Blanket Update and a Project For the Shop

Well, I promised that I would upload some pictures of the blanket soon and this post will not disappoint!  I've also added some pictures of some fingerless gloves I am working on for the shop.  I feel bad that I have only been working on things for personal projects basically all year so far!  But first up, here's some shots of the squares for the blanket with all the colors! 

First up!  The whole lot of them in the bag I keep them in.  Don't they look all pretty?

And here they are keeping my legs toasty warm ;)

And laid out, one of each.

And a couple pictures of what will be fingerless gloves.  The second picture captures the color much better, and it's such a gorgeous color!  I can't wait for these to be done, though, it's hard to get good pictures to list them without my camera.

And that is all for tonight!  It is a pain in the butt making a post out of a slew of pictures from my phone.  Blogger likes to mess up the formatting and jump the photos around. What a pain!  But anyways back to watching Dexter then some much needed sleep!  I hope you've enjoyed the update- oh!  And speaking of updates!  Nails are STILL looking great...just two super tiny chips at the tips of my thumbs.  Not bad!  I think this polish will stay until my nails grow to the point where they look weird. Very nice.

~Katy

More Projects

Well, I was itching to get the second blanket started after I finished the first one.  The only thing that was stopping me was a lack of appropriate yarn.  My husband wanted something less thick than I used on the last blanket, and one of the local yarn shops was having a sale on Superbowl Sunday.  So, I went in to see what they had and found this!  It is Cascade Yarns, 220 Superwash Sport.  It's a sport weight, 100% wool yarn that can be machine washed and dried.  That was a requirement as well, MUST be able to be tossed in the dryer.

I chose 6 colors, a pink, a purple, a mint green, a coral shade of orange, an ivory, and a turquoise.  I started off with 2 hanks of each, though at some point I will have to get many more.  This is one of the times that I really appreciate my husband, I brought the yarn home and he liked the colors as well.  Also, we had also both agreed on what granny square we liked better when I had made some just to try (which was when he decided I should make another blanket LOL.)   

I am super excited to be making progress on this one!  I've now also made 3 squares of purple.  After I made the first square and settled on how many rounds to make it, I figured out how many squares I will need to make for it to fit on our bed, after I add a border to it.  The grand total will be 210 squares.  WOW.  The yarn I have for it currently will make 48 squares total.  I will definitely be getting more yarn, but that will have to wait. Thankfully with a granny square design, I personally don't find matching dye lots to be too important. I may stick with just these 6 colors, or I may add more.  Not sure yet!  But for now, I am just working away on the yarn I have.  Each time I finish a square I count down how many are left, right now it's at 15 down, 195 to go!  That's a little overwhelming but considering I got the yarn less than a week ago, it's not so bad.

But, enough about the blanket (for now!) I have another project to share!  Today, we had a fun little incident where a bird managed to fall into our fireplace.  Eric managed to get it out, and let it out so it could fly away and on with its life.  But I took that opportunity to check our chimney flue.  I suspected it was open for a while now but was too lazy to check (bad me!) and of course if a bird got into the fireplace, the flue must have been open.  Turns out, the flue is stuck so it will only actually close half way.  After a brief google search I decided trying to fix the flue was too complicated.  Trying to insulate the fireplace seemed a much better idea!  And a couple short hours later, here we are!

My original intent was to use an adhesive backed magnet strip around the edges to secure it.  I went off to Hancock Fabrics to get everything I would need, not sure whether or not they had the strip magnet or not.  I didn't see it there, and, well, I'm not a fan of just asking.  So I devised an alternate plan!  Since our fireplace bricks come out passed the fireplace opening, I chose to use tension rods.  And lucky me, they were on sale!  I ended up using 2 tension rods (one on top, one on bottom) as well as some blue fleece (color chosen by Eric.  It worked out well!) and lined with Insul-Bright.  I brought out my sewing machine for the first time in YEARS... not sure really whether it would quite work or not.  It was handed down to me by my mom who had it for goodness knows how long.  Welp, I set it up and like many things made YEARS ago... it worked just like the first time I sewed with it when I was little.  It ended up being a super quick and super inexpensive project- the rods and the fleece both being on sale made it total to less than $30.  Not bad!  I wish I had thought of this ages ago.  I don't feel a draft in the living room anymore and who KNOWS how much this could have saved on our electric bill when it was colder out.  But hey, it'll help now!

One last project, that's not even so much a project, is this little thing I was playing around with.  It's just a different crochet stitch, which I found via Pinterest.  It's a linen stitch, or woven stitch.  I tried it out with some yarn I got from a friend of mine, and I am loving how it looks!  It's only a little swatch... I haven't yet decided what kind of project I can make with it, and goodness knows I have my work cut out for me with the blanket!

If you want to try out the woven stitch yourself here is where I found the instructions for doing it.

I look forward to updating everyone with the progress on the granny square blanket!  And hopefully finding my camera to add some better pictures!

~Katy

Project Pictures!!

Ok, I have now officially finished my blanket!  I wanted to take some good pictures but I can't find my camera and Eric is already in bed so for right now I can't spread it on the bed for pictures.  So what I got will just have to do!  I've got pictures of my sweater, too.

Here is me with one end of my blanket!  You can almost make out the edging I made.

And my blanket, with my soda nestled into it LOL

More of the blanket... a better look at the ripples!

Last night when I went to bed (yes, I've been sleeping with it even before I finished it!) my cat Splenda was REALLY enjoying it and was all rolling around in heaven.

And a somewhat fuzzy picture of nearly the whole thing (I can't find my camera, so all the pictures were taken with my phone...)

And last, my sweater!  Again, not great pictures.  I can wear it with the seams out or in.  I like it both ways, though so far I've been wearing it with the seams in.

I'm pretty excited to be done with both my "big girl projects" since most things I make tend to be much smaller.  My first sweater AND my first full sized blanket finished in the same weekend!  Not bad :)

~Katy

Big Project!!

So some of you may know that I love to crochet.  I love to crochet so much that I started making more than I could use or give away and I opened an online shop, first on Etsy, and now on Zibbet (because Etsy is horrible, people.) which if you want you can check out here... http://www.zibbet.com/kakers

Anyways I don't just make things for the shop.  I make things for ME and for my family as well.  Last year at Christmas Eric and I picked out yarn so I could make us a blanket and well, it's been somewhat slow going but I've been working on it more lately and it's getting pretty close to done!  It needs to be wide and long enough to cover us both at the same time.  I'm actually starting to think there's a chance I may not need the last skein of each color that I have in order to finish it!  But we will see.

This was while I was working on it last weekend...

And I went ahead and took a few more pictures to share with you :)

(Splenda wanted in on the action)

(So did Honey.  Yes, these are different cats.)

As you can see it has a little length to go but it's looking good so far!  I'm going to be so proud once it is done, I've never finished a full sized afghan before!

~Katy