Keep Them Balls a Rollin'

I finally finished rolling my one pounder into a ball.  That was painful.  It is so large it was hard to hold onto, and the yarn never pulled off the skein smoothly.  I dread that I have two more to roll.   The Pinpoint Blanket calls for three one pounders, eek. 

I'm going to just happily make squares till I run out then I'll deal with it.  In desperation I asked my husband if he'd be willing to hold the skein while I roll on the next one.  Such a look of horror.

Rolling yarn into balls  is normally fun for me and relaxing, but I'm looking now at the other large skeins I've bought in a bit of a large skein craze/phase I went through, that I'm now totally cured of.

I don't think pictures do justice to the size of the thing.  I suppose it will roll off my lap and take out the refrigerator, in a tragic accident.

Pinpoint Crochet Blanket Square One

While waiting for dinner I made my first square in the Pinpoint Crochet blanket.  I love it so much.

Normally I wouldn't care for the color gray, in crochet, but the One Pound Caron Soft Gray Mix with my sweet little pastel centers is perfect for my gray couch.   The yarn is nice to work with, and very snuggly.

I was able to practice my newly acquired skill of treble crochet on round 3, and it came easily to me, I was so pleased.

You see I messed up that last corner, I didn't see it till I'd snipped off the thread.  I'm pretty certain I can hide that mistake when I join the squares together.

I would have more squares done this evening (I wanted to make one with each of the center colors), but the pound skein, like all skeins, needs to be rolled into a nice ball before you start to crochet, in my opinion.   I made the first square directly from the skein as it comes, and you just have to tug and tug at the skein to get more yarn.   Grr. 

I spent quite a bit of time this evening rolling the bad boy, but there's lots more left to roll.

There are two more sets of One Pounder Yarns with potential sweet pastel yarn centers on my shelves, waiting to make two more of these blankets,  (one a soft green, one a mixed pink) so I'd better scoot.  Winter is coming.

Here's what it should look like, except without those stark colors (shudder):

Michael's has this pattern on a little paper right by the One Pound Yarns, and other patterns right by other yarns, so it is fun to look to see if there is anything new.   And you can grab the pattern and all the yarn you need on the spot.  Very nice.

I watched, and did row by row on this square, the Crochet Crowd video tutorial, a first for me.

https://youtu.be/fr92AhUiwaM

There's a left handed one too.

In the Garden, With the New Camera

I've had a new camera for a few months, and I have finally been successful in taking a few pictures with it.  The thing has thwarted my efforts to even look through a viewscreen, and die horribly if you think you're taking any pictures.   You should see the language in my little notebook as I've tried to figure it out.  Bad dog.

I wanted a pretty nice camera for closeups of flowers, cookery and crafts.  The camera has auto-settings for those things, but it doesn't want you to use them.   Let's not think about it anymore, and say, my what lovely closeups you have, CameraIdiot.

Aren't they all so beautiful?  I need to work on angle and composition, but these little plant portraits are what I had in mind.

Wish me luck.

Note: we'll be refreshing the wood mulch in this area in August so it will look nicer all around.

Pop! Yourself!

In case you admired my DOA FunkoPop, you can Pop Yourself:

https://funko.com/pages/pop-yourself

Storyboard That!

I found a comic creation tool recently called Storyboard That!  It gives you three panels and tons of options for characters, backgrounds, and more.   Even better, you can change the colors of background elements, and the clothing, hair and all coloring on the characters.  

https://www.storyboardthat.com/storyboard-creator

Click to enlarge!

They give more room than most for text.  The boxes are a little large for the panels, but I couldn't quite figure out how to adjust the speech balloons.

Marion and Robin are huge readers.

Crafty DOA: Crochet Upgrade from Dunce Level...Maybe

Ive figured out how to comfortably do triple crochet!  I did it to create a Willow Square from the book 200 Crochet Blocks for blankets, throws and afghans by Jan Easton.

The Patchwork Heart blog featured this particular square in a post earlier this year and I've been wanting to make it since.  So lovely!

I started my square out fine, so I thought.  By row three my square was curled over like a cap for a Chihuahua.  What the heck.  Tension too tight?  Pulled it all out.

Started again, and dang but it looked nothing like the picture.

 It dawned on me finally that the problem is the U.K. calls stitches different things.

  In this instance, a close squinty look at the picture in the book and the stitches section in the back, plus a page denoting the differences between US and U.K. Terms, bah its double crochet.  Too bad, the treble is fun and pretty.

I'll be starting once more, and hopefully I'll have a nice picture to post. (Incoming)

Update: redone with double crochet up to Round three, and it is perfect!  Yay me.

Round Four is incredibly challenging, with the most unusual, shall we say, mix of stitches I've ever seen.  I had to write it out line by line to "translate" both the stitch names and how the pattern needed to be read.  This block is marked Intermediate, not "just above dunce level", so it is no wonder I'm challenged.  I'm going to get it though, the Willow block shall BE MINE.

I'm using cotton yarn for this.  I thought as an exercise in learning to crochet better, using my cotton yarn would be a nice way to also use the many adorable little skeins I have hoarded.  I'm hoping to make the squares into a throw, eventually.  I picked one of my current ones out as a good size, and I plan to lay the squares out along the bottom of that throw to get width, then go up with more to get the height.  With 200 blocks in the book, I'm certain I'll have plenty.   I want each square all one color so that the pattern itself really stands out.


Blogger note:  you can't use the Blogger app for iPad anymore, you just get a message saying it doesn't work.  You can just log in from Blogger.com and type away, but on iPad, you can't add pictures from your camera roll, it wants a picture from the web. This would require a bunch of messing around, so I will just be going blah blah blah in pictureless mode till I go to my pc and work the easy picture magic from there.  What I'm saying is, don't peek till there are pics.


7/16/17

Rows 1-5

I'm up to row 6!   The fourth row is a bear.  There is a great YouTube tutorial on this square by Bella Coco.  There are actually 4 in the set. She shows the row then lets you pause and catch up.  She mentions row four as being particularly confusing sometimes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzsRXQrVBfE



The Patchwork Heart has a post giving help with round four in particular.  http://www.thepatchworkheart.co.uk/2015/10/willow-block-help.html

You can see on her page how beautiful these squares are, almost reminding me of stained glass.

Not So DOA After All

Apparently I've left a trail as DOA, so even if I don't write here, my work lives on:

From Pinterest

While searching librariandoa on my ipad (I don't bookmark anything) the above came up.  Whoa!  Printable Pictogram Puzzles for Adults!   I am clearly credited, but it's strange to have been aggregated.

It does make me want to do more Rebuses and Cryptograms, and I've been thinking of Crosswords again, not to mention Word Finds, which I personally like.  Mostly the part where I think up the words to go with the theme.

I Miss Twitter

I closed my Twitter account last month.  I had been ignoring the new Privacy warnings you'd see when you logged in, but finally looked at it.

Yow, they advise you they'll be selling your email, personal information and browser history to advertisers.  Now that's intrusive.

I killed off the account, and lo, this is the last bastion of Librarian DOA, created in 2008 for the Things on a Stick program.  Heady times, those!

I'm thinking I need to find a way to get more posts in, and liven things up here on DOA.  You know how it is, sometimes even when there are lots of ideas, nothings gets written here (absorbed by my ever present notebook).

In any case, I did like Twitter, as a fun, light sort of newsreel of events.  It was all gardens and authors and movies and tv and cooking in my Feed.  Life: The Good Parts Version (Princess Bride Reference).   So some days I think of creating a sneak account for something innocuous like DumboPie whose personal information and email leads nowhere, and whose browser history is a cipher.   Hehehe.