Hooked on String

Three hats

2011-01-19T10:21:00.000-08:00

Doing hexes, even automatically, gets boring, even while watching tv, so I went back to making hats (even went out and bought some yarn this time). The results were a study in gauge and hook size, things that I have admittedly ignored in the past. All three hats were made from the same instructions (left over from last hears church project) but using different size needles and (consequently?) different gauges (though I did not actually measure them). All were made with the same yarn (well, different colors): Red Heart Classic medium (4) worsted acrylic. The hooks were E, G, and K. The results were way too small, slightly small and way way too large, judging by fairly typical heads (mine and wife 3's). So I guess I'll have to start attending to that gauge thing.

way large

like I said

smallish

way small

My Life in Crochet VI: Wedding Afghan

2010-11-29T12:38:00.000-08:00

So, here I was with 200 or so hexes, some of them already joined in various ways and various confusing patterns. I had tried to organize them in various ways (alternating light and dark, say -- which doesn't work with hexes) but had trouble keeping the big picture in mind. As a result I had a number of misshapen clumps, without pattern or order of any sort I could see. So, I stuff the whole in a bag and went back to making more hexes.

And then my daughter announced that she was getting married. So I had a deadline for finishing the afghan. Under that kind of pressure (he kind that grows minute by minute) I found a stitch that tied hexes together and a way of looking at the overall pattern the I could make sense of -- and that, happily, I could bring most of the pieces already made up into. As I knew, stitching hexes together is tedious work that requires actually looking at what you are doing, but somehow, I managed to get the who;e thing done almost a full day before we had to leave for Portland. The results were very satisfying and, I think, well received.


Wedding Afghan

My Life in Crochet V: Interlude with Hats

2010-11-29T11:11:00.000-08:00

Along about this time last year my church (broader than my parish but still local) decided to give warm things to the clients of its food bank: hats, scarves and such. So I looked up the church-approved hat sites and worked my way through several hats (they go fast). I had some yarn left over when the hats were collected, so I made similar hats for my daughter (30 something now and living in Portland OR), her POSLQ and wife3.

Wife3 had some fancy ribbon and asked me to make a hat from it, so I did. And then I stopped the hat making.

Until a week or so ago, when I was bored with hexes and had a nice bit of yarn, so started to make a hat again. Just coming round the curve of the head, I ran out of yarn. I was too lazy (or it was too cold or...) to go get some more, but wife three found a number of short pieces (maybe two foot each) of yarn left over from a crewel project a long while ago. So I went on, splicing every few inches with a new strand. each a different color. Of course, this left me with a lot of loose ends and I am not a great one for tucking those in (the undersides of my hexes are generally a mess). So I pulled them all to the outside and fluffed them up a bit to give (vaguely) feathery effect to the whole. When wife3 said the hat would need a cuff, a fold-up section, I pulled the bottom rows of loose ends through to the back side and thus to the outside of the folded hat. Very nice.

My life in Crochet IV: ADD and the Sensitive Wife.

2010-11-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

Although I always claim that my ADD is hypOactive, the fact is that I fidget constantly, even if you don't count the tremor. And it drives wife3 crazy, though she only says something about one time in ten. And that mounts up fast. I tried for a while always having a deck of cards on hand to play solitaire whenever I was going to be sitting but not typing or eating (which interfere with my fidgets). But the sound of the shuffling cards and even the the slap of cards was only a minor improvement over tapping pencils and fingers and feet.

Then Martha Stewart published an article on granny squares. I read it and, since I had never gotten over my aversion to granny squares, wondered if I could modify the pattern into something else, say hexagons. A few tries showed I could, and so I was off. Whenever (within reason, of course -- not in church or at an entertainment) I was just sitting, I whipped out a ball of crochet thread (#10) and a 2 hook and ran a few more rounds on the hex of the day. I could do it almost mindlessly (if you don't mind a few mistakes and strange corrections) and soon I was watching tv or riding a tour bus or sitting through a meeting hooking away (well, it's better than sleeping).

For the most part, my color selection was determined by what the few shop I knew of had in the way of thread. Within that selection, I pretty much picked my colors for a particular hex at random or with some thought of "what goes together" (but I am somewhat red-green color blind). I did, when I had the material, do all the holidays I actually celebrate somewhat: Christmas, Valentine's Day, St Patrick's, Independence, Hallowe'en, and Thanksgiving, I did the school colors of all the schools I'd been or taught at (when I could remember what the colors, or look them -- a school so small that I was on the basketball team probably didn't have colors). I did the colors of the liturgical year. I tried some variations on the usual stitches (which didn't work out too well -- especially the round spiral center that never did get back to a true hex). Anyhow, I just kept quietly (the important part) hooking away.

As a result, I discovered one day that I had a bag of well over 200 hexes. So, someone said, maybe I should make something out of them, an afghan, say. I'd long since lost the Stewart article, which gave instructions on binding the pieces together, so I tried a few things that seemed right and finally found one that I could do almost as mindlessly as making the hexes. But then there was the problem of how to arrange them. I started by working outward from a central hex to the six adjoining hexes but quickly lost the over all pattern for the individual block, so that even though I knew I needed to work on one corner, I could not find that corner again. So I gave it up and made more hexes.

My Life in Crochet III: Tops for Tots.

2010-11-26T12:15:00.000-08:00

The experience making things for the neighbor's daughter came in handy when wife2 and I had a daughter. As a moment at a yarn store book rack will tell you, along with doilies and afghans, clothing for kids in the cute years are best sellers. So, I made hats and scarfs (including a Dr. Who version which would now serve for Harry Potter) and sweaters and at least tried at socks and gloves.

But the cute passed, as did wife2, and goths do not wear crochet -- or, at least, I never figured out a way to make black items with pale white skulls all over them (and yet recently I saw a marvelous piece of 3-D crochet the Day of the Dead, with very good skulls around the edge). And so I set aside my crochet for the most part -- a little now and then to impress the girls (worked this time!): doilies and fillet bookmarks again, but you can only do so many of them if they are all meant for one house.

My Life in Crochet II: Revenge!

2010-11-26T11:58:00.000-08:00

I learned to crochet to get back at my students in an Oriental Philosophy class in a small college (now a world-wide university). Instead of taking notes on my deathless lectures, they sat there (well, a couple of them) crocheting granny squares (this was at the turning from the 60s to the 70s). So I asked wife1 to teach me to crochet, so I could do it back at them. She did and I did, and then spent a couple hours getting tips and demonstrations of further techniques (granny squares, in case they haven't come back and you have forgotten, involve only chain and double crochet). I thereafter made my share of doilies of increasing complexity and fillet bookmarks with initials.

I went on in this desultory way until my neighbor divorced her husband, took her daughter and went to school -- again; she already had a PhD. To keep in touch, I made some frilly things for the daughter and eventually blew up a doily to a pancho for her (had to learn to crochet button holes as well as how to attach the button). And then, with my marriage, that all petered out, though I would occasionally go back for something soothing to do.

My Life in Crochet I: Prelude in Knitting

2010-11-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

I started to knit when I was maybe 9 or 10. The school I went to then -- a one-roomer in the midst of a forest (really) -- didn't have enough kids to get two youth groups, male and female, so, since the girls outnumbered the boys 5 to 4 (as I recall; real number not proportions), we got the girls' version (though most of the boys got some help from the neighbors with boy stuff, like knots and such). So I learned to set a table, plan a meal, cook it, and no doubt countless other "female" chores; cooking stuck with me, but that is another story. I also learned to knit and turned out endless potholders and a few more complex items of equal utility.

When I went away to school, I pretty much gave up knitting, except for a couple of times I used it in the hopes (not fulfilled) of impressing girls by taking up their work when they grew weary. But my gauge was always too tight (potholders!). So, eventually I dropped it, until much later, when I picked up The Manly Art of Knitting and tried a few things from it, though never the hammock knitted on two shovel handles. I dropped again and have never gone back, though I have tried other ways to get two dimensions from one: weaving of various sorts, tatting -- including needle tatting, even a (very) little embroidery, and Japanese knotting (well, some western sailor knotting, too). But once I got to crochet, I more or less stuck, though I would go years without doing any, only to take up again.