Interweave Crochet Summer 2009

The preview for the summer issue of Interweave Crochet is up and guess what?

My very first paid gig as a crochet designer is in it!!!!

Presenting (drum roll please...)

The Seashell Tote!



If you would like to see more you can check it out here.

Chain Link Here I Come!

I have decided to go to the Chain Link conference in Buffalo, NY this summer. Even though it has been a rough year financially (and in other ways as well), I think it will be good for me and will be totally worth the penny pinching to pay for it.

I will get to meet a whole bunch of other crocheters, which will be fabulous! Also, I will get the opportunity to learn learn new techniques, learn more about doing crochet professionally and get a chance to meet the editors of the major magazines.

On the non-crochet side, I am going to take a day trip to Niagara Falls and get to play tourist for a little while.

So, I am hoping that this trip will allow me to develop more as a crochet professional and give me the closest thing to a vacation that I am probably going to get this year.

All in all, I think it will be a very good thing. :)

25 Things I Love About Crochet

Laurie, the Fearless Leader of the Crochet Liberation Front, issued a challenge for all of us crochet bloggers to list 25 reasons why we love crochet.

So here goes.....

In no particular order

1) I love how meditative crochet is.
2) I love how I can make things that are both beautiful and practical at the same time.
3) I love how it allows me to give gifts to my friends and family that are interwoven with love.
4) I love how it gives me something useful to do when I am watching TV or waiting somewhere.
5) I love how it allowed me to give comfort to my ailing mother-in-law during her last months of life even though I wasn't right there.
6) I love how it allows me to make things for myself that actually fit.
7) I love how it allows me to feel connected to my mother-in-law and my great-grandmother despite the fact that they are gone.
8) I love how it has given me the opportunity to connect with people I would not otherwise have met.
9) I love how excited my mother got over the scarf I made her for Christmas.
10)I love how there are so many different crochet techniques that it will take me years to get to them all.
11)I love how crochet can be as simple or as intricate as you want it to be.
12)I love how it gives me one more thing in common with my friends who are also fiber lovers.
13)I love fondling all the lovely yarn and imagining what it could be turned into.
14)I love dreaming of all the sorts of things I can make.
15)I love turning those dreams into actual objects.
16)I love how I can try aiming to get one place and end up somewhere else entirely when designing.
17)I love watching things take shape in my hands.
18)I love how I can improvise something at the spur of the moment if I need to.
19)I love how my interest in crochet has resulted in my learning about the broader craft/handmade/diy culture that exists.
20)I love how it has allowed me to see options for how to live my life that I was unaware of before.
21)I love how connecting to other crafty people through crochet has given me the courage to put myself out there more, and in ways I would never have dared to in the past.
22)I love how it has helped me cope with all of the difficult times surrounding my mother-in-laws passing.
23)I love how it gives me a way to explore my creative/crafty side.
24)I love how versatile crochet is, it has something for everyone.
25)I love how it will give me something I can share with my niece and nephew as they get older.

Whew! That's quite a list.

What are your favorite things about crochet?

Things I learned from the Sweet Tea

The Sweet Tea...she is done! This is a photo of the top fresh off the blocking board.

This project turned out to be more educational than I anticipated. Here are some things I learned:

1) A high alpaca content yarn was not the best choice for this project as it doesn't give enough structure to pieces that need to have a particular shape.

2) Getting gauge with your swatch does not always mean you will be able to keep gauge when you make the final item.

3) The 50/50 alpaca/merino wool yarn I used handles ripping out and re-crocheting multiple times beautifully. It looked as good the last time as it did the first time. (It was Valparaiso from Art Fibers, which unfortunately has been discontinued.)

4) Short rows are a wonderful thing.

5) I can successfully tweak a pattern to make it work for me. (This was something I was afraid of as I don't know much about garment construction.)

6) I now have a much better idea of what I need to do to make a top fit properly and I know what to do to make the next one fit even better.

I am very happy with the final results and am looking forward to taking the Sweet Tea on it's maiden voyage into the outside world!

Sweet Tea Take Two (and three and four and...)

After letting the Sweet Tea sit to one side for a few days I frogged it and took a picture of the yarn so I would have something to show on my Ravelry project page.

I tried making the top front again using a smaller hook but was still having the same problem of it being too wide. I took a good look at it and realized that the edges were flaring out really bad. I made some measurements and discovered that even though I had gauge when I started, my shell stitches were 0.25 inches wider in the last row of the top front as they were in the first row. So, I was not getting the shape I needed for the piece and I wasn't keeping gauge.

I frogged the piece again and set it aside so I could think of a way to fix my problem.

While thinking about how to fix my gauge issue, I decided that I wanted to make the tank one size smaller and add some short rows (instructions for this are in the pattern, so I didn't have to work the detail of that out, thank goodness!:)).

I came up with some things to try to fix my problem and tried them a couple days later. First, I tried doing the increases on the edges in a smaller hook to see if that would pull them in. It did not help as much as I had hoped. Frogging number three. Second, I left out the increases on some of the rows to prevent the edges from flaring out. The shell stitches were still widening some, but that compensated for the width being lost from the removed increases. So I finally had something that was the right length and the right width. The removal of some stitch repeats did mean however, that I was going to have to follow the instructions for a smaller size than the one I was actually making.

It was at this point that I realized that I needed to make the top two sizes smaller to fit my torso properly. Frogging number four. This also meant that I would need to put in the maximum number of short rows to make room for my chest (there are two short row options in the pattern).

Finally I was able to make two top pieces for the front and back that were close enough to the right size to be used. When I made the connecting row to put the two pieces together and start working on the body of the garment, I discovered that the shells were still spreading some and the called for number of stitches for the underarm area made it too big around again. AHHHH!

I frogged back the connecting row, reduced the number of underarm stitches to get the width I needed and then switched to a smaller hook in order to keep the shells the same size as before.

Once I was working evenly and no longer needed any increases, I was able to keep gauge quite well. I started making the body of the sweater, adding in all of the short rows I could. I tried it on as I was going along and...IT FIT! Happy dance!

I am now working even on the body of the tank until it is long enough. But, it is finally working! I am checking my gauge every few rows just to be sure, though!

The straps may still pose a challenge, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it. At least I am a little better prepared now.

You learn something new every day

I discovered this morning that The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is not necessarily the best thing to read on public transit on the way to work. ;)

This is my reward for being fearless?

I have been planing to make the Sweet Tea tank from Everyday Crochet by Doris Chan for a long time. I bought the yarn about a year ago, after receiving the book for Christmas. I felt it would make a good first adult sized garment project as it has no seaming and no sleeves. But, as I had never tried to make anything that required a lot of shaping and a strict adherence to gauge, I was hesitant to start in on it.

In the interest of being a more fearless crocheter, I made a New Year's resolution to actually make this garment. So, yesterday afternoon I decided that I would start it. No time like the present, right?

The basic idea for this tank is you start at the top and make the top of the front of the garment and then the top of the back. Next, you join them together with bits in between for the underarms and then work the rest of the body in the round. After that is done you make the straps and voila! tank top.

I knew that getting gauge would be very important, so I swatched and swatched and swatched again until I was satisfied that I had in fact found the right hook to get gauge with the yarn I have. So far so good. Next, I started with the top front (or back they are both the same). I got the base rows down and started working the pattern rows. I was happily working repeats of pattern rows 1 and 2 to start with, then I got to the part where I needed to work repeats of pattern rows 3 and 4. This is when I realized I had a problem. I was thinking that pattern rows 1 and 2 were work even rows and pattern rows 3 and 4 were increase rows and in fact it was the other way around. I had not read the instructions carefully enough before starting.

I was kicking myself as I ripped back to the base rows because I follow protocols for a living and I should have freaking known better!

Fine. I redid the piece doing the increase and work even rows in the right places. I made a second identical piece for the back of the tank top. I proceeded to do the first round where the two pieces are joined together and the underarms are made.

Everything was going well and I imagined myself flying through this thing and having a lovely piece to wear from my first foray into adult sweaters.

Somewhere in the middle of the second round it occurred to me that the tank was looking a bit big, so I put it on and hold it up about where it will sit once the straps are on. It was not just a bit big, it was HUGE. *^%#!

I laid the piece out on the bed so I could recheck my gauge. The gauge in your swatch isn't always what you get when you actually go to make an item. I figured with the increases and what-not maybe it was coming out different enough to cause me problems. I was just fine with this theory, not happy but fine. That is until I discovered that, to the best of my ability to determine such things, my gauge was SPOT ON. AHHHHHHH!

I checked to see just how far off I was, because I would need to know in order to try and fix things and the thing was 10 inches too big. 10 inches! How on Earth could I have been 10 inches off if I had gauge? The only thing that prevented me from swearing like a sailor at this point was the fact that I do not actually know how sailors swear. (Maybe the people at the pirate shop can advise me on that.)

This really only left me with two, equally demoralizing, explanations. One, my understanding of what was meant by the gauge guidelines was so far off as to have put me in the next state or two, there is a serious warp in the space-time continuum in my apartment that I was previously unaware of.

I am using a different yarn than the one in the book. However, it is the same weight yarn and has at least some fiber content in common. Even if the fiber content were completely different I still don't see how that could be responsible for the item being 25% larger than expected with gauge having been achieved.

The project is now sitting off to one side waiting for me to calm down enough to rip it out and figure out where in the heck I went wrong.