The Beginning of Insanity

After doing some charity knitting, I am now wanting to make something more for myself. The blanket I'm going to make is called the double vision blanket. It's made up of 100 squares using 10 different colored yarns and there's 55 different shades that are created through the combinations. I absolutely love it, and I'm kind of nervous about starting it (hoping I don't mess it up!).

Here's the yarn colors I'm going to use in the order I'm placing them in.



And here's the amount of yarn I'm going to use for the colors.



Tonight I made my first square! Sorry about the bad lighting and weird background (my couch).



1 down, 99 to go! EEK! Wish me luck!

Alphablanket and Other Craft-Like Things

Oh noes! I haven't posted in a while! Also, I didn't realize I was receiving comments. I don't know what's up with that, I'll try to fix that. I've been up to a few craft things, of course. CAUTION: This is a picture-packed post (yay, alliteration?)! One of the big things I made was this ABC crochet blanket.




This took a while to make (almost a month) and I think it turned out well. Some of the letters don't "pop out" too well, but it was fun to make. That being said, it was a lot of work for a charity blanket. Although I enjoy making things for charity, I feel I would use this blanket to give to a friend rather than make to give away. I feel that I could use my time to make things that would be quicker and easier to create than spend a lot of my time on one blanket.

I've also been busy making a few more things to donate to Pine Ridge Reservation. These will all go in my second shipment that I will (hopefully) be able to send soon. These include a crocheted blanket that I made around the same time as the alphabet blanket. I worked on this mostly when I got sick of the ABC's and everything involved with that. Here's the other blanket:



And a close up picture...



I also dyed some more yarn! I feel geeked out about it all, but it's so much fun! I dyed some more Paton's wool with cherry and orange kool aid. Watch out - picture overload coming up!

These first two pictures are of the yarn immediately after I got done dyeing it. The first picture is right out of the microwave with the yarn still in a ziploc bag (yep, I microwave it to help the kool aid not bleed out of it later!).




These next pictures are of the yarn wound up into a ball, then wound into a hank. The hank is a way to help display the colors they way they would blend in a pattern.




BUT OF COURSE, the point of yarn is to make things, so I made this into another "baby bag" for LOWO.



And then, some pictures to compare the first bag to the second one.




So many pictures! Hope I didn't blow up anyone's computer. Also, don't forget to feed my fish over to the left with a mouse click. They're getting hungry ;).

I Lessthanthree Neil Patrick Harris

Recently, I have been on a documentary kick with Netflix. Although I love my docs, I found something completely different yesterday. I had the privilege to discover and watch Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. Neil Patrick Harris is so incredibly adorable and likeable as the sinister Dr. Horrible. I didn't know what to expect, but I saw it on netflix and decided to give it a go. It had been made and posted during the writer's strike a few years ago and is a mix of a superhero plot, some catchy songs thrown in the mix, and a great cast to make a fun miniseries. It was definitely a great find, and supposedly there's a sequel in the works. That would be fabulous and I'll for sure go to see it whether it's posted online or made into an actual movie.



I'll say that sometimes it's hit or miss when it comes to netflix, but every great movie makes up for (most of) the awful ones. Especially when it involves Neil Patrick Harris.

Indoturtle and a Sweater

Recently, my friend Diana left for Indonesia with the Peace Corps on March 15th. She's going to be gone for 27 months. As a going away present, I made her a small little "talisman" that she could take along and take pictures of in random places. The first update a few days ago was that Indoturtle (and Diana, of course) are enjoying their new location and home on the other side of the world. They have a nice picturesque view of the local volcano (eek!) and some beautiful mountains.



He's made with red and white colors because these are the colors of the Indonesian flag (which is red on top and white on the bottom). Hopefully there will be plenty of adventures for Diana and updates from Indoturtle (lol) in the future.

I finally finished a project I had been working on which was a baby sweater made from fingering weight yarn. I won the yarn from a type of contest called the Ravelympics. It was basically an event that took place during the time of the 2010 Winter Olympics where each participant had to challenge themselves in their crafting. I ended up making a buttload of projects in the short time of the Vancouver Olympics (mostly hats, but some other things, too).



Anyway, the sweater is made from super thin fingering weight yarn that takes much longer to work with using much smaller needles. I didn't like the colors at first (made me think of too much rainbow-like colors making it look possibly "clown barf"ish). Fortunately, I was just worrying too much and the finished product turned out really nicely and the pattern (not my project) was even mentioned in the next newsletter of the Threadbear Fiber Arts Studio in Lansing because I shared it with the Threadbear group on Ravelry. I'll donate it to LOWO on behalf of Bundles of Joy since I don't know any babies that I could give it to, haha. Oh well.