Tuesday, November 12, 2013

A case of the blehs

Maybe it's the threat of impending winter or the exhaustion of the house (or lack thereof) drama, but I'm rocking a major case of the blehs.  The highlight of my day for the past week or so has been going to bed.

But since the craft fair is over (and I had the worst year ever!) I'll show you what I've been working on now that I can lay off the baby blankets (I still have 2 more orders for cupcakes and a big order for Christmas for someone).  First up...I'm back at the quilt.

I bought a few yards of Kona Cotton in the color "Bone" at a quilt shop back in May for the quilt.  I bought all they had but the shop owner assured me that matching it wouldn't be a big deal- Kona dye lots are really consistent.  So I bought the 2.5 yards they had at the shop and ordered the rest off etsy.  I didn't actually open the etsy package until the craft fair was over and I could return to the quilt without guilt.  That was when I realized....that the two different Kona Cottons I had were just that- different.  Really different.  Crap. I contemplated changing up the pattern and adding a colored border and then returning to the pattern so that it wouldn't be so obvious that we just went from off-white to taupe, but instead I kept searching for more Bone.  Found it at JoAnn, 40% off. I love to shop local/independent for fabric, but I'm cheap right now and I shopped independent and got the wrong color.  No sense paying full price twice. Washed and started cutting last night. As you can see, I had loads of help.

*By the way, if you're looking for 5 yards of Kona Cotton in a color that is not Bone but still very nice, let me know. I know where you can get some.

I have a bit of a destash project going on at the moment, and of course, have loads of help with that too.  She's been really needy lately.  

It's a shelter blanket and I'm using up a year's worth of partial balls and including 2 sweaters from the frog pond.  It's much bigger now but this was the best picture I had of it.  I love these shelter blankets- you get to clear up your stash and get a warm fuzzy feeling while you're at it.  Plus it saves me from deciding what to do about those 2 cardi's. 3 birds with 1 stone. The hardest part of these blankets is getting Madeline off them long enough to work on them. 

And lastly, I've got a little design that I'm working on.  The magic happens in the crown, which as you can see, isn't there yet.  It looks really neat on graph paper though.  The blue version is in Good For Ewe Sultry Steps, the green is in Chord- the pattern is definitely going to be written up for Chord-love that stitch definition.  I'm calling it the Main Squeeze hat as it was originally made for Tall/Dark & Handsome but due to gauge issues, is now going to be a trunk show sample.  He'll get his eventually- if I'm a really nice girlfriend it will be before we start snowboarding for the season.  It is a fun little knit though. 
So that's all for now.  Hopefully I'll have a couple finished projects to show off for my next post- and who knows- maybe a mortgage (but I think I'll have to sell a kidney to make it happen.  Banks hate small business owners.  Backbone of America my arse.)