LET'S GO DUKE!

In less than an hour, Duke University (my alma mater) will be playing University of Virginia in the ACC championship title game.  Charlotte now has a fabulous new circle skirt made from our old t-shirts so she can cheer on the Blue Devils in style!

I pieced together squares cut from the backs from four t-shirts (the lighter blue one was actually Corey's old Duke shirt, but the other three just happened to be in good colors), then cut it into shape.  Afterward, I appliquéd on the logos so they would be in the right place near the hemline.  The border between the gray and navy panels is the front middle of the skirt.  Finally, I sewed on a 3" wide elastic waistband and zigzagged around the bottom of the skirt for a little extra detail.

I sewed the skirt while Charlotte was at school on Friday and just sort of winged the length.  It came out a tad long, but it is winter after all, right?  I stuck it on Charlotte right after she got off the bus and had her pose a little.  Her hair looks a little bedraggled because this dry winter air is not kind to Charlotte's fine hair -- especially after taking hats on and off all day!

Best thing about a circle skirt?  The twirlability!  Yes, that is a word (at least in this household).

Crossing our fingers for an ACC championship trophy to get March Madness started out on the right foot!

Some Happy Birthday shirts for Charlie Jo

Sweet Charlotte turned 6 this week, and I made not one, but TWO appliqué shirts for her.  The first was the traditional (or what has become traditional in this household) number shirt:

It's short-sleeved, so she was wearing it over a white long-sleeved shirt.  I took this pic as she was modeling her new sunglasses, necklace, and denim vest.

The second shirt is one I actually want to make for myself as well.  Now everyone will know that Charlotte is really Wonder Woman!

Ella & Audrey's Frozen-inspired hats

My friend, Melissa, and I are kindred spirits who love handmade items.  Another thing we share in common is that we both have blond four-year-old daughters (though hers is soon to turn 5 this month!) who are completely enamored with the Disney movie, Frozen.  So when Melissa came to me and asked if I might be able to crochet some Elsa & Anna hats for her daughter, I jumped at the chance!  Here's the Elsa hat, modeled by Melissa's daughter, Ella:

The hat looks great with the Elsa dress!  Ella looks born to be royalty.  Also, when Sonia saw these pictures, her eyes almost bugged out of her head and she is now reminding me daily that she would LOVE an Elsa dress for her birthday.  She's currently cobbling her own together out of a turquoise tutu, a blue felt super hero cape, and a sequin tiara I bought for her out of the dollar bin at Jo-Ann Fabric.

Melissa & I looked at some finished-product listings for Frozen-inspired hats on Etsy to get inspiration, and I headed off to Jo-Ann Fabrics to check out the yarn possibilities.  When I saw Premier Yarns Serenity Chunky Sequins yarn in a color called "Snow Crystals", I almost fell over.  It was perfect for an Elsa hat!  It is a gorgeous white yarn with silver sequins woven throughout.  Too bad sparsely-placed sequins don't show up in pictures; you'll just have to take my word for is that this yarn is simply awesome and perfect.

I used a really nice free pattern, Basic Bulky HDC Beanie, from the Charmed by Ewe blog.  It worked perfectly with the size 5 yarns that I used for both hats.  

Even Elsa the Snow Queen needs to take a rest sometimes.

Ella loves to play Elsa & Anna with her little sister, Audrey.  But the day that Melissa took this picture, Audrey was NOT in the mood to pose as Anna.

Luckily, Audrey decided posing wasn't all that bad later in the day.  The Anna hat was crocheted with size 5 Lion Brand Wool-Ease Chunky yarn in the color "Spice".

I made the braids an appropriate length for Ella to wear the hat, so the braids are hanging a bit long on her one-year-old sister!  Oh well, she still looks super-fabulous.

We decided that the Anna hat needed some flowers (made with Red Heart Super Saver yarn) on it as a counterpoint to the Elsa hat's wintry theme.  The cute little flowers at the bottom of the braids aren't very visible in these pictures, but one is pink and one is purple.  I free-handed the flowers.

The sisters from Arendelle! (Ella stuck her Elsa tiara on the hat for this picture....  Perfect!!)

To jazz up the Elsa hat a bit, I used some cotton yarn to crochet white and turquoise snowflakes (using this fantastic free pattern).  Then, I sewed the snowflakes and the big pink flower (from the Anna hat) onto barrettes so that they could be taken on and off the hats as the girls desired.  Or, they could wear the snowflakes and flower in their hair!

Happy early birthday, Miss Ella!  May you and Audrey spend many happy hours pretending to be Elsa the Snow Queen and her plucky little sister, Anna.  Thanks for the pictures, Melissa!!

Charlotte's Puppy "Skye" from Paw Patrol

Happy, happy 6th birthday to my beloved niece (Niki's daughter), Charlotte!  In honor of Charbunkle's birthday, I crocheted her this puppy named "Skye" from the Nick Jr. show "Paw Patrol".

Back when Charlotte & Peter first started watching that show last year, I looked around on the interwebs for Paw Patrol crocheted goodies, but I didn't find much because the show was still a bit too new.  Since then, I've seen a few Paw Patrol amigurumis float across my Pinterest boards, but none turned my head like this pattern by Nipiti, which I bought on Etsy.

As usual, I used Red Heart Super Saver and Red Heart With Love yarns, but I also mixed in some beige Caron One Pound yarn that I've had in my stash for a while.  Actually, that yarn might have come from Niki when she handed down all of her worsted weight stash to me!

And of course, I used my beloved safety eyes.  The pattern calls for the kind of safety eyes that have irises around the pupils, and the pattern author even used the appropriate pink-irised eyes to match the animated version of Skye, but they look a bit too albino to me, so I went with plain old black.

I love the cute little tail!

Hopefully Skye arrives in the mail today and breaks my streak of always sending late birthday gifts!

The hat and goggles are so much fun.  Nipiti wrote a really great pattern.  I highly recommend it!

Happy birthday to my favorite (ok, ONLY) niece in the entire world! Your Auntie Ernie loves you so much and wishes she could be there to celebrate with you.  Enjoy the rest of your visit with Grandma JoJo!

Ikey's Narwhal Hat

When my good friend, Emma, saw Kieran's shark hat (and read about me worrying that the fin would look too much like a horn or tusk), she had a brainstorm: what if we used the shark hat pattern and modified it to make a narwhal hat for her son, Ike?  A bit of hooking resulted in this hilarious hat (modeled on Sonia, of course):

Ikey, who is one of Sonia's best friends in the whole entire world, is seriously obsessed with narwhals.  Emma sent me this picture of Ikey posing in his hat.  He seemed to really love it when I gave it to him on Tuesday morning!

I had never even heard of a narwhal until after Sonia was born and I saw it in her Raffi's Baby Beluga book!  For the uninitiated, you can read about narwhals here, and here is a good picture that I found (FYI, the middle narwhal is a rare two-tusked type):

I lined the hat with black fleece to keep Ikey's head warm during the late part of this never-ending winter.  Emma and I debated about whether or not to include the teeth on the narwhal hat....  I did some research, and narwhals only have two teeth!  The narwhal's tusk is one of these teeth (an elongated upper left canine, to be precise), and the other tooth is buried in its jaw and not used for feeding.  The buried tooth must be some sort of holdover from an earlier evolution of the narwhal.  But what fun would that hat be without the teeth?  So we decided that the teeth needed to be added for maximum fun and enjoyment.  Another interesting fact: only male narwhals have a tusk; females' 2 teeth stay safely buried inside.

The tusk placement presented something of a problem....  Since it is a tooth, the tusk protrudes just above the mouth on a real narwhal.  But, on the narwhal hat, when I put the tusk where it really should go (between and just below the eyes), it looked like a nose.  So, I sewed it on a bit higher-- still pointing forward, but not in danger of looking like the carrot nose on a snowman.  The narwhal is sometimes called the "unicorn of the sea", but I didn't want the tusk to be so high that the hat turned into a ferocious unicorn!  Speaking of which, how hilarious is this picture that someone created?

Well, happy narwhaling, Ike-a-buddy!  You are a very fun kid to crochet for.

The replacement snappy pencil pouch

Once upon a time, a great tragedy befell the original snappy pencil pouch that I made for Brad.  The story goes like this:

Brad loved his pouch and carried it everywhere he went at the high school where he teaches.  Occasionally, when he's out and about on campus, there is an inevitable call of nature.  I am informed that men's bathrooms don't have handy purse hooks or shelves by the urinals, so Brad was attempting to take care of business while pinning the pouch between his chin and chest when disaster struck.  The pouch did NOT make it through intact after an emergency session in the washing machine (apparently the measuring tape segments inside yearned to be free), so Brad sheepishly called me and humbly requested a replacement.

Thank goodness I wrote down the measurements I used when I altered the fabulous Sew Can She tutorial for a Snappy Coin Pouch, so recreating it was no problem.  I used some navy duck cloth for the outside, and added an important design element (that was actually called for in the original tutorial, but unfortunately omitted from the original pencil pouch) -- a swivel snap clip.  Said clip was actually recovered from an old dog tie-up that Corey had fashioned before we figured out that tying Connie up made her crazy.  Now, it can be used to secure the pouch to Brad's pocket or belt loop when his hands are otherwise occupied.

For the inside, I used some Star Wars fabric that features technical specs of various vehicles from the movies.  I picked up the fabric from the remnant bin, of course.

Brad was very pleased with the addition of the swivel clip, and has also requested a shelf to be installed above the urinals just in case he's carrying something else without such a handy dandy clip.  Luckily, the high school administration agreed and the shelf is currently on order.  Cross your fingers and hope this pencil pouch stays out of other tragic situations!

Guest post from our little brother, Jordan -- Memoirs of a Gigolo: A-dog's Afghan

Alternate Title: The Gigolo Strikes Back

I just completed another afghan for a lifelong buddy. This one was for the one and only A-dog. He was my roommate at UC Santa Barbara in the freshman dorms. We didn't really get along much that year as he was always studying physics and I was always partying. Our friendship really blossomed during the sophomore year when we didn't live together- we apparently make great friends but horrible roomies. Here he is enjoying a cuppa on a sunny Seattle morning:

And here he is after a successful farmer's market extravaganza- never mind the Drano.

He was the best man at my wedding, and the decision was a very easy one. A-dizzle fo' shizzle. I cannot adequately describe how cool this dude is, but I can point you in the direction of the A-fro he is wont to sport. I recently spent a month on my motorcycle touring the southwest with a full five days visiting the Dizzle's house cooking gourmet food and thinking deep thoughts while hackey-sacking. I don't have many pics of the two of us together- we simply aren't the sort to take a bunch of duck-faced selfies- but here is one from Santa Barbara:

For this afghan, I converted a granny square into a granny rectangle and just kept adding row upon row. I used four Caron Pounders of white and three different blues of increasing shade. I started off with a single row of each, then double rows, triple rows, and finally quadruple rows in order to create a pond ripple effect. As you can see from the zoomed-out shot, my corners began to outstretch the sides and the afghan is a little distorted. I think this is due to using a ch-3 for the corners instead of a ch-2. Or possibly because any pattern will reveal its weaknesses in a real world application when you take it to undue proportions:

When I was nearing the end of the triple-row iteration I began to be concerned about how much yarn was left. I weighed the remainder of each skein but needed a way to describe how much yarn was used per unit crochet. This led me to spend an intense caffeine-fueled morning deriving an algebraic expression to predict my yarn usage. I ended up with:

y = 64(nx) + 4[(X1-1) + (X2-1) + ... + (Xn-1)]

where x describes the row numbers of that particular color and y is the number of "stitches" where 1 stitch equals 3 double crochets. This counts the initial white row as row zero and requires a factor of +32 for the white yarn calculations.

Using this equation it was possible to determine the values of grams of yarn per stitch. I then calculated the number of stitches required to complete the afghan: the crunched numbers revealed that I had sufficient quantities of each color to complete the pattern, but just barely when it came to the dark blue, which makes sense because it uses more yarn for each pattern repetition than the other three.

Once I was done with all this BS I realized that MS Excel could aid me in these calculations with about 10% the effort. I used it to double-check my results and the equation held true.

I'm really digging this afghan. Part of me wishes I didn't tell the Dizzle that I was crocheting him an afghan, because then I could simply keep it for myself. I enjoyed many hours of winter warmth with this sucker draped upon my lap as I added row upon row. Here is the concise list of full albums listened to during the crochet process:

Arcade Fire- The Suburbs (I really should point out that A-dog sent me this album as well as Reflector right before I commenced the project. I don't mean he drop-boxed me some mp3s, I mean he really sent the physical albums purchased from a real store. Home-Dizzle rocks the house again)
The Avett Brothers- The Second Gleam
Beck- Mellow Gold
King Crimson- Starless and Bible Black
Live- Throwing Copper
Jim Croce- Greatest Hits Volume II
My Morning Jacket- It Sill Works
Radiohead- The Bends
Arcade Fire- The Suburbs
Russian Circles- Station
Yes- Close to the Edge
The String Cheese Incident- Born on the Wrong Planet
Phish- Rift
Ween- The Mollusk
The White Stripes- Get Behind Me Satan
King Crimson- Larke's Tongues in Aspic
The Mars Volta- Deloused in the Comatorium
The Builders and the Butchers- Self Titled
The Builders and the Butchers- Salvation is a Deep Dark Well
Arcade Fire- The Suburbs
Blind Melon- Self Titled
Gomez- Bring It On
Ween- White Pepper
Yes- Drama
Pink Floyd- Animals

A-dog and I discovered the band Yes together, and spent many priceless college-age nights tripping out on The Yes Album, Close To The Edge, Fragile, Going For The One, and Drama. He wrote a college paper on the Drama album and its meanings. Deep stuff. I remember a Hunter S. Thompsonesque road trip to Sedona, AZ that was spent listening to Yes albums in my beat up Civic hatchback. Good times.

If any single ladies in Orange County (Costa Mesa, specifically) are reading this, you really need to track this dude down and attempt to date him. You'll never meet a more cool, competent, and capable cat. He's the CSO of a profitable optics company that makes laser prisms for all sorts of top-secret contracts, and is a gourmet cook to boot. By gourmet I mean that he uses an all-copper bowl to beat egg whites. Try it and see. A-dog meditates, performs Tai-Chi, and loves a succulent dry-aged steak as much as the next king. Oh, and he keeps his bachelor abode spic-and-span. I can't wait until he flies out to TX this summer to visit me for some good homie chillin' times.

Oh, right, this is a blog about craft projects. Sorry for all the A-reminiscensces. Here's another pic of the afghan to distract you from my best homie ever, the hellarighteousdudeskillet known to most as the A-dog.

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A note from Erin -- I am totally flying to Texas and stealing this afghan before Jordan has a chance to give it to A-dog. The colors are fantastic, and this is THE coolest use of a granny square-ish pattern!  I'm not experienced enough with granny squares to know why the corners are a bit pulled out.  I don't think blocking is the answer because that wouldn't really hold up with an afghan.  Who cares, though?  This afghan is still ridiculously awesome.  The math Jordan used to calculate the amount of yarn he'd need absolutely kills me.  He is a closet genius.  I can't wait to see his next project!