Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 8,600 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 14 years to get that many views. <<<— This was fun!

Here’s hoping that 2013 will be an even better (and more active!) year in my crochet ventures. I have lots of plans, so wish me luck!

Click here to see the complete report.

Now through Friday at midnight, save 20% on the purchase of my Climbing Leaves Scarf pattern through Ravelry. Discount automatically applies when you add it to your cart. Happy Thanksgiving!!

Think Pink

Curated By: StarlightSarah

ArtFire.com

For The Love of C…

Curated By: KnothingButCr…

ArtFire.com

Interweave Crochet Accessories 2012 came out this week so I made an excuse to do a little yarn shopping and went out to check the stands. Hurricane Sandy delayed the distribution in some places, it seems, so I wasn’t sure where I’d be able to find it when. JoAnn’s and Barnes and Noble were the spots, though! It was so neat to see my name in print – in public!!

I was so sad when the cone ran dry. :(

What I want out of this pattern is a single strand bag. One cone of yarn. One market bag. No sewing. Other than finishing off the beginning and end pieces of yarn, of course. Well the red cone ran out just shy of beginning the handles (which was probably as good a place as any to join a new strand) so the next attempt will be the next size down. Hopefully I won’t have to make too many changes to the pattern, but it’s still aggravating. Especially after 15 hours of crocheting with cotton yarn. It wears my poor little fingers plumb out! But I knew that the only way to see how big a bag I could make out of a single cone of yarn was to give it a go. I suspected that it wasn’t going to make it from fairly early on, but once I’d committed, I was in it for the long haul. I really hate frogging a project, and even though it means redoing the bag, I can still use the one that didn’t turn out like I planned.

I mean, look at this!

Testing out the handles…

… with juice!

That’s three 46 oz. bottles of juice in the bag with plenty of room to spare! I love it. I’m going to be able to fit SO many groceries in this thing!

Now, it is a little Christmassy looking with the white handles, but it was that, green (WAY too Christmassy), or yellow (eh). So rather than going out and buying something new, I decided to be a good girl and use something I already had. So red and white it was. Of course, I need to go buy a new red cone to redo the bag anyway. Yay for yarn shopping! Even if it’s just one skein for a specific project. Or cone, as it were.

Then it’s back to the adjustable base ring for another dozen plus hours and hopefully a finished pattern this time. By the way, if anybody’s interested in testing the pattern for me, I’d love a second set of eyes!

I was SO excited to get a complimentary copy of the magazine, along with loose pages of my pattern in the mail. Now I just need to figure out how to frame them! Anybody have experience with or suggestions for properly displaying articles?

It was fun looking through all the pictures that they took and seeing all the ways they played with color in their festive section. I rather liked my white and silver snowflakes on the white wreath, but putting the metallics on a blue wreath really makes them pop. And it was so much fun to make all the different colors!! I made a total of 12 in I think seven different colors. I prefer making the larger ones with size 3 or 5 thread, but the bitty ones (made with size 10, yikes!) are beautifully delicate.

IC also added a chart for them, which is awesome, but it’s also kind of confusing. :( I mean, look at this mess!

If I didn’t know what I was looking at, I’m afraid the chart would intimidate me. Hopefully it helps with the visualization, though. It really isn’t so terrible as the chart makes it look… It takes me about an hour to work one up which is WAY quicker than any standard thread crochet snowflake I’ve ever made. The smaller ones can take a little longer because it’s more fiddly, but not much. Still less fiddly than my previous experiences with such projects, though. Which is why I came up with the design to begin with.

See, my mother used to make all of our Christmas ornaments and my favorites were the snowflakes. She added glitter to some of them and she also made this absolutely amazing multi-dimensional tree-topper. Wanting to have some of these little beauties of my own, I kept trying my hand at different thread crochet patterns with varying success. Eventually, I decided that the snowflake designs I tried were simply too piddly, so I set out to make my own.

With this snowflake, there are no slip stitches worked into the chain (which is the part that I find aggravatingly time consuming and finger cramping), PLUS you can modify the final design during the blocking and stiffening process. Simple chains are twisted to create the length and points of the arms, which pulls the crocheting together without having to work stitches into the chain. It also adds a textural element to compliment the star in the center.

Now if anything about this pattern is difficult, it’s the star. Its texture comes from post stitches and sometimes getting them worked into the right place can be a little tough, particularly when using the size 10 thread. That’s why I would recommend using larger thread the first time you try this pattern, just to see how it works more easily. The last point of the star is the tricky one, but it’s absolutely worth it.

I’d love to hear what you think of the pattern, so if you give it a try, let me know how it goes and I would absolutely love to see pictures! You can link in the comments here or find me on Ravelry, Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr. And, of course, if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to holler for help. :)

-C

Green Camo For Yo…

Curated By: DefiantCreati…

ArtFire.com

No, I didn’t get all dressed up this year, but I still tried to be festive with a little black and orange today! I also took the opportunity to add a splash of crochet with the scarf. ;) I hope everyone has a very safe and fun holiday, however you choose to celebrate.

-C

See, I sculpted, in crochet, an Arkansas razorback hog. Oh yes. This is where I’m from. We are maniacal hog fans back home. And one of my girlfriends from high school requested that I crochet a piggy for her hubby as a wedding gift. I thought, “Sure!” there’s got to be hog patterns out there, right? Ha! I was SO disappointed. So what did I do? I decided to sculpt one. Freestyle. Wingin’ it, if you will. It was an exercise in patience, creativity, and vision. That’s right. Vision. I had to SEE where I was crocheting. Have you ever tried this? Ack! It’s intimidating. And I had lots of frogging moments (ripping it out so I could re-do it, over and over and over again), but by golly I DID it!

And yes, if you can’t tell, I’m rather proud of my little razorback. No, there isn’t a pattern. I started trying to kind of keep notes on how it went. … But I re-worked so many parts of it that it was hard to keep up with and I was a little concerned that I’d encounter troubles with their trademark rights, so I decided it would simply be a one-of-a-kind piece of art. You hear that, Amber? Lol. It was, though. It was a labor of love. Art. Fiber Arts!

It just so happened that we were late for the wedding (only maybe five minutes, but everybody was GONE!) which afforded me the opportunity to take some pretty awesome pictures of it on her grandparents’ farm. So while they were off in the fields getting hitched, here was what I was doing:

I’m sure it was a beautiful ceremony – I do always enjoy country weddings, especially when there’s great scenery – but I’m also kind of glad that I got to take these shots. They were so much better than anything I could have done anywhere else besides on a farm in Arkansas.

So, “Woo pig sooie!!” and congratulations to a very dear friend of mine on her wonderful wedding, even though we missed it!