Crocheted Arm Candy

Wow, wow, and wow.  I am in the final round of voting for So You Think You're Crafty!  When I first signed up to compete, I seriously did not think I would make it this far.  Because of this little adventure, I have some beautiful new items in my house, I've spent quality time with Drew in front of the table saw, and I found a product that I love to make and that people want to buy!  So, before I get to the bracelet, can you take a moment to go HERE and vote for my project in the final round?  I made a Helix Jewelry Display to use at a craft show (my first!) in a couple of weeks.  I'll be posting a tutorial on it once the voting has ended, so, sometime next week.  It's super easy and I love the way it turned out.  Anyways, go vote!  

Click here to VOTE! (Voting is on the right sidebar)

Ok, on to the bracelet.  I don't wear a lot of jewelry, so this jewelry challenge kind of threw me for a loop.  I started looking around on Pinterest, and kept running across Adrianne's jewelry projects.  So I tried playing around a bit with some polymer clay, some stamping, but oh boy oh boy, did that not work out.  In the end, I really had to fall back on what I knew, and it wasn't going to be jewelry making; it was crochet.  I saw some pictures on Etsy for crocheted and beaded friendship bracelets, and I fell in love.  I would totally wear those!  But they obviously don't come with tutorials, so I had to figure it out myself.

It's odd, how come I don't feel passion and intensity when I'm trying to get to the bottom of a work problem?  Well, not odd.  I know exactly why, but that's another blog post....

Anywho, tangents, tangents.  I don't really want to post the detailed tutorial, since it IS something that someone is selling online, and I don't really know what the intellectual property implications are in this case.  If I figured it out myself, does that mean I can do whatever I want with it?  

In case you'd like to give it a try though, it's crocheted using slip stitches.  The ends of 4-way braids, and the ends are held together with a macrame square knot.  You'll need the smallest crochet hook you can find - a 2.5mm hook, some embroidery thread (6 strand), and some size 6 seed beads.  I don't know how the sizing works on seed beads, but basically, you use the ones that are just about to make you go blind looking at them.

I started with some colorful combinations, until Drew looked at them and said they're cool, if only a little more manly.  Really?  Ok.  So now, I'm working on black/black, gray/blue, you know, dark manly combinations.  I may try hemp too.

I'll be selling these at the craft show in September, and maybe maybe, have some on my Etsy shop or do some custom orders afterwards.

Oh yeah, and those glass canning jars - a garage sale find.  Yeah!  I think I got 12 big glass canning jars and two of these little one for $5.  Of course, I was all nonchalant at the sale, trying to determine if that was a good price, but you better believe I did a little happy dance when I got home, because I love them!

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Crochet Rug from T-shirts

I've seen a lot of crocheted and woven and braided rugs out on the internet; it was even one of the first things I pinned to Pinterest, but I never got around to trying one of my own until now.  I always thought it was going to be difficult, but actually, it's really quite easy, and no fancy instructions needed!

Step 1.  Acquire fabric.  In this case, I used XXL men's t-shirts from Goodwill.  Choose t-shirts that are mostly or 100% cotton, and have no or very little print on them, preferably, only above the arm line.  You'll also want the fabric weight to be fairly consistent, so don't try to pair up a Hanes t-shirt with a paper thin cotton shirt from BR.

Step 2. Create your yarn.  There are oodles of t-shirt yarn tutorials out on the internet.  Feel free to choose any one of them, or try this one on for size.  The basic idea is that the shirt is already in the round, so you're cutting a continuous strip from the bottom hem up to the armpit.  Actually, remove the hem before cutting - it doesn't curl well (or, at all). Once you have the big strip, stretch the strip and allow the knit in the t-shirt to curl in on itself, thus creating the yarn.

Step 3. Ball up your yarn.  This is actually pretty important, but once I started to crochet, I realized I twisted the yarn as I balled it, so there was a lot of tension.  I ended up unraveling the whole darn thing before crocheting, which kind of defeats the purpose of balling it up in the first place.  C'est la vie.

Step 4. Crochet.  I used a single crochet here for a dense weave.  I don't know the name of the method I use, but I twist the yarn onto my hook, chain 2, then SC my first round.  You can also start with a magic circle, or any other method to start crocheting in the round.  For an crash course in crochet, start here with my lovely friend Rachel!  

I started with 6 SC in the first round, doubled it to 12 in the second round, and slowly increased beyond that.  In retrospect, I think I should have started with 4, doubled to 8, and then actually counted my way around.  

1st round: 4 SC

2nd round: 2 SC in each stitch (8 stitches)

3rd round: *1 SC in next stitch, 2 SC in next stitch, repeat from * (12 stitches)

4th round: * 1 SC in next 2 stitches, 2 SC in next stitch, repeat form * (16 stitches) and so on.

Or, you can be like me and just make it up as you go, increasing as necessary to keep the piece flat.  If the work is curling up, you need more stitches in the round.  If the work is ruffling, you can either take it apart and not increase as many stitches, or do a round with no increases, sort of to bound the problem.  I also tried to alternate where I made the increases so as to keep a circle shape.  I've noticed that if I increase in the same spot each round, I end up with a polygon instead of a circle because of the bulge that extra stitch makes.

When you've come to your desired size, or to the end of your t-shirt stockpile, pull the end through the last loop and pull tight.  Then weave in your ends.

Sorry this isn't a very detailed tutorial, nor is it a class on crochet.  My mind wasn't really focused last week due to some family issues and this was an easy mind-numbing project!

Click here to see where I party!  Celebrating Everyday Life

Outdoor Dominoes Tutorial

This was a project I've been meaning to make for a while now, and loved getting a chance to do it for the Out and About week at SYTYC.  Now I just need to have a party so I can play!

I started off by sending Drew to Home Depot to buy lumber.  Actually, he had to go himself since the wood boards wouldn't fit in the car without removing the carseat.  He asked me to make a note in my write-up that the wood had no knots, but then afterwards, told me I wrote it up wrong.  He bought pine boards with no knots not just to make it pretty, but so that when you actually play Dominoes, you can't use the knots on the back to figure out which pieces your opponents have.  So thoughtful!  There you go honey, I hope I explained it correctly!

Anyways, I think he bought 2 10 foot 1x4s and 1 8 foot 1x4 board.  A 1x4 board is actually about 3.5 inches wide, so I was aiming to create dominoes that were 3.5"x7".  There are 28 dominoes in a set, so 7" times 28 = 196", which is a little over 16 feet.  With 18 feet of board, we gave ourselves a little extra in case we screwed up on the table saw.

Cut the boards down to 7" lengths, using either a chop saw or a table saw.

Stain.  I used some leftover Chestnut stain that we had for our floors.  I didn't mix the stain very well, so the first coat was a dull brown, with all the pigment down at the bottom.  Then I had to remix and then add a heavily pigmented coat onto the wood, which made it a beautiful reddish color.

Here's where things got crazy.  I had bought a 3/8" circle punch at Michaels for a $1, thinking I would make a stencil from some leftover cardboard and paint on the dots.  And for $1, I was feeling pretty good.  Fast forward to that evening when I made my stencil template and went to punch out the holes when I realized the punch wasn't able to punch that far in to the cardboard.  Anxiety ensues.  (And maybe some yelling.)  Of course, in the store, I had thought about buying little adhesive dots to use, but I couldn't find dots in the size I wanted.  Somehow, it never occurred to me to buy adhesive paper and punch my own holes.  Silly, really.  Eventually, though, I did figure that out, except it was now 9:30pm, and all the stores were closed, and I had no adhesive paper at home.  So, I ended up punching holes around the edges of stamp sheets (the "green" stamp set), and sacrificed some white address labels as well.  Let me tell ya, that's a lot of little dots.  Thank goodness I hadn't cut my nails down to a nub, so I could sit there and peel the backing off of biiiillllions of little paper dots.

I did use the template I had made to mark where the dots would go on each piece of wood by poking holes in the template.  

Start the domino assembly line.  I sat peeling and placing little dots, and Drew started painting on a coat of clear acrylic sealer.  I'm sure polyurethane would work great; we just had the water-based acrylic sealer left over from a different project. 

Ugh, the 6-6 domino was a pain in my behind.  When that one was finally done, I was so happy to be done with the peeling of dots.  The dominoes sat in the basement to dry, and then they were finished!  Actually, a couple of days later, we found them to be a bit tacky, since the sealer hadn't had time to fully cure, so they are still resting, and will do so until I get around to inviting people over to play!

Anyone want to come over for a rousing game of Dominoes?

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