this past week: budgeting and stripes

September 10, 2012 by 10 Comments

Hello everyone!

It’s relaxing to be blogging right now after such a stressful week!  Let me tell you, I’ve had the worst kind of personal drama, my first week at my internship, a horrendous mistake in budgeting, trying to cook, and school.  I’ll skip over the personal drama and just mention that my internship is at a community mental health center, where I get to co-counsel people and help lead groups, etc. (it’s a very interesting place to intern, for sure).  My budgeting mistake left me with $200 less than I thought I’d have this month, which means groceries are going to be hard to come by towards the end of the month.  That definitely means no yarn this month, either.  My cooking skills are slowly but surely improving, with the help of my chef boyfriend, which is good, and school is, well, school.

Amidst all of this stuff going on, I have had a little time to crochet.  The Granny Ripple #1 is slowly coming along:

 

And again, while I’ve been crocheting, I’ve been listening to audiobooks.   Nothing I haven’t mentioned before, either.  The Dragonriders of Pern is just as good the… whichever go-round I’m on now.  It’s definitely after third.  Also, my boyfriend and I have been watching an anime called “One Piece,” which is a really long but really good TV series that we are marathon-ing online.

So that’s all my news for today.  Hopefully I’ll have more granny stripe progress soon.  Thanks for stopping by!

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new project: granny stripe

September 4, 2012 by 6 Comments

I know I have quite a few projects to work on right now, but for most of them I am out of yarn.  The realization just hit me that my lack of yarn money is probably the main contributor to my lull in crafting recently (although I’m sure my apathy has played it’s part).  Since I do not have any money for yarn right now, I decided to make something with what I’ve got.  I realized that I have quite a stash of Caron Simply Soft (not my favorite yarn, but cheap):

The colors are a bit off, but you get the idea.  So I thought I’d try my hand at something I’ve not done before: a granny stripe blanket, particularly the one made famous by Lucy of Attic24.  I know the pattern is simple, but that’s OK with me because it looks so good!  Since some of these colors are basically scraps, however, I decided to change colors whenever I run out of the working one instead of changing them at the ends of the rows, thinking that it would produce a rag-rug type effect and produce a bigger blanket in the end.

I have run into two problems so far, though.  The first is that my foundation chain was so long that, while my blanket will definitely cover a double bed and maybe a queen, I might run out of yarn before I get there, even though that box is full of skeins.  The whole point of this was to not have to go buy more yarn, but I’ve already worked on the blanket enough that I don’t want to rip it out and start over.  The second problem is that some bands of color are significantly wider than others, and while I thought this would add charm, so far it just looks bleh:

In any case I plan to continue, because who knows, it might turn out great after all, and I might have enough yarn!  We’ll just have to see.  Honestly I don’t care that much, I’m just glad to be hooking again after that long hiatus.  If it doesn’t turn out good, maybe by that time I’ll have money to buy some yarn that I really want for something even more exciting.

As always, thanks for stopping by!  I’m headed off to work on it and watch a movie.  (I’m caught up on homework, hurray!)

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