Jiggywinks!

 Apparently, this is a rabbit, but it looks like a pig to me haha!  I made three dresses without a pattern, plus two little hats! That's one of the things I like about crochet, you just keep going until you're done! With knitting you need to have a pattern! Cost: Used cotton yarn I already had for dishcloths. This was a commission from a friend of mine. We ended up bartering three crocheted dresses of mine for one of the Ukrainian eggs she paints!

December of 2018, my mother-in-law asked me if I would complete a family project on her behalf. Her mother, my husband's maternal grandmother, made crocheted afghans for each of her grandchildren, but had passed before she could finish the one for my youngest brother-in-law.  I laid it out on the floor like this December of 2019 to use as a reference when I crocheted them together! Remember the vintage leftover yarn I used for the orange and yellow baby blanket? This is it!! I retrieved the tub of yarn and had a quick lesson in crocheting granny squares, and got to work. Grandma Wright had completed two dozen squares, and I sewed a little charm into the corner of each one so that it was known which ones were Grandma's.  It took me two years to finish all the squares and put them together, but the last six months were just waiting for yarn to be stocked in my shade ("eggshell") due to the general run on yarn from COVID-19.  Cost: about $15 for yarn. Made good use of ev...

 Used up the last of the pink yarn from my 15-year afghan and a partial skein of red heart to make a small baby blanket.  About six inches from the end as I was edging the blanket with pink, I ran out of yarn! Ended up using the trimmed ends from the squares tied together to make it to the corner! I wove in the ends and knots as best as I could, but I just had to remind myself that its ultimate destiny is to be chewed and spit-up on.  Cost: $0 (leftovers)

It's always a joy when you're able to clean a stack of projects out of your UFO pile. Yesterday I had my wisdom teeth pulled, and so today I was about to sit still and do a bit of work! First off is this knit lace blanket. I made it as a replacement for a knit blanket I made for a nephew of a friend of mine. When I ran into the mother last summer, I asked how Henry liked his blanket--and she said "oh he loves it!... He chewed a hole through it..." So of course I had to make a new one! It's a gift...a part of my heirloom guarantee I guess haha! I just feel so bad that I knit the original too loosely and that just wasn't a good plan with a small child who likes to pull things. Next I started making a crocheted blanket, also to go to Henry. This will be much more durable... Maybe the knit blanket will be put aside until he's older. Then, I made a small granny-square baby blanket the leftovers--I love using up all my odds and ends. This one I...

I was just paid $20 to embroider a child's name on a tai kwan do uniform. It turned out okay, but don't do what I did--go buy a protractor and actually measure the angles! I did a little bit of general measuring to make sure I drew the letters about the same size and spaced them out a bit evenly, but for the love of mike I just lucked out. Four rows of chain stitch in black, instead of the more traditional satin stitch. Not only was it faster, but it will be easier to rip out when it's the sibling's turn to wear the jacket (the real reason for embroidery as opposed to a black magic marker). Cost: Nothing to me, I had black floss laying around. $20 for my time.

Greetings Lovely People! The big question (for whoever ends up reading this blog) is why such the big gap? Did I not work on any projects? The answer is of course I did! Since July of 2019, I was cast as Christine Penmark in MTG's "The Bad Seed", a 1950s horror-type play about a young mother whose world spirals out of control when she realizes there's something sinister about her 8-year-old daughter Rhoda. So, I was busy rehearsing my first lead role (!) until the show ran for the first two weekends of October. Not only that, but I was busy with preparations for MTG's "Beauty and the Beast", which is scheduled to run the first two weekends of December. At first I was stage manager, but then I ended up helping play piano and rehearse with actors for their auditions, and I played piano for all the auditions, which were in August. Encouraged by an email to audition "just for the heck of it", I did. Never expecting to be cast, merely wanti...

Ever since we moved into our lovely apartment, I knew the empty space over the kitchen sink needed SOMETHING. In a house, it would be a window. In our cave of a kitchen with my spice bottles stored on the counter, it was a spice rack! Cue the "Mission Impossible" theme as I searched online for a suitable candidate. And searched. And searched. I quickly learned that for someone who wanted only a shelf to house her own spice collection (plus knicknacks) and not a pre-arranged counter set, this was going to be difficult. And expensive. The type of rack I wanted--the cheapest one I thought--was a simple wooden rectangle with shelves. Nope. Every shelf option that was reasonably priced was for counter storage, sized with accompanying bottles I didn't like, with guard rails (so I couldn't show off my knicknacks) or too small for the space. If I found one that kinda-sorta was like what I wanted, it was on Etsy for over $60! NO THANKS. I went to Menards and bought two of th...