly severed leg. Here is Lamb in recovery:



That is the craft week in review at Throwing Sticks. We hope that your week was better, that your crafting was satisfying, that nothing shrank to unsatisfying proportions, and that your family did not eat and destroy objects of value. Tune in later for more news from the yarnside.