Where did the month of July go? Not much happened this month, but that hardly justifies the month taking a hike so quickly with August now on the doorstep. The beginning of July was pretty steamy though wildfire smoke coming down from Canada kept the air temperature from soaring into the mid-nineties and roasting us to a turn.
So here’s a few pics taken during the month. A nice little collection of forest fungi and lichens decorating fallen branches.
A geranium I bought last year has decided to put on another display for this year.
I’m still doing crochet, a craft I began teaching myself last fall. One of my practice pieces was a funky looking throw blanket made from tail ends of yarn balls from other projects. With over a dozen different yarns in it, I’m not about to pull it all apart to reuse the yarn. I’ll leave it as is. I kinda like it.
In crochet, there is what is known at the ‘magic circle’, a way of starting a project which is being done in the round, such as amigurumi yarn toys. I have finally, FINALLY, managed to gain some mastery of it. One of the benefits of this technique is it makes it possible to close the hole at the starting center so your amigurumi won’t have a gap in the top of its head. I’m not adept enough to make cute yarn critters yet, but I did manage to create these disks, which also allowed me to master increasing the size of a project. These are also keepers. I’ll stack on each other to make a small table-top display.
At the beginning of the week, my area finally got a significant amount of snow from the latest storm, about twelve inches in all.
This is currently the view into the back yard, showing very little of the three and half foot tall stone wall with the steps totally obscured and only a dimple showing where I had previously shoveled. A few decades ago this would have been normal, but since global warming and the unstable climate that goes with it, it has been at least three years since we’ve seen this amount of snow in a single snowfall.
Between that and chilly temperatures in the teens and single numbers Fahrenheit, outdoor activities are at a minimum. As I am not a fan of skiing or snowmobiling, I only venture out when I have to for grocery shopping or appointments. So I keep myself busy with indoor projects. Cooking and reading help pass the time, as I wait for more clement weather, but my latest new hobby, crocheting, is taking more and more of my time.
I started teaching myself, thanks to numerous online tutorials, how to crochet last fall. My late mother had knitted but never crocheted, finally being forced to give it up when her arthritis made it too difficult to manipulate the knitting needles. There is still a decent sized stash of yarn from her projects left over, along with a surprising amount of yarn left over from needlepoint projects I have done over the years. Frugality, ingrained in me by my Great Depression Era parents, led me to save any left over yarn, so I have had plenty to practice with, as I’ve been teaching myself.
The learning curve on the different types of stitches, how to hold your hook and yarn, at what tension to hold the yarn, I found a bit tricky at first. But gradually I’ve become accomplished enough to consider myself a competent beginner. There are only a few basic types of stitches in crochet; the chain stitch, the slip stitch, as well as single, double and treble stitches with the infinite variations involving those stitches which go with them. Just to add to the learning curve, it seems they use slightly different terms in the UK as opposed to here in the US. Our single crochet stitch is their double, our double is their treble and so forth.
Granny squares are the first thing one masters, as you can stitch up mass quantities of them, then hitch them all together with slip stitches. It’s also possible to just keep going with a single granny square until you wind up with a good size blanket.
I was able to create this throw with just double stitches done in a Granny square pattern working from the center outward.
As what to do with left over skeins, there are any number of small projects you can create with them, such as dishcloths, coasters, pom-poms etc. I chose a large project, a blanket, where I stitch using both mid-size and small left-over balls of yarn until I run out of a particular color, then immediately change to a new color. I try to keep sequential colors more or less compatible but otherwise just keep going. If some yarn seems a little too thin, I double up the yarns (two yarn strands to a hook) which can make stitching a bit tricky but produces an interesting effect.
As you can see, the blanket is a work in progress and will probably take a while to finish. It is 165 stitches wide, using a half-double crochet stitch. It’s still up in the air on how many rows I will end up doing (to be honest, I haven’t been counting), but I would like it to be comparable to a twin blanket by the time it’s done.
I’ve still a way to go before I try making any clothing, amigurumi figures or any of the more complex looking afghans. So, for now, this should keep me busy until spring at the very least.
