4 months!

Hi friends,

4 months?  Oh, my!  I had no idea it has been that long since I've posted here.  I guess I should try to do better.

I've been doing a lot of crocheting.  I started a shawl and what I think will be more of a lap blanket.  I'm using size 20 crochet cotton thread, so they are a lot different than using yarn.  I get a lot of partially used balls of thread at Good Will, and I'm generally not too picky about the colors, so I wanted to make something that would use those and wouldn't matter if I ran out of a color.  So I found a motif pattern that's pretty easy to work up.  I've never worked with motifs before, so this was a new experience for me.  This particular pattern gets connected on the last round of the motif, and then there are smaller motifs for fill in between the larger ones.

The colored one will be the lap blanket.  The fill in motifs are black, which is very hard to work on at night or even a cloudy day, so I tend to add a row of large motifs before going back on a sunny day and working in the black.  You can see where the black has not yet been added.

The white one will be a shawl, but because all white thread is not identical (you know, like 50 shades of gray?, but white...), I will most likely dye this one when it is finished.

I'm thinking maybe dark blue.  Here's a close up of the motifs.

Something else I've discovered is that there is a great amount of disparity between brands of crochet thread.  Although all of these are size 10, they really are not all the same size.  But, I don't think it's going to matter on these projects... size is pretty flexible.

Another thing I did recently is make a trivet from wine corks.

I cut them in half & hot glued them together.  I wish I would have made it thinner, so the next one will be.  I'm cutting the corks into quarters this time.  Here's a picture where it doesn't blend into the background so much.

And, after about a month of not touching my stamps, I have done some stamping.  I was about 11 weeks behind in the alphabet challenge on SCS, and I'm now completely caught up.

I also had my classes this month, so I needed to make cards for those.  And sometimes I like to do the technique that is posted each week in a special tutorial.  This week was a faceted box.  I made one.

And thought maybe I would not make another.  But when I showed it to my class ladies, they wanted to make one, so that is on the agenda for next month.  I changed up the instructions a little on the size of paper to start with, because it didn't make sense to make it longer than necessary & then cut off the excess.  This also made scoring the long sides the same measurements on both sides.

Thanks so much for stopping by to visit my very neglected blog.  Have a great weekend.