Crochet Patchwork Pillow; farewell to the scraps

More scrapbusting is happening around here.  I do believe I have mostly tapped out the scraps, if you can believe it.  I just counted, and it looks like I managed to squeeze this, this, this, this, and also this blanket out of the scraps.  And a whole mess of hats too, and maybe some other stuff I’ve forgotten about.  Most of these scraps are leftover from this epic project, made possible by the Great 70% Off Sale of 2012.  So if you’re after making one of those, be warned:  that baby wants a lot of different colors, and you’ll be smothered in leftovers.  Which hasn’t been a terrible thing for me, and it feels strange not to have them anymore.  With the last of them, or the pretty ones anyway, I made this pillow cover; there were just enough different colors left to make it work.  The motif pattern is from The Royal Sisters, found here. 

 

What to do now?  It is one of those mornings today, with golden sunshine pouring in the open windows and doves in the garden.  Cloudless blue sky.  It is an old-fashioned morning.  I’d like to tie on an old apron and shoo some hens around, and bake a pie to cool on the windowsill.  Hang the washing on the line.  Later, I think I’ll sit in a rocking chair on the porch, sip an iced tea.  Imagine some non-scrap project possibilities.  Already, I’m thinking about this, which has a lovely, scrappy-ish quality.     

 

Wow, no scraps left.  What an odd feeling. 

Not a skirt

This is not a skirt.

This is not the back panel of Mari Lynn Patrick’s beautiful Sunshine Skirt from the Spring 2004 issue of Interweave Knits.  (Yes, 2004.  What, you don’t have nine years’ worth of pattern magazines cluttering up your workroom?  Hmm.)

This is two days’ work, which in the big picture is not that much.  But it isn’t a skirt.

It would be 3/4 of a skirt.  If I weighed 90 pounds.   Hang on, I just want to look at this for another minute…

…before I have to unravel it all again. 

Either this pattern is deeply flawed, or I am, and I’m guessing me.  Raveller Dominik tried to help.  I thought I had this one.  Cottony soft DK weight yarn, in a simple two-panel design, worked flat.  Easy instructions.  Fun and interesting stitch patterns.  What could possibly go wrong?  Well, gauge, for one, and also my basic lack of ability to count things (aargh), not to mention my rudimentary grasp of decreasing in crochet, and my haphazard attitude toward pattern-following in general.  A perfect storm. 

Discouraging, but I am undeterred.  I shake my fist in defiance of failure!  Sunshine Skirt, this is not over. 

Wooly kerchief

I spent a day watching Before Sunrise with the luminous Julie Delpy and the impossibly young Ethan Hawke—when did that movie come out, anyway?  It feels like it’s been a long time.  I could look it up, but I guess I’m content just to wonder.  I love that film.  I love how they just talked and talked and talked, and didn’t get mad or take offense or get bored or run out of things to say, but they didn’t decide they were madly in love, either.  And those nighttime in Vienna camera shots, all gorgeous glowing streetlamps, oh man.  Sigh. 

So, riveted by 90’s nostalgia and daydreams about spontaneous romance on a train from Budapest to Vienna, I sat there and knitted this thing, this little kerchief thingy, all in one morning.  It is the Age of Brass and Steam Kerchief; that name is bigger than the scarf is, but so evocative.  A scarf with a name like that wanted me to knit it in gray, but something else called to me from the cupboard, so I used a Madelinetosh DK “onesie” in the color “Lowland”.  It’s gray enough, right? 

This little eyelet detail looks like links of chain.  So steampunky!  Anyway, I hardly had to look at it at all, just back and forth, eyes glued to the charming Jesse and beautiful Celine, and of course, that’s too much knitting all at once, and now my thumbs hurt.  I won’t bother telling you about how I blocked it—of course I blocked it, you knew that—and as it dried, I cleaned the floors and planned to bake cookies.  I say planned, because (maybe I’m alone in the world on this; tell me if you agree) I like the dough better than the cookies, and none of it actually made it into the oven.  Well, there you have it.  Oven-free cookies.  Make the dough, freeze it in a plastic bag, and break off pieces to eat when you feel peckish.  If you’re afraid of salmonella, leave out the eggs.  I digress.

I don’t want to harp on about the weather, because it’s miserable most everywhere this year, and my neighbors to the west have it so much worse than just cold and rain, but dang.  It just doesn’t feel like June.  I will be wearing this wool kerchief.  This year, this week.  Luckily, it’s beautiful. 

Meanwhile, there still must be yarn action, but my thumbs hurt, so you know what that means.

When you can’t knit, you crochet.  And vice versa. 

Simple Knitting

So much yarn-related activity is happening right now.  A flurry of yarn.  A blizzard.  In-progress scarves and hats are everywhere (I guess because I’m cold?) and crocheted (non-granny!) squares, worked Just Because.  Just because that’s what one does.  Yesterday, I found myself hanging around waiting in the hallway of a university engineering department, waiting with anticipation for something good to happen (which it did) and of course, as I waited, I whipped out a ball of yarn (you would have, too) which drew some looks of confused intrigue from the passing scientists.  They had clearly never seen the likes of me.  I was having a confidence crisis anyway, and feeling a little bit simple, you know, surrounded by geniuses as I was, and I found I was just kind of clinging to my little squares, working madly at them, in a big hurry to finish one and have something to show for myself.

More cotton/angora dishcloths.  They comfort me, from the knitting to the scrubbing.  That yarn lived in my cupboard for so many years, just waiting to become something useful.  I see it’s discontinued now, which is too bad.  It makes the best ever dishcloths.

The Happiness Fairy

 

There’s a new hat, and it’s all business around here, for about twenty seconds.  She stands over by the tree, and manages not to laugh.  I say, “Stand here, look there, eyes up, chin down.”  All serious, you know.  She’s trying so hard to keep a straight face, her forehead creases with the effort.  Then I say, “Smile a little.  Not that much,” and that’s it.

These are my favorite ones.  She can’t help smiling.  When she was little, she had a tutu and and a homemade paper crown, and she went around as the Happiness Fairy, and not for Halloween, but just, you know, on a regular Tuesday.  I’d be stomping all over, hollering about somebody’s shoes in the middle of the floor, and just then she’d come twirling in whistling on an ocarina, a big piece of pink silk tied around her head with a lanyard, and saying, “I’m the Happiness Fairy!”  Bam, just like that.  Smiles.  It’s her superpower.

Doesn’t she just look like the most awesome hipster angel in that slouchy scrap hat?  Everything looks good on her. 

Blustery

It seems like this cold spring is the story everywhere.  I try to find the beauty in it, and I do love the sodden, gloomy skies and the way pink blossoms look against the storm clouds.  So muted, this year, is everything.  So grayed out.  And then will be one gorgeous blue afternoon—yesterday—of basking in sunshine, lounged lazily on a chair watching birds squabble in the branches above me, Dean spotting a woodpecker camouflaged against a tree and coming to get me, to show me [as I was typing that, just now, just this minute, the woodpecker came again to the fence post outside the window, flicking his bright red cap and his quite dangerous-looking beak—he’s kind of an exotic character here in my neighborhood] and I remember how much I love summer, and the next day, cold and rainy again, can be hard to swallow.  I really want to enjoy these days, though, so for now I’m leaving the tags on my new bikini and bundling up, and there’s lots of knitting.  I always knit year-round (as if there would be any stopping me—I am a vaguely anxious, okay, cantankerous harridan, if you take away my knitting) but in this long, blustery cold season, I’ve been knitting scarves.  Serious woolies.  One way or another, I will be warm.

This pattern is always so rewarding.  When in doubt, when I can’t find anything else fun to make, and when there isn’t a blanket anywhere on the project horizon, I turn to it.  This one is my third in this pattern, and this time I used Noro Silk Garden, scored in the Great 70% Off Sale of 2012.  Of course, I lost the ball bands—there are two skeins each of two different colorways here, alternating against each other in an endlessly interesting striping pattern.  I can hardly knit this scarf fast enough.  I want to see What.  Happens. Next!  

Swoon!  Infallible, this pattern.  It’s a winner, every time. 

Spring Day

This rose grows beside the back door, in an unruly and leggy shrub that threatens to swallow the sidewalk.  It is copious with thorns like needles.  You need a suit of armor to prune it, but I pruned it, hard, and it came back the next year meaner than ever, taller and leggier than before.  I’m a little afraid of it.  But oh my, those blooms smell divine.  They have the scent that other flowers wish they had.  This thing never lets me forget that it is a rose.  In two weeks, these blooms will be full of amorous and starving Japanese beetles and by then my attention will be on the peonies anyway, but right now, today, I can’t walk past this deadly thing, in spite of its clawing branches, without giving it a good hearty sniff. 

I’ve got a new quilt in the works now, too.  These brisk spring sunshine-y days are perfect for quilts.  A quilt is kind of a warm weather thing to me, I don’t know, I just want to spread one on the grass underneath the fireworks.