Birthday Yarn

I gave myself another break from the yarn fast, really just a continuation of the last break, coming as it did so soon after. But I had such great excuses reasons… it was my Birthday! Plus I had a Buy One Get One Free offer at Savers that was good for that day only. And it was a half-off day at Sal’s too. It was simply meant to be, don’t you think?

I scoured the entire Savers store, so sure I could find two wonderful treasures and take  advantage of the B1G1F deal. We call this a ‘Big If’. In this case it would be a Big deal  If I could just find two items that I wanted! I looked long and hard, yet all I had in my cart was a package of new travel containers for DH’s upcoming trip, 99¢, and ten new coloring books for the foster kids, 69¢ each. The usual Savers Buy 4 Books, Get 1 Book Free deal made them only 55¢ each, which is always nice, but how sad if my Big If freebie turned out to be a 99¢ package of notebook paper!

I went down the store’s side aisle one last time, in case they’d put out some nicer knitted or crocheted blankets. On my way I saw they’d added to the yarn bin. Yay! I nabbed four six-ounce skeins (two bags) of Red Heart Fiesta for $2.99, enough to decorate several ripples! It’s Periwinkle, a particularly pretty shade of blue yarn, with bits of white, deep pink and dark green. I left happy.

After a quick run into WalMart right next door for Emily’s bag of Iams, I headed to Sal’s. Things went much more quickly there. I’d only gotten about ten steps into the store when I Scored!! Look at what I got for $5.00! HaPpY Birthday to Me!!

That’s nearly six pounds of soft cotton and cotton blends. (subtracted two ounces for each cardboard cone) Most are labeled 8/2 weight. I imagine I’ll either weave or crochet with it.

I got more Red Heart yarn.

No, it’s not an exciting color group, but at 50¢ a skein I wasn’t going to turn my nose up at it. When I went to stow it in the attic I realized the Red Heart Soft matches some yarn already in my charity stash! Light Yellow Green may be the name on its label, but I prefer to call it soft sage… I may have enough now for a soft sage Pretty Pineapple!

Nine ounces of this pretty pink and white will perk up two or three ripples. It looks like JoAnns’ Sensations Rainbow Boucle to me. What a fun texture!

All in all, I think it’s a nice birthday haul. Come on, admit it, how many of you have counted thrift store yarn among your birthday treats? lol.

But wait! There’s More! I also found this silicone mold, which I think is for freezing ice sticks to put in water bottles, but I’m going to use it to make flat-sided recycled crayons instead. I wish there had been a couple more… it will only make eight crayons at a time. Oh. Well.

There wasn’t any price sticker on it, but after I got home I saw they’d charged me 29¢.

I do love my Sal’s.

A Wooly Challenge

When I sort through a bag of donated yarn…

or a thrift store or tag sale haul,

I often discover a few scrap balls or skeins of wool. Over time I’ve accumulated a wool stash destined for charity knitting.

Sadly I’ve never found a local charity that accepts woolen items, but DH is going to a conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada next month, creating an opportunity for me to give to Warm Hands Network, an Ottawa-based organization that collects handmade WOOL (Yay!!) blankets, sweaters and accessories. Twice a year shipments are made to warm impoverished children in remote areas of northern Canada. In February a shipment went to Moosonee, the gateway to the arctic and any woolies I may donate will be shipped come October.

I’ve already finished knitting my first, a simple ribbed cowl. I made it with one strand each of olive and pale grey yarns held together.

It’s very similar to Tiennie’s Ribby Neckwarmer (Ravelry project page w/180+ examples!). The free pdf is also available through Tiennie Knits, (photo link on right sidebar).

To be honest, it’s the turtleneck part from my first attempt at Anna Hromova’s Basic Neckwarmer. (Ravelry project page) The free pattern pdf is at Sunnyknits in both English and Russian. My mom would call this type of neck warmer a dickey. The four corners of its flat ‘bib’ are created with 3-in-1 increases, also known as kyoks, which I had never done before. The pattern’s step-by-step directions were clear, but I tried to use markers instead of counting stitches and I messed up how I placed and moved them. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize I’d done something wrong until I was almost finished with the dickey! I had just run out of my marled yarn and was attaching a completely different olive yarn for the garter stitch border when I noticed my increase lines curved to the right instead of going straight. It seemed like a good idea to just unravel back to a cowl and bind off.

One warm wool cowl finished.

I’m already giving the dickey another try. I have plenty, four and a half ounces, of this bright red acrylic/wool blend, vintage Phildar Pegase 206, and I think I know where I went wrong with those pesky increase markers, but I’m going to experiment on a swatch before I do any increases on the neck warmer itself. Until then, the 2×2 ribbed part is easy breezy knitting.

Let’s see how many woolies I can finish by June 7th!

Ripple of the Week #22 – Parakeets

I wanted to use this interesting novelty yarn, Moda Dea Cheri, in my next ripple.

Although my rule of three rows per ounce works well for most acrylic yarns, like Red Heart Super Saver, it’s not always reliable for novelties which can be much denser. Remember how I ran out of the Fun Fur in Princess? I knew that I needed a more accurate way to measure yarn usage if I was going to enjoy playing with Cheri and the rest of my novelty yarns.

It dawned on me that many patterns refer to how many yards of yarn you need, not how many ounces. I didn’t know already how many yards of yarn I used in my ripples, but I knew they weigh about twenty-four ounces when made of RHSS, so I thought I could soon figure its yardage. Imagine my surprise to find that there’s no yardage information on its label! But with Google’s help I learned that there are 364 yards in a seven-ounce skein, which meant I use fifteen yards for one ripple row. (364 yds ÷ 7 oz. = 52 yd per oz. ÷ 3.33 rows per oz = 15 yds per row)

Back to the Moda Dea Cheri, which has eighty-one yards in a skein. That’s roughly five ripple rows (81 yds per skn ÷ 15 yds per row = 5 rows). Since I have so much Cheri, I thought I’d save two skeins for another ripple, which left me four skeins, twenty rows, for Parakeets.

Too limp when crocheted alone, I added a strand of yellow baby yarn to Cheri.

Simply holding the two yarns together while I crocheted worked smoothly and I love the result…

Relying on the yarn’s yardage worked! I got the twenty rows of Cheri that I wanted…

Parakeets

11,690 Crochet Stitches – 990,450 Donated Since Jan. 2011

and I have two full skeins of Cheri left. YAY!

I can only hope the other novelty yarns in my stash have labels, labels with yardage information! Glancing back at the stash photo, I see my chances of that aren’t so good, only about 50/50. But that problem can wait for another day..

so let’s enjoy one more view of my pretty Parakeets.

Just a Little Yarn

Have you noticed how long it’s been since I bought yarn?!!

Yes, I’ve continued accepting yarn donations, I’m not one to turn down free yarn, but I haven’t paid for any since mid-January! I decided a couple of weeks ago that I deserved a reward, a little charity yarn treat for sustaining a yarn fast for the long three plus months.

I found myself another ‘yarn blanket’ at Savers. DH has already unraveled it into these Five Pounds! of lovely yarn balls.

I think it’s Red Heart Super Saver. Paying $6.40 for all this is like getting eleven skeins of RHSS for 70¢ each! Yay!! Eventually I’ll turn it into three and a half more ripples for foster kids.

Of course, one yarn buy often leads to another. Sal’s had this amazing sweater, which I fondly call my ‘Muppet fuzz’ sweater. I’ve finished the back and started on a sleeve.

It’s a somewhat ‘hairy’ pink, orange and silver novelty yarn. I can’t wait to see what this is going to look like in a ripple!

Actually, with fifteen ounces of this silly stuff, I guess I’ll be using it in several future ripples! Most novelty yarns come in little 1 3/4 ounce (50 gm) balls… so I got over eight skeins worth of novelty yarn for $2.00! hehe

Although this comes to nearly six pounds of new yarn, my charity stash is still down by fifteen pounds, so I’m good.

A New Sort of Ripple – #21 – Sweet Cherry Sundae

After crocheting eighty of the same kind of ripple since January 2011, I finally decided I was ready to try a different pattern!

I’ve wanted to make a ripple with alternating large and small points for a long time and I thought that I could probably figure out how to make one about the same size as my old ripples. They normally have six peaks with ten double-crochet stitches in each uphill or downhill run. Instead, this one has nine peaks; five large peaks with nine double-crochet stitches on each side and four smaller ones with four stitches per side.

I love the way the stripes seem to wriggle across the blanket! It came out about thirty-five inches wide like my old ripples, as I hoped it would.

I’m considering Wriggly Ripple as its name. What do you think??

It’s quite a change from the ripples I’m used to making.

In all the excitement I almost forgot… I crocheted one row of white, then two rows of Red Heart Super Saver Light Raspberry and three of RHSS Burgundy to make Sweet Cherry Sundae.

Do you want to make a Wriggly Ripple too? Shall I take the time to write out and test the pattern?

Blankets for an Auction

Last spring I donated two of my blankets to a nearby church’s silent auction, part of their annual fundraiser for a Haitian Ministry.

This year I’m offering them four:

#1 – Cool Jewels, which I finished last July, is one of my most favorite blankets. You can read all about my adventures while making this blanket by clicking on ‘Other Blankets’ in the Categories list over on the sidebar. Most of the posts that will come up (remember, they’re shown in reverse order) are about Cool Jewels.

I absolutely love it’s luminescence, which is best seen when it lays flat.

#2 – I crocheted the Checkered Rainbow Blanket a few years B.B. (before blog). It’s the usual size, about 35″ x 54″, good for a crib, a child’s carry-along blanket, or to use as a throw.

#3 – I also crocheted a fraternal twin from slightly different colors. It’s a little shorter.

What a fun baby shower gift they would be for someone expecting twins!

I found the simple pattern, “Cheerful Checks” by Nancy Fuller, in a little 5 x 8 Leisure Arts booklet, #75028, “Scrap Wraps”.

Pssst… a little secret… That link goes to Amazon where you can Look Inside! the booklet and see photos of all five crocheted blankets, plus you’ll find the complete patterns for both “Granny’s Favorite”, which is on the booklet’s front cover, and “Graceful Appeal”, seen on page four… shhhh.

Maybe it’s time for me to revisit this pattern. It would be a great way to use some of that mound of ecru yarn I was given in December.

Pick #4 is the freshly finished Christmas in Grannies:

I know at least one other person is giving them a crocheted blanket, so they may not want all four I’m offering. After all, five is alot of blankets for a small church auction and there’s no point in flooding the market. That would only lower the price they’d get for each one. I can easily put the extras back in my blanket stash.

Oh, I’m also giving them the cotton market bags I crocheted last year, the Crocheted Stash Basket and the Seaside Tote. You can follow this link to a list of four free bag patterns, including the ones for these two designs.

Ripple of the Week #20 – Tranquility

I planned Tranquility around the colors in the Red Heart Super Saver variegated yarn called Aspen Print. I chose only four yarns, RHSS Light Sage and Warm Brown, plus an unlabeled cream and a vintage dark brown.

10,418 stitches crocheted – 966,185 donated since Jan. 2011

Aspen Print is an unusual variegated yarn; its color segments are so short, every crochet stitch contains at least two colors. It makes soft, tweedy ripple stripes:

Although I have four more skeins of Aspen Print, I have no plans for starting another ripple series, like the series of seven I did with French Country, another variegated yarn. Still, I can’t resist comparing 2011′s #15, Soothing, which also included Aspen Print, with today’s Tranquility.