Saturday, March 14, 2009

L, M, and some new reading material

NatCroMo is moving along and I am still keeping up with the daily inspiration items.

Thursday was "L is for Leaves". I decided to re-introduce the green yarn I used the first day because the colorway was called "Leaf". I was looking through a pattern book for a crochet sampler afghan, and found a pattern stitch called "Palm Leaves", so I thought that would be perfect. So, I just crocheted a small section of this pattern.

Friday was "M is for Mold". Wow, this one really stumped me. All I could think of was to do something in greens/browns/blacks and give it some texture. As I looked through my bag of scrap yarns, I found a little ball of brown yarn that was leftover from some socks I knit for my Dad. It was Wool-Ease in various shades of brown. I hope this doesn't mean Dad's socks look moldy to me! It was kind of funny, because I was actually looking for some dark green yarn that I had knit his gloves with, because I think of mold as being green. Note to self: I need to knit or crochet something for my Dad that doesn't make me think of mold. :-)

Anyway... when I went to add in the brown yarn to my project, the green yarn from Thursday was hanging there, so I decided to switch to a bigger crochet hook and use both yarns together. I love the look of this, especially when they are contrasting yarns. So, I switched to a K hook and decided to use random popcorn stitches to create texture.

Here's how L and M turned out:
03.13.09 001

I went to Barnes & Noble last night because I wanted to see if they had the new Piecework magazine which I had read about in an e-mail advertisement - and they did!! The March/April 2009 issue features "Textiles for Historical Reenactment". My husband is a Civil War re-enactor and there is also an article in this issue called "Knit Civil War Socks". The articles look very interesting, although I don't know if I'll want to actually knit him authentic socks because they used a really tiny gauge on tiny needles and long socks in solid grey 100% wool at tiny gauge just doesn't sound really appealing to knit. But, I'm still looking forward to reading the articles!!

As I was walking into Barnes & Noble, another book caught my eye: "The Knitting Directory". This book has a lot of information in it and really good knitting diagrams for picking up stitches, cabling, etc. It's also spiral bound so it lays flat - I mean shouldn't all craft books be spiral bound?!?!?!? :-) It also contains a really nice stitch library with a lot of different basic, cable, and lace stitch patterns that I want to try. It seems like a really nice book for the bargain price of $9.98:
03.13.09 002

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