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.

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 post The Vault: Part 7 appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

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:

Sorry, Maig.

To be continued…

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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.

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…

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My next project involved color change, which I did incorrectly. However, the pictures are great! Falwyn’s little fox plus a textbook example of what happens when you delay color change by a loop.

To be continued…

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I made a tiny whale next and tried to get creative with the photos.

To be continued…

The post The Vault: Part 3 appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

I got on a kick of finger puppets, and made a tentacled alien, shown blurrily below, for a friend (also Buddha’s fashionable hat, which was the result when my friend challenged me to make a stadium). I tried to make a finger puppet from a pattern that used joined rounds, and ended up accidentally adding stitches until it was a Jabba the Hutt kind of shape, so I added a face and arms to get the second alien below.

To be continued…

The post The Vault: Part 2 appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

I began crocheting during a bout of insomnia, from the Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Needlework. My first attempt was a muddled mess. Finally I succeeded in a couple of rows of recognizable fabric.

One mistake: the yarn was not only fuzzy-textured, it was variegated and rather dark. Smooth, light colored, solid yarn is better to start with, for easier hook-work and for seeing what you’re dealing with.

I tried some taller stitches and had the typical trapezoid experience.

Finally, though, I succeeded in making Caron’s free heart. I am pretty sure it did not match the pattern, but it was a recognizable heart.

This went on Facebook with the caption “I did a thing!”

My next project was a pattern I’d actually tried the first night I crocheted, sitting on my bed in the wee hours of the morning, and mangled terribly. Not so this time! I made piles of goldfish.

After that I felt bold enough to experiment with different hooks and with stitch improvisation.

In late November I tried a pattern that used one-loop-only stitches, a butterfly, and by the beginning of December I had a perfect swatch of double crochet (plus some single crochet).

To be continued….

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