The Vault: Part 7

My next project was the small apple ornament that appeared here early on and has been expanded into a whole fruit salad. I also free-handed a couple of additional finger puppets.

small creatures

After that, though, I got back to the embroidery floss amigurumi with the mighty & ferocious dragon. I really liked this project and the way the variegated floss looked with it.

dragon dragon

This dragon was given to a friend of a friend to be a cross-country road trip mascot. I may have to make another one.

At this point we have essentially caught up with ourselves. I hope you’ve enjoyed this walk down Memory Lane as much as I have. When next we meet it will be 2014 – happy New Year!

The Vault: Part 6

The next project also gets a post all its own. The mini turtle is an adorable pattern, and since my sister and I have both had turtles as pets, I made one to send her. For whatever reason I didn’t photograph that one (it was in yarn), but I made another in embroidery floss and got lots of pictures of it.

turtle turtles 'n' frogs turtle fell out

One summer in my mid-twenties, when I had two turtles, they had two goldfish that had been intended as food but left to grow to the size of my hand. I named them Hansel and Gretel, figuring the turtles were fattening them up. I returned from a trip out of town to a traumatized roommate and a filthy tank: “They ate Gretel!” Except they had only partially eaten Gretel; her head was still on the floor of the tank, one big eyeball looking up at anyone who came to investigate the state of affairs. That memory led to this:

turtle grin smug turtle

Sorry, Maig.

To be continued…

The Vault: Part 5

My fox experience led to playing around with color change, seeing what happens when you change color in some rotation. I had to play again to reconstruct what happened in the photo below, but it was fun to do.

old color experiments

This is all in single crochet, of course, the center of my crochet universe. The picture above is of a piece rather unhelpfully made partly in variegated yarn; I tried to give more visual information when I recreated it. Working from the bottom up in the picture below, starting and ending with two rounds of single-color stitching and with a round of single-color in between each of the following, is a single round of alternating loops of each of two colors, another single round but with the position of the colors swapped, paired rounds of each of those situations, and finally a single and then three rounds of three colors in rotation, one loop in each at a time. In the single round of three-color work I pulled loops in the order blue, yellow, red. In the second I pulled blue, red, yellow; there are three rounds instead of two because when I started round 2 I realized that I was pulling a loop of red through a red stitch-top, and likewise for the other colors, so at the end of that round I inserted an additional loop of blue and made a round where the colors did not match.

new color experiments

This work is somewhat less elastic than crochet usually is, but not terribly so (you do have to make sure not to pull your yarn tight, as with any color work). If you like the look of duplicate stitch embroidery on knitting, this is probably the easiest way to get it in crochet – it’s not an exact match, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible, and you don’t have to do any embroidering!

To be continued…