crochet stumbling block

In my lunch break yesterday, I tried to move onto creating ripples and hit a bit of a stumbling block. I think I had been crocheting wrongly all along, but hadn't realised until it came to doing this. I discovered I hadn't been picking up the chains properly and when I tried really hard to pick them up properly... Well, I basically failed. The white example at the top looks pretty good, I'll admit, almost identical to the picture underneath it... but I actually turned it upside down for the photo. I was creating a mountain instead of a valley, increasing as I tried to decrease. Gah!The problem is that I accidentally kept crocheting into the same chain as you can (kind of) see from this picture. I tried again (in red) and had a little bit more success, but obviously still went quite wrong. I didn't have enough chains left at the end so must have missed some en route, and my wave is not nearly as regular as the one in picture. It is progress from the white one though and I don't feel too bad since the instructions kindly reassured me that crocheting directly into a foundation chain is very hard for a beginner.

So I'm not giving up yet, and for this lunch break I have brought some higher-quality wool to see if it makes it any easier for me to see what I'm doing. I'm hoping not to use high-quality wool to make the whole blanket, but I think it might help me to learn at least. Fingers crossed for a bit more success today!

By the way, the very lovely ripple blanket pattern I'm trying to use is written by Lucy and is available on her blog here.

FYM

Elgin's charity shops were very kind to me last week. As well as an abundance of vintage craft books (I'll try to share them soon) I got this Farm Dictionary. You may think this would not be very useful to a city dweller like myself, but I have already learned that FYM means farmyard manure, which I'm sure will be a very handy new expletive.
How could I resist this cover? When I brought this book home, my sister squealed because she had so nearly bought it herself the week before. Lucky for me, she decided there wasn't enough room in her suitcase for it! I have a small shelf set aside in the living room for books that are more beautiful than they are useful and this title is right at home there already.
The fact it had come from Pluscarden Abbey (a beautiful monastery in Elgin with real live bee-keeping monks) gave it that little extra something too.

Right, off to eat lunch and learn to crochet ripples before more subtitling beckons.

lunchtime crochet session part two

Today on my lunch break I consolidated my treble stitch skillz and practised making stripes in different colours. I can now do treble stitch without thinking (too much) so I think this could be quite a relaxing new hobby/activity. I'm very pleased with how thick, warm and blanket-like even this small sample feels. Tomorrow I might move on to making ripples. Exciting!

One aspect (not sure if it is a downside or an upside) of crocheting in the workplace is that every single person who comes into the kitchen is guaranteed to ask you what you are doing. Thank goodness I'm so enthusiastic about crocheting right now, so I don't mind having the same crochet conversation ten times in a row.

Talking of work, I got the best news today. After 16 months of fearing I could be made unemployed at any moment, I am finally getting a permanent contract! Hooray! Ah, sweet security :)

let the craftathon commence!

Would you believe me if I told you that I learned how to crochet on my lunch break today? Well, I did! I'm planning to make a ripple blanket so I had to learn how to do triple stitch first.

Fortunately I found this book in a charity shop the other day and it had instructions for triple stitch as well as some awesome boots to make. Unfortunately I couldn't understand the triple stitch instructions. Fortunately my workmate Veronica had been taught to crochet by her granny (over a quarter of a century ago as she pointed out) and was able to help me make a bit more sense of them :)

So now I can do triple stitch. I'm going to practise that for a little while longer yet and then start practising my rippling. It feels good to be learning something new and I think I could really like crochet. I'll keep you posted.

Hopefully I'll be back on the old blog again soon. Work is a bit mental at the moment, with long shifts and not many days off (hence the lunch break crochet session) but I aim to be back soon with some tales from the charity shops of Elgin and Glasgow. I've had some great luck in that department over the last week or so.

surrounded by jukeboxes

Working jukebox
Originally uploaded by I like

Greetings from Elgin. It's like a home from home (well, it IS home in one sense as it is where I lived from eight to eighteen years of age) surrounded by jukeboxes*. I am sleeping in my sister's old room with her jukebox, which she has not yet managed to ship out to France. Down the road in a chip shop called The Northern Fish Restaurant is Graham's dream jukebox, the Ami Continental. Graham is usually only in Elgin over Christmas when the chip shop is closed so he has only ever seen in by peering through the window and between the vertical blinds. Searching for Elgin on flickr, you would think there was nothing to see but the ruined cathedral, but there are still one or two more interesting sights for the eagle-eyed.

Anyway, I'm not here for sight-seeing, but to visit my family. I've already managed to catch a cold from my nieces and nephew, but I'm enjoying myself and learning A LOT about Peppa Pig. I think I have seen every episode about three times already and I've only been here a couple of days. Fortunately I like Peppa pig. I've also learned a fair amount about dinosaurs and ballet dancing from bedtime story reading duties, which I have been assigned to every night so far.

Other than that, not a lot has been happening. I wasn't organised enough to take any craft projects with me unfortunately. We do have some acorn gathering planned. My niece Kim has promised to help me in exchange for a "ladybird" acorn brooch. I'm also planning to spend at least one day going round the charity shops. If there is one thing Elgin is not short of, it's charity shops! Hopefully I'll have something fun to photograph and share here by the time I get back. Until then, it will probably be all quiet on the dropstitch front...

*Apparently I did not make it clear that I spend my days in the flat with Graham's beautiful jukebox for company, so it was a home from home BECAUSE I was surrounded by jukeboxes. You dig? Yeah, I knew you dug. Back in the big city now, by the way, so normal blogging should resume shortly.

happy girls' day, girls

And the winners are...

..numbers 11, 5 and 10 a.k.a. Amy, Claire and All About Us (who we know better as Stuffed Nonsense, of course). Congratulations! I'll be in touch for your postal addresses soon, or if you are reading this and are very organised, you can email your address to me via the link in my profile. Claire, I will give you your package at work and thus save on postage. Whoop! See, I won on Girls' Day too!

Apologies for the very uncreative though fair and scientific method of drawing the winners. I had planned on something more extravagant, but I'm catching a train up north (off to visit my parents, sister, brother-in-law, nieces and nephew - hooray!) straight after work tomorrow and am my usual disorganised self so need to pack and change cat litter etc. It's all glamour round these parts, I'm telling you...

The winners' parcels will be dispatched on my return.

Yippee-eye-yay!

Happy Girls' Day 2011 :)

typo-tastrophe

Consider this a valuable lesson learned. Never again will I try to write and proof instructions when I am like a half-shut knife after a long day at work. I had just finished packaging up a lovely big pile of brand new 'make your own' kits when I spotted this typo in the instructions. When I say I had just finished, I mean that literally - the last staple was flying out of the stapler when my eye chanced upon this glaring error. Yes, I said staples. Irreversible bloomin' staples. This means all the kits have to be taken apart, destroying all the packaging in the process so that I will essentially have to start from scratch. Two nights' work down the bleedin' pan. Grrr! I'm sure nobody would ask for a refund over one missing letter, but I couldn't love these kits knowing what I knew. Sigh... Who would believe that I proofread professionally, eh? Hopefully I do it a bit better than this in my day job!

You still have time to enter the giveaway or take advantage of the 20% discount in my shop (simply quote IAMAGIRL at the checkout) but not too long. Winners will be drawn and the codes will be deactivated tomorrow (Thursday a.k.a. Girls' Day) so get a wriggle on.