Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Hello!

Welcome to my yarncraft blog!

I was inspired to start this blog by my charming and talented mother, whose crochet blog currently features an exciting mystery project in progress. (I already know what it is--haha!) I see this as a place to feature my works in progress and finished objects, to chronicle my trials and tribulations, and generally geek out about how cool it is that I can take a long piece of string and turn it into something useful--plus, maybe now that Mom and I are both blogging, the phone bills will be a bit smaller! (Maybe.)

A little about me: I'm 25 years old and I live in Lexington, KY. I have a dim memory of my mother teaching me to crochet when I was a small person; I'm pretty sure I made a lot of very long chains and an extremely lumpy potholder or two before abandoning crochet in favor of other pursuits. My senior year of college, when I was very poor and had a lot of time on my hands, I bought a new crochet hook and a bunch of yarn and made scarves for... well, just about everyone I knew, for Christmas. (I found out recently that I was doing it wrong the whole time. Oops!)

In December 2006 I was back home for two weeks and caught the crochet bug again. It was a very crafty vacation: I made hats with Mom, tried a shawl, sewed an apron with my grandmother, and even got Grandma to give me a lightning-speed intro to knitting--she was on her way to a bridge game! I came back to Lexington with a suitcase stuffed full of yarn and a burning desire to make stuff.

Then I decided to quit smoking, and I remembered how difficult it is to smoke and crochet at the same time. I didn't want to make any more hats or scarves, and I spent a few days going through the free patterns on Lion Brand's website before I finally settled on a project. Two months later, I was smoke-free, and I had this:
















A full-sized afghan! That I made!

After that, I picked up my knitting needles and some cotton yarn, and made my first dishcloths. I started buying knitting books. I'm beginning to get over my frustration with how slow knitting is compared to crocheting; as of today, I've knitted half a dozen dish/washcloths, a very large bag (bigger than I intended!), and two halves of socks. (These are two separate socks, not one entire sock. I don't learn how to make the toes until Saturday.)

I just bought a used sewing machine on the cheap so I can make linings for bags and things like that, and I'm working on a second afghan.

I used to be addicted to cigarettes; now I'm addicted to yarn! Oh, well. As I told my coworker Pat (who is the Craft Queen around here), at least carpal tunnel syndrome is almost never fatal!

3 comments:

Barbara said...

That is one awesome afghan. I took the pic of you and it along when I had lunch with the Tae Kwon Do ladies last week and they were mightily impressed.

Barbara said...

And I don't think blogging will have any effect on how long we talk on the phone. Not the same thing at all!

Ann said...

Oh, that's right! You'll have to give me all the gossip on Sunday. And I think you're probably right--we'll still talk just as much. It's just that now we'll have seen more pictures of each others' projects!