Hello again!

Goodness, it has been a while. I have a whole list of excuses, but you'd just be bored. So basically, AP exams are eating my life, but now, the hard ones are finally over! So I have a bit of free time!

There's actually a lot of news to report this time. First of all, I'd like to introduce you all to the newest members of my family, Hera and Artemis:

(sorry for the bad pictures, the mice move so fast, it's impossible to get a good one!)

Aren't they adorable? Hera is the dark brown one and Artemis is the white. Don't you think it's ironic to name mice after the queen of the gods and the goddess of the hunt? Me, too. That's why I like it. I got them from my AP Environmental Science teacher. She also teaches an animal behavior class that did some sort of project with mice. Well, their original mice started having babies by the dozen, so she needed to get rid of them. So, I volunteered to take one home.

I did some research, found out all about how to take care of mice, bought a big aquarium, set up an elaborate cardboard jungle gym in it, and bought food and litter and stuff for them. Artemis was the first one I brought home, on monday (April 6th). I wasn't really sure whether she was a male or a female, so I looked it up on the internet. My original plan was to have one male mouse, because 2 male mice together will fight like crazy (they're really territorial) and a male and a female will breed at an alarming rate. But, it turned out that she was a female, so her name changed from Bartimaeus to Artemis and I decided to get another female mouse. See, mice are really very social creatures, and a female all alone will get depressed and sleep all the time.

So the next day, Tuesday the 7th, I took my little hermit crab cage to school again to pick out another mouse. But when I went to the teacher's classroom after school, the mouse cage was completely gone! It turns out, another student had volunteered to take them home over spring break and had taken them out of the classroom early. So I had to run to the bus loop to find her and pick out a mouse in a hurry. It is extremely hard to determine a mouse's gender, especially on the fly, so I took my chances and just grabbed the prettiest dark brown one. Luckily, she is a female, so her name's Hera. They are so cute!!

In knitting news, here are a few updates on my various projects on the needles (no pictures, though, because I don't feel like it):

1) Seascape Shawl

I need to come up with a new name for this project, because it's lime green and not ocean-y. Like, Winding Vines or something. Well anyway, I've got quite a bit done, at least, I've exceeded my own expectations for my progress. I finished the border section and now I'm a little over halfway through the first chart. This is going to be awesome when I'm done!

2) Garter stitch cowl

This is a new one! I went on vacation recently to the beach, and we went through this tiny, tiny town called Plymouth, NC. We were going through the pitiful little downtown Plymouth when we passed a store called Yearning for Yarn. So of course I was like MUST STOP. So went in, and was greeted by the store owner, a sweet little old lady named Catherine. She immediately introduced herself and the other woman in the store and took us on a tour of all the yarns she had. It was a little bitty store, and really long and thin, but it had a good selection! Catherine was SOOOO nice and sooo sweet that I HAD to buy something, so I bought a bag of used needles in various sizes (for 3 dollars, what a deal!!!) and a skein of Plymouth Yarn Co. Baby Alpaca Grande. This yarn is so soft I want to roll in it, or knit bedsheets out of it, it's incredible! I could only really afford one skein because it was 14 dollars, but I had to have it. And I didn't feel bad about paying that much, because I wanted to support such a fantastic store!

So anyway, one skein isn't enough for a whole scarf, unless it were really skinny. So instead I'm making a cowl. It's completely garter stitch, with 21 stitches per row on size US 13 needles.

The only sad thing is that it's getting warmer every day here, so I've got to wait until NEXT winter to wear it!

3) 3-2-1 Scarf

I just finished this one today! It's based on the pattern here: http://laughingpurplegoldfish.blogspot.com/2008/10/3-2-1-and-youre-done-its-curlicue-scarf.html
Mine is made with purple Caron Simply Soft, with a border of some teal Knitpicks Suri Dream. It's gorgeous! But again, i have to wait until next winter to wear it. :(

4) Crochet Earrings

I made the first pair of these for my mom for mother's day. They're basically tiny crocheted flowers made from embroidery floss and put on earring wires. I've done the first flower of the second pair now.

So, that's about all for now. I'll try to post again in a reasonable amount of time....

Hat update

I finished the earflap hat! And I modified the hell out of it!

Yep, that old urge to mess with the pattern struck again. I went with the two white stripes! And I only really followed the pattern as far as the crown of the hat and the front flap. I totally omitted the back flap and for the earflaps I ignored what it told me to do, went down a few hook sizes, just used one strand of yarn, and made them a lot smaller. Then, when I crocheted the "fur" lining, I realized that it would look great as one of those russian type hats (What are they actually called? All I know is that the girl in Balto got one like it as a present...). So I flipped the earflaps up and tied them. So basically, the finished hat looks ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like it was supposed to. I do like it, though.

Only one problem: The hat is waaay too big for me. It doesn't really stay on my head. It doesn't even fit my brother (a.k.a Owen of the Gigantous Noggin). But there is NO WAY i'm undoing the hat to fix it. So whatever.

I'll post a picture as soon as I get a good one!

Dilemma

So, I am currently crocheting this hat from the newest issue of "Crochet Today" (a really cool magazine):

But I changed the brown to navy blue, mostly because the brown I had looked yellow and sickly with the white trim. Well anyway, I have the crown of the hat done, but I'm afraid that I will run out of the blue yarn. So I was thinking about striping the rest of it to conserve yarn. What do you think of this:

(MS Paint - looks real professional, doesn't it?)

Do the stripes look good, or stupid? I can't decide.

Super-Happy-Photo-Fun-Zone

Yay! Photo time! Most of these are pictures of projects I'm working on or have recently finished.





That blanket I've been working on. It's not quite done yet, but it's already a suitable blanket-size.
















The mittens I made from the back of the "Chicks with Sticks" book














Ssssssid the Diamondback Draft Dodger. The pattern is here.













Simple red scarf. Thanks to R2D2 for modeling.


















Awww it's my puppy, Scoop.
Okay, he's not really a puppy....he's actually almost 8 years old.....but he'll always be my puppy!












Jazzy Coffee Cup Sleeves that I mentioned in my last post. The green one is Owen's (my brother's) and the multicolored one is mine. I didn't have any coffee cups, so it's on just a normal glass.









That's all I've got for now. Adios!

Eventful day...

I've gotta say, yesterday was more exciting than like the rest of my summer put together...not completely a good thing. There's good news and bad news.

Good news first: I finished my birthday present for Sarita, and it's ADORABLE! Seriously, I don't want to give it away...okay, yeah I do, because I know she's going to love it. So I'll just have to make something just like it for me! I've moved on now to a cat that I told my mom I would make for her. It's from Knitty, the knitting web-zine, from I think a few years ago. The link to the pattern is here.

Bad news: My mom cut her hand really bad on a piece of glass. It was really scary, actually, there was a LOT of blood. She had been putting dishes away when a glass broke, making a really sharp edge that went right into her finger. I thought we were going to have to go to the emergency room or something, but once we got the bleeding stopped enough to look at the cut, it wasn't big enough to warrant stitches, just deep. So I just called my dad, who came home from work and I went to Walgreens to get some of those bandages that they always have in movies when someone gets beaten up. Y'know, the little white, thin ones. Apparently they're made to hold the skin together on bad cuts. So, more good news: she's fine now. No lasting damage. Joel (my cousin) was actually over at my house for the whole thing. He spent the night at our house the night before last.

I also watched the movie Persepolis yesterday. It's based on a graphic novel that we read for school in the 9th grade. It was pretty good. Actually it was a lot better than I expected, and even Owen, my brother who didn't want to watch the movie in the first place, liked it. It had a lot of funny moments, even for all the sad ones. So I'd definitely recommend it.

Alright, that's all I have for now. Adios!

I <3 KPC

Hello all!

This post is basically just a shout-out to my favorite knitting website, Knitting Pattern Central and it's crochet cousin (ha! alliteration!) Crochet Pattern Central. The Knitting and Crochet Pattern Directories are totally awesome. Seriously, go to the "miscellaneous" section of KPC; people make some craaazy stuff!

So yeah...nothing else to say...

Adios for now!

Hola Hola!

Update on log cabin blanket progress: It currently measures a little over 3 ft by 3 ft, which is pretty darn good for less than a week of work. I am now out of blue AND white yarn, though. I was just using stash yarn, most of which comes from thrift stores and yard sales. That means I can't get any more of the same yarn because it was made over thirty years ago... So I'm just going to improvise from here. I might make a really big black section around the outside to make up the rest of the size. Here's a picture of what the blanket looks like now, courtesy of Microsoft Paint because I can't get my computer to read the memory chip in my camera:

Well, actually, I'm still working on the black around the outside, but this is what it will look like once I finish the black section.

All right, I'll keep you posted on further progress, because I know you're just dying to know how it's going. Adios!

The Next Frontier

Okay, so maybe "The Next Frontier" is a little too drastic for the title...Well I was going for a "Where no man has gone before" sort of thing, because I tried something new, but I failed to come up with a good way to phrase that. So I just stuck with the "Star Trek" theme and left it at that.

Back to the point, the +-*0\
=
=------------7

Sorry that was actually way away from the point...my cat stepped on the keyboard trying to attack my cursor, and it was so cute I had to keep it.

ANYWAY, so I started a new crochet project, which is *drumroll*...a blanket! I've never attempted to do a whole blanket before, so this is exciting. It all started when I checked out Mason-Dixon Knitting by Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne (who run http://masondixonknitting.com/ together). This is probably my favorite knitting book ever! Tha authors are hilarious and the projects are some that i might actually do, a big plus for a knitting book. I think I've checked the book out from the library about three times... Well anyway, there's a section in the book about Log Cabin knitted blankets. This is a technique where you start by knitting a square, then pick up stitches from one side and knit a block, then pick up more stitches and knit another block. Well the end result looks something like this. (The link is to someone else's blog who has a pic of a log cabin blacket. It was the best picture I could find.) I'm improvising a crochet version of the technique, though. It's going to be black, white, a really pretty light blue color, and probably another color because I'm pretty sure I'm going to run out of blue. All are just yarn from my stash. I took a picture of what I have finished so far, but apparently my computer isn't reading from drive "I" so I can't load it. Maybe next post.

Alright, I'm going to go crochet now. Adios!