and it's over

the beautiful cool weather we were having has blown over. :(
I'm very sad about this. I was hoping to have another week or two this summer to work on the Christmas blanket for my daughter, but alas, it is not to be.

I was also hoping to make a few more water bottle sleeves for my craft sale this fall.
this humidity has been so miserable today that even sitting straight in front of a fan does not cut it.
this is why people invented air conditioners and we do a couple of window units, but we are not rich people and we will just not be putting them in the windows.

so until this humidity rolls out of here I just might be out of luck

butterfly

it's been a while, again.

another week has gone by and I have not blogged. typical of me, i guess. I've just had a frustrated couple of weeks and then I got really busy again.

I made another cabled bottle sleeve, I have yet to photograph, and I like it a lot. it's nice.

then I was looking at my crochet thread and feeling like a jerk for not working on lace like I told my self I was going to do. so I made some lace. then I bought some dye. and then I played with the dye and the lace together.

it was fun so I did it again

I have another piece on the blocking pins right now. it's a butterfly and really like how that turned out as well.

now I just hope that someone else will like them enough to want to have one or all of them.

what I've been doing with the cooler weather :)

Long Winded and Picture Heavy ~ just so you know

I've taken a little time and learned a couple of new "stitches". I have seen the crocodile stitch before and I've loved it, but it has never really made me think 'crocodile', it's more like dragon to my mind. so I learned how the basics of this stitch worked and I fiddled and once I felt comfortable with what I was doing... voila, dragon scale mug cover



once I had it finished I made another one and had them at my desk and I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye. it was upside down and looked like a lotus flower and so was born
the lotus flower mug cover.

I really like cables. some days more than others. I also love a cold drink in the summer. along with this comes the condensation and that is so annoying. I have been making water bottle sleeves for the last couple of years... but just for myself. I can't be the only one who has this problem. In fact I KNOW that I'm not. I used to work with a woman who would freeze her water bottles every night and then have ice cold water all day at work. her solution to the condensation was to put a tube sock on the water bottle. okay, good idea, but there must be something prettier than a sock.....

wouldn't you know it, there is something prettier than a tube sock.


next I figured I should make a present for my friend who is having a birthday in a couple of days. something quick to have it in the mail so she would get it in time for her day.


I decided to revisit the lotus. this time no buttons to close it, it is continuous rounds. I don't know if she will like it. I hope so, but I guess if she doesn't ever use it I'll never know. ;)


then I figured that I would love to do more of the sleeves... for the shop and for the craft sale this fall.
so I really want more than one or two different varieties. most water bottle sleeves and mug/cup covers tend to be so plain. I really wanted to make one last year that looked like a sweater. so I then thought why not do cables like all terrific sweaters have. My favorite sweater that I wore until it had holes that I could no longer patch up had those wonderful classic cables.
after learning how to do cables in tunisian crochet, I had wished that I had waited a day or two to send Jen her present. I would have made something more like this






well, there's always Christmas and maybe by then I'll be good enough at this to make mittens

thank goodness it's below 70 degrees

I can not begin to express my happiness! the temperature has dropped over the last couple of days. it is now cool enough and the humidity is low enough for me to work with yarn and threads again.

I really should get back to work on my daughter's Christmas blanket. I have barely started the tree trunk on it so I have a LOT of work to do on it if it is going to be done for Christmas....

but I also have a possible craft sale in a couple of months and I haven't got much of an inventory for it. I have a couple of things I have been working on since yesterday and I have yet another idea to figure out before then, but at least the weather has cooled off enough for me to do something, one of which was inspired by the stinky heat and humidity.

In the summer I reuse water bottles or old pop bottles, etc. and I freeze water in them so I will have cold water to drink through out the day. but the humidity condenses on the ice bottles and soon I have a lake sitting on my desk.
so I have made a few bottle sleeves in the past that I use a lot and they help not only with the condensation issue, but also with prolonging the life of the ice.
so I am making some nicer ones of those. I will not be waiting for the sale to list them.
look for them in my etsy soon

aweful weather means no making anything

UGH
we are experiencing record heat after a record spring of cold weather. it seems the very moment the kids finished their last day of school this year, the Summer weather hit with a vengeance.

Yesterday it was supposed to be 94 degrees and instead it went to 101 (although the local record is recorded at 99)
the weather forecast has been changed 5 times in the last two days. we were supposed to have thunderstorms but that didn't happen. we were supposed to have them today as well, but the forecast for today is now changed from 96 with occasional thunderstorms to 100 humid and hazy.
I'm alright to not have thunderstorms when it gets this hot because that just means Tornadoes are favorable. I am terrified of tornadoes

so blah blah blah weather... but this all means that while it is this sticky and gross I am stuck not getting to make anything.
I was working on finishing up a baby sneaker yesterday and I couldn't even finish 3 minutes. it is just tiny, did not cover my whole body and just having the yarn around my fingers was making me horribly uncomfortable.

I really hope this weather calms down a lot, soon, or I'm going to go really stir crazy

working on some projects for a friend...

since facebook pictures are compressed and shrunk, it can be a little hard to see details and so I have pictures of the scarves here so you can click on them and see some greater detail :)





and the green shoe. I still have to make the second for the completed pair but it is on it's way, after I'm done with the scarves