Yearly Archives: 2007

*Started two card wallets. These I think will be finished with business cards in mind. I’m dying to make something more complicated, but I’d like to be a bit more assured of my construction before I go getting all crazy with something that would see heavier use than keeping business cards neat and clean. And looking cool. Of course. 🙂

*I have a snowman who has been underway for ages. I need something to weight his bottom down so that he stands properly and I haven’t figured out quite how I want to do it yet, so there he sits.

*The toy design idea I had is coming along too well to jinx by talking about it.

Mostly I’m trying to come up with creative things to do with the yarn I have, since payday isn’t here yet. It keeps me in some sort of reasonable check when I just plain don’t have the funds, but it’s depressing even if it forces the sort of improvisation that some of the best stuff comes from.

Ever since I first stumbled across The No-End-In-Sight-Ripple-Along I’ve been wanting to play with ripple pattern. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve never made a ripple; I think maybe childhood trauma is to blame. ROFL! Looking back, I don’t think I knew a single family growing up who didn’t have at least one hideous ripple in their collection.

Of course, since then I’ve learned to embrace the ugly, and ripples have come a long way from the pointy gold and brown nightmares of my childhood. The ones I’ve been seeing lately are unspeakably gorgeous. Look!

Anyway, with the weather turning warm I haven’t wanted to start another afghan, so I’ve been trying to work out a ripple in thread. Thread is another on the long list of things I used-to-didn’t-like that I’ve come around to loving lately. Being stubborn, I can’t just find a pattern and run with it. No.

I’ve got to grok the ripple.

Which means not only pouring over pattern after pattern, but studying the ripple tutorial at Crochet Cabana and making an awful little little stack of stunted, twisted bits of thread. It’s worth it, of course, when you reach the point where what you’re doing is intuitive, rather than a study in carefully following directions. (Which is not to say, at all, that there’s anything wrong with that. I prefer it sometimes myself. But sometimes? I don’t. I adore the feeling of sitting down with hook and yarn and just making something happen.)

I think I need to work this out in yarn first. It refuses to look quite right, and I’m either doing something wrong, which will be easier to see in yarn rather than thread, or I’m failing to respect some property of the thread that’s making it behave just a little badly.

We’ll see.

If I ever get going on an actual project, I might just have to join that ripple-along, too.