First I thought I could make a crochet version, with perle cotton in the appropriate colors, but it was obvious early on that it wasn’t going to have the effect I wanted and I only half-finished it. For my second attempt I turned to needle-felting, buying 100% non-superwash wool yarn for the body color, and got along well until the end, when it was pointed out by my husband that the proportions were off enough that adding the red arms/ears/fins was not going to go well. For the third attempt I bought 100% wool flat felt and rolled up a strip of it to form the core, so I would have more control over the proportions, and that time it all went swimmingly!

(So it’s a little lopsy-faced. I’m okay with that.)

Note: This robot is not one of Mozilla’s trademarks, but the icon file is subject to the Mozilla Public License.

The post Third time’s the charm appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

When I was a kid we got weeples as fundraising incentive prizes: small puffballs with eyes, feet, antennae, ribbons with messages on them, and sometimes other accessories. When I remembered those, I knew I’d found the perfect achievement badge.

So I made them!

…but how do you make your own weeples?

Puffballs and eyes are obvious, and I had learned sometime prior that artificial flower stamens were commonly used for antennae. The rest needed some research and development.

This got to be a very long post. More details than you likely require follow, behind a cut.

Feet and Proportions

The feet of commercial weeples are stickers, so I thought sticker felt would be the best material for mine. Hand-cutting for the quantity of feet I needed was not going to happen, though, so enter a big fancy paper punch: Fiskars In Bloom Squeeze Punch (Extra Large). The plastic handles are not equal to the task of punching out sticker felt, but if you dismantle it you can use the actual punch, which is metal, as a die. Just add a hammer and something underneath you can smack an irregular metal object into.

Each flower makes two pairs of feet. Pick the worst petal and cut it out, then cut the remainder in half.

The punch seems to be getting dull with use, though it is still usable; on some of the colors of felt the cut is very shaggy. I tried sharpening it by punching aluminum foil, following a recommendation I found online, and it didn’t seem to make a difference. It was heavy duty aluminum foil, and I may try again with regular, but I don’t have high hopes. As of this writing I’ve punched enough feet for over 120 weeples, however, so I won’t be too upset if I have to replace the punch eventually.

My five colors of sticker felt are each less than half used, as well. They are stiff sticker felt – I tried the softer kind and it didn’t cut cleanly, just stretched, partially cut, and gummed up the punch. Pipe cleaners are great for cleaning out punches, incidentally.

The feet seemed too small for a 1.5″ pom pom, so I switched my operation to 1″ pom poms. The 1″-across measurement is a fantasy, but they look proportional and still accommodate the two smallest sizes of googly eyes available. I bought the googly eyes and sticker felt at my brick and mortar Jo-Ann Fabrics, the flower stamens on Amazon, and the pom poms on CreateForLess.com. I found a recommendation online for Aleene’s Fast Grab Tacky Glue, specifically for gluing pom poms, and it has worked well. I haven’t done a comparison with other adhesives, but after holding the join in place for a little while I haven’t had any problems with pieces tipping or sliding.

Ribbons and Assembly

I had found multiple blog posts online that talked about using printable iron-ons with ribbon, though all the printable iron-ons I found specified they were only compatible with cotton fabric. I tried anyway, and it did not work for me at all – between throwing away ribbons that didn’t come out and the fussiness of the ones that did, it seemed like doing the work of 10 ribbons for every 1 that came out.

Next I looked into custom-printed ribbon, but the only source for 3/8″ ribbon (since no one printed on 1/4″) offered only one font and cost $15 per roll. I would need a new roll for each badge, bringing the total to $150 (plus shipping). Nope.

Instead, I got printable fabric, specifically June Tailor Sew-In Colorfast Fabric Sheets. After doing the colorfast treatment, I blotted on dilute white glue with a foam brush to keep the fabric from fraying when I cut it into ribbons. I didn’t measure my glue and water, but the mixture was definitely white, while also less opaque than skim milk.

I let the fabric dry flat, rotary-cut it into strips between 1/4″ and 3/8″ wide (closer to the latter), and then cut each end off at an angle and cut between each set of words, roughly halfway, at an angle. The fabric was flexible but solid, seeming in no danger of fraying; it may have been safe even without glue, but I wanted these to be very handling-proof.

Incidentally, to lay out my printing I used Scribus, creating a landscape-oriented letter-sized page split into 4 columns with no side margins. Each column was 2.75″ wide, and I centered the text within them. That created a de facto margin against the short sides of the paper, which was also the tail of the ribbon that hides under the weeple body or trails off after the message. If you wanted longer messages I’d recommend laying out your text so you can have the text close to the tail of the ribbon, keeping the total length near 3″.

At this point I had the materials for your basic weeple. Assembly is shown above: glue ribbon to feet and eyes to pom pom; next fold, trim, and glue antennae to pom pom; finally glue pom pom to feet. I found that order made it easier to get the eyes and antennae positioned how I wanted them. Mass-production makes this easier by building in time for the glue to dry after each step!

Accessories

For the first six badges, basic weeples were great. For the last four, I wanted to do something even more special. Accessories? My searches for tiny hats came up dry and I couldn’t figure out a way to make them, especially not in mass quantities.

My sister visited a sort of craft thrift store and found small craft wings, and in the ensuing text conversation I typoed that as “wigs” – two ideas right there!

After some looking online I had a few other ideas: earphones (paper, but how to cut?), sunglasses (paper, find a punch?), and clown hat (paper cone with tiny pom pom on top). I thought I’d do wizard hats (cone of appropriate paper), but that seemed likely to be finicky, and meanwhile I found some variegated pom poms that would be special and much less work. I settled on the remaining “special” weeple having a crown, which I figured could be a flat paper punch out of sparkly paper.

And indeed, I punched a bunch of crowns out of sparkly gold paper. Nothing to say about that.

The wings turned out to be the hard accessory. The purchased wings were too big, so I thought I could punch some. I stiffened felt with a dilute glue bath (as for the ribbons, but more soaked), and then a second time because after the first time it wasn’t stiff enough to get into the butterfly paper punch. I got some partial cuts out of the punch and thought perhaps it needed to be turned into a die to use with a hammer, like the flower punch. Wrong answer! That made it worse; part of the felt would just stretch and “smear,” and it become very difficult to remove from the punch.

Ultimately I traced the best of the first round of butterflies and hand-cut the rest. Since I didn’t need nearly as many as feet, that was fine, but if I hadn’t already destroyed the paper punch I’d have switched to construction paper for the wings.

The wigs were variegated embroidery floss held together by a sewn “part.” I unrolled two skeins of different colorways, put them together and doubled them three times, for a total of sixteen strands. To make sewing feasible, I cut strips of light paper to put underneath, marking every 2 1/2 inches for my seams and using a short stitch. I cut the floss and paper together and only trimmed the wigs later if on the weeple they looked really uneven.

My paper was not as long as the embroidery floss so I had to add a second piece. To avoid sewing through two layers of paper, I lined up the markings at each strip’s end and pinned, then sewed the next seam over before trimming one side of the paper and sewing the skipped seam.

After the wig glue was thoroughly dry, I used a wet foam brush to try to “comb” the wigs, or at least encourage them to hang downward instead of sticking out.

Here’s the ultimate materials list:

• stiff sticker felt (not the flexible kind)
• big flower paper punch, dismantled, plus hammer
• scissors (I used my paper scissors for everything)
• printable colorfast fabric
• page layout program, inkjet printer
• white glue
• rotary cutter and mat
• 1-inch pom poms
• glue-on googly eyes in the two smallest available sizes
• artificial flower stamens
• Aleene’s Fast Grab Tacky Glue

And for accessories:

• wings: butterfly paper punch, construction paper or cardstock to punch, or felt to trace on and cut by hand
• wigs: variegated embroidery floss, lightweight paper, sewing machine and thread
• crowns: crown paper punch, sparkly cardstock

This was an adventure, to say the least, in both R&D and production. I have a dozen each of the first 3 prize weeples and 5 each of the remaining 7, plus one designated “prototype” of each so I can remember the color combinations and eye size/spacing. Now to see whether they’re as motivating as I hope they will be!

The post Weeples!!! appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

Clearly before the protective strips of parchment were removed. Those bottles contain red and yellow icing for people to add to their slices.

The hubs did at least as much work on this as I did, I should say. I started with a Food Network cheeseburger cake “recipe”, though I couldn’t find a 2.5-quart bowl, only a 2-quart bowl, and we decided to make only the burger patty chocolate.

A couple of weeks ahead I did a dry run. I thought I would make a finished, decorated product, but I ended up only baking the cake. I used half a box of chocolate cake mix (1 layer) and a full box of vanilla cake mix (3 layers, which seemed annoyingly excessive at first but turned out to be the right amount).

I took photos with my phone for later reference so the next cake wouldn’t be so bottom-heavy – the top “bun” looked silly, like a little hat perched on top, and the bottom bun could lose up to half its thickness and still be fine. However – look! A burger!

At this point we also thought the bare cake for the bun looked nicer than the icing-covered version, though no icing meant no sesame seeds (rice krispies being the universal “hamburger cake sesame seeds” according to my research). That’s actually why we did the “condiments” – the lack of bun icing meant overall a low quantity of icing, and we thought it would be nice for people to be able to add more if they wanted.

The day of the wedding we worked on the cake for SIX HOURS. I did not expect this to be a six-hour cake, but we made a lot of icing and had to go out for more powdered sugar at one point.

Preparing and filling the pans: cut out circles of parchment paper on the regular pans, thorough vegetable shortening on the bowl (via paper towel). A lot more batter in the bowl this time around – two-thirds full. Note that the bowl will take a long time to bake and even the pans will take longer because of the full oven. The tomato slice will be quicker, but for everything else start with a 30 minute timer.

I leveled the chocolate layer on a plate, saving the crumbs so I could put icing around the outside and pat them on (a great idea from the Food Network version). Unfortunately I should have put parchment on the plate beforehand and I lost the middle of the layer when I flipped it onto the bottom bun. A lot of toothpicks and additional icing later and it was okay, but not stable – it kind of disintegrated on the way to the wedding. I was able to make it look all right but there is a reason there aren’t as many photos of the finished cake as there might be…

Flexible dough scraper with rounded edge: the perfect tool to get the top layer out of the bowl.

The hubs insisted on cheese, lettuce, and tomato, and fortunately we had a small-scale cake pan (in fact it was retrieved from the to-donate box, so good timing!). I baked a skinny cake layer and he soaked it in glaze-style icing (powdered sugar and milk, as opposed to the easy vanilla buttercream – plus cocoa powder as appropriate – of the rest). He colored all the icing, except the green which was commercial, and iced on the cheese and lettuce. It was a minor miracle when we added the tomato slice; suddenly it all looked right.

We’ll close with a failed experiment – frilly toothpicks. I cut strips of fruit roll-ups into fringe and rolled them around the ends of bamboo skewers. I corn-starched one side of each strip but probably should have done both… on the way to the wedding they just solidified into a wad of gummy at the end of the skewers.

The post Hamburger cake! appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

The idea: Lay some fleece out on a needle-felting brush, needle it until it can be transported without coming apart (5 minutes if you’re being careful, with flips), take it to the sink, soak it, rub it between your soapy hands for another 5 minutes (also with flips) and rinse – done.

For all of the smaller patches the fleece barely overhung the felting brush. My goal was thinner pieces of felt than the last time I made felt; those were too thick to expect to keep needles in. To that end I used thinner layers of fleece, which also meant they were somewhat irregular. I stuck some crewel yarn in several of them; in the photos it’s between layers but it can also be on top – just hold the ends down with your fingers while you needle-felt the middle until it’s stuck, and then needle-felt the ends until they’re stuck too. It takes a little more care than just fleece but it isn’t fussy. If you put it in between it may or may not show well.

To flip it helps to have a cat brush that you can get underneath the fleece through the felting brush bristles. I also tried to needle in the edges in particular so they wouldn’t get thin in the wet-felting step. You can see in the third picture below that the size has already decreased quite a bit.

I don’t have photos of the wet-felting step, but it’s straightforward: run warm water, soap up your hands (I tried glycerin hand soap and liquid dish soap and would recommend the dish soap), wet the fleece, and rub it between your hands – gently at first and then more vigorously when the patch shrinks enough to fit entirely between your hands. Flip and rotate it so you hit it from multiple angles. The patch will not be a regular square and I saw no way to influence the shape – it probably depends on what parts of the fleece patch were thicker to begin with.

The first time I tried to make a larger patch it was simply long – and not just that, long in what was already the long direction of the brush. I believe I did not make the fleece thick enough, but it was also quite difficult to wet felt because of how much larger than my hands it was. You can see in the photo below that it really didn’t come together at all.

The more successful larger patch overhung the felting brush some on all sides, for a total that was a bit smaller than the failed one. It had to be needled in sections: first the middle, then in thirds from end to end. The wet-felting was slower but the same idea. Unfortunately I ended up with some gaps in the finished felt (this happened to a much lesser extent with a couple of the smaller patches), so I needled some additional fleece over them and performed a second wet-felting.

You’ll see most of these patches again in upcoming projects. I’ve been crafting steadily; it’s mostly been on things that wouldn’t be interesting blog posts, but there are a couple more photogenic projects in the pipeline!

The post Fleecy Felty appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

The photo it represents actually came from this blog, from the post discussing the creation of the hat I’m wearing in it. Here it is for direct comparison.

We did not end up using this for the team page as originally intended; the idea sort of fizzled out. I wanted to show it off somewhere, though, and in case you’re curious, I have for you some material lists and process photos.

Visible components:

• Fabric
  • satin (sky, glasses)
  • fleece (white part of jacket)
  • home dec type (dark green trees, gray part of jacket)
  • netting (overlay for gravel)
  • cotton and/or cotton-poly (everything else)
• Sewing thread
• Bulky acrylic yarn (hat)
• Fabric paint (lips and teeth)
• Blanket binding (frame)

Invisible components:

• Flannel (to pad up my nose-cheek-chin region just a tad, though I think it ended up being irrelevant)
• Heavyweight nonwoven interfacing (face/head, line of trees on left, glasses, two full-size backings)
• Fusible web (glasses, mouth)
• Tacky glue (glasses)
• Fray-Check (glasses)

The first two photos are the back view of the piece that formed my head and neck, and a partially laid out background. I used the head piece to help align the background pieces.

Next, a shot I call The Invisible Bozo, and a taste of the oddness of cutting up three or four copies of your face to do a project.

The back, before and after I covered it with a second layer of interfacing and with calico.

Finally, a shot of the finished item lit from the right instead of the left. It really shows how much dimensionality the piece has.

This isn’t a project I would have done without someone telling me “hey, you should to do this,” but it was an interesting challenge. I don’t know what I’ll do with it now, but my rationale for backing and binding it was that if I was going to put as much time into something as I did into this (I didn’t keep track, but 10 hours give or take) then I was going to finish it properly.

The post A fibrous self-portrait appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

It went fine, but definitely not as planned. I didn’t realize my bamboo sushi mat was comically tiny, and as it happened my netting wasn’t much better and I didn’t have a spray bottle to sacrifice to the cause like I thought I did. After I finished the first one I decided to try to make another, and be more tidy about it – the first one grew as I layered, giving it a large messy perimeter, and the middle layers of wool show through the outer ones quite a lot.

Tutorial modifications: I wanted to decorate the lower side, so I laid netting over the bubble wrap before starting to layer fleece, but in retrospect I’m not sure that was necessary. The netting is definitely desirable for the rubbing step, but you can always move it if you flip the piece (which I did, at least the second one). My needle felting stash has both smoother and coarser wool, so I sandwiched two layers of coarser wool between two layers of smoother wool. It seemed like a great use for some beautiful variegated fleece I’d been hanging on to – three of the sides use that. I only decorated one side of the first piece, with contrasting fleece at different angles, but I put strands of crewel wool on both sides of the second piece. They may need a bit of needle felting to fully stay put. Fortunately this felt won’t see rough handling.

My whole sheaf was a lot larger than both the piece of netting and the bamboo mat, so while I did the rubbing with bubble wrap step (though I dipped it in soapy water rather than rubbing it on a bar of soap), after that I couldn’t make the original tutorial work for my setup. Instead, I laid the non-netted side of the wool against a piece of bubble wrap, laid both pieces of netting on top, rolled it up, and squeezed and turned it all along its length, with a hand motion similar to rolling up a sheet of gift wrap. I did make sure to rotate the felt 90 degrees occasionally and flip it at least once, and it worked! Here they are all nice and dry, after a touch of the iron while they were still wet. I know these pictures are somewhat small but you can click them into larger versions.

You can’t get the real effect, though, until you trim off the raggedy edges, so here’s that view:

I got a little bit of dust from the dark green wool when I cut the edges off. Hopefully they are actually stable. I am not sure I have the necessary patience for hand-felting. Of course, I can always whipstitch the edges once I cut them down into squares, after I decide how large my needlebook will be. I plan to give it a fancy cover as well, so you’ll see this again.

The post Flat felt appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

The shape I decided on was a barrel with a flap in the long direction, buttoned down near each end. The pattern is at the bottom of this post (behind the cut, if you’re on my main blog page); before that are my experiences with the felting process.

My pre-felting measurements:
Gauge: a bit over 11 stitches and a bit under 13 rows in 4″.
The rectangle is 10.75″ tall and just over 9″ wide.

I read this was a good but slow felting yarn, and decided to help it along by brushing it with a cat brush before starting the felting process. I don’t know whether it helped, but then I don’t have any comparison.

I started with two rounds of wash-wash-rinse in my giant washing machine, with two spiky plastic dryer balls for company and a little bit of soap. The machine was set on heavy soil, hot water, and the heavy duty cycle, and the pouch was in a mesh bag to keep in lint. Even after a run in the dryer, very little happened (the results are the first 3 pictures above). Afterward I did a round of hand-felting by shaking the pouch (without a mesh bag) with the dryer balls in a plastic canister, in two changes of water, each with a bit of dish soap and one also with baking soda. I read that hard water inhibits felting, and while I wouldn’t call ours hard, it’s far from soft. Another trip through the dryer, and still just about nothing (last picture above).

After a bit more research, I learned this “good for felting” yarn has a reputation online for being persnickety about felting. I went back to the washing machine, but more seriously. Same settings, with a round of wash-wash-rinse, but this time with two pairs of pants in addition to the dryer balls, a kettleful of nearly boiling water added to each wash, and a pretreatment of soaking the pouch in ice water before the first wash – the temperature change is supposed to help shock the fibers open. No mesh bag, either, because it didn’t seem to be shedding badly.

That is when the magic happened. So much smaller, so little stitch definition. I don’t know how much was the particular method I used last and how much was the fibers finally being ready to give up their original shape, but I can say I’ll start with this method next time. A shave (see notes on razors in an earlier post) and some buttons and it was ready for use!

Final measurements: 7″ seam to seam and 8.5″ end to end, since the ends are poofed out. Not quite 9″ around from opening to end of flap (what would be the height of the original rectangle); 2.5″ diameter. The rectangle lost almost 2″ in each direction.

Felted Pencil Bag Pattern

See Crochet Reference for abbreviations, my pattern conventions, and links to stitch instructions. See above for gauge. I used an H hook (5mm).

Body:
1. Fsc 20.
2. 2sc, ch 3/sk 3 sts, sc 12, ch 3/sk 3 sts, 2sc (6 ch, 16 sc).
3. 2sc, sc, sc 3 in ch sp, sc 12, sc 3 in ch sp, sc, 2sc (24).
4. 2sc, sc 22, 2sc (26).
5-33. Sc across (26 sc; 29 rows).
FO.

Ends:
1. Ch 2, sc 7 in 2nd ch from hk.
2. 2sc around (14).
3. *2sc, sc* around (21).
Provided your body rectangle is finished, keep your yarn on your hook and proceed to assembly.
[If you make these first, place a stitch marker and make a round of 28: *2sc, sc 2* around. Loosen your last loop and cut the yarn, but don’t pull the end through. This will ensure you have enough yarn to attach the pieces without having way too much.]

Assembly:
If you made the ends first, pull out the last round of one and place the loop at the end of the final round-3 stitch on your hook.
Attach the disks to the body however you desire, by sewing or slip stitching or single crocheting. I did it in a slightly nonstandard way, trusting that the felting process would seal up any gaps:
** *Pull up a loop in the next disk st, insert hk in last row of body, YO and pull through body + 2 lps on hk.*
Sl st in next row of body.
Repeat *…* twice. 3 sts of disk, 4 rows of body accounted for.**
Repeat **…** around the disk (7 times total). On the last stitch I made my sc in the disk stitch only (to leave a little gap for the opening), but that gap stayed at least as large as originally upon felting, so I wouldn’t do so again.
(Essentially what I did there was to sc the pieces together, but not attach the rectangle until the second YO of the sc. In lieu of making every third stitch an increase, as I would have to make a fourth round on the disk, I slip stitched into just the body. Those are the gaps I hoped would seal up in washing.)

Attach the second disk however you attached the first, but you’ll need to start at the body row where you finished with the first disk.

After felting, mark button locations and sew on buttons – include a good shank! I decided to make the side with the attaching round of sc the inside, because the line between rectangle and disk was cleaner on the other side.

The post First time wet-felting appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

It didn’t go so well. I started with green floral wire, probably about 28 gauge, maybe 26, which was stiff with its coating. Second round was 30 gauge gold wire. Both were with a size 1 steel hook (2.75mm). My tension was all over the place – with the gold wire especially, it was impossible to get a grip on it without bending it and risking kinks. Not that I didn’t get kinks regardless. After the fact it occurred to me that finger cots on two or three fingers of my left hand might be a help, but by then I was getting ready for bed.

I did feel like I was starting to get the hang of it, as uneven as that second round is, but by then I was kind of over the whole granny square idea and decided to make a chained chain. I used the same hook, and red wire that was unlabeled, but probably 28-30 gauge. That went better, especially because the unevenness of my loops is not as apparent as the uneven height of the double crochet stitches.

Speaking of kinks, as we were a while ago, I tried to reel the wire straight off the spool instead of letting it come off the end, coiled, because I read a hint somewhere that I’d get fewer kinks that way. I didn’t have much luck getting the gold wire to unreel like that, but the red wire was better behaved. I think it did result in fewer kinks, but not their complete elimination.

I thought about trying beaded wire crochet, but it was getting late and I didn’t have any ideas that appealed to me much. Instead, in honor of how birds-nest-y my wire crochet is (especially the granny), I made a wrapped wire bird’s nest.

Frigid rain all day yesterday. I do like winter, but not that aspect.

The post Wire crochet experiments appeared first on ReveDreams.com.

I thought I’d show you the steps so far. I started with a large piece of yellow fabric and some pieces of green that I cut out into fiddlehead shapes. I sewed the spirals on with a straight stitch down the middle of the strip of fabric and zigzagged the outer edge of the background.

Then it was time for paint. I wanted a darker green than the fiddleheads at the bottom, and for whatever reason was completely attached to a rosy pink at the top. I also wanted an irregular gradient, so I diluted fabric paint (green with a little black) in a fairly tall, narrow jar, rolled up the fabric, and dunked it in. I happened to have a rolled-up piece of light cardboard — originally the center of a roll of wrapping paper — that could hold the fabric tube upright during the dunking. My hope was that the fluid would wick up the fabric, but gravity would keep it most concentrated at the bottom. I also expected the white design on the yellow fabric to resist the paint.

And it did! There is the green, still wet, not as dark as I imagined but just fine as is. I left the fabric in the jar overnight, and it crawled much further up than I expected (especially given the amount of fluid left in the jar the next morning). I love how much further up it extends on the right, which was on the inside of the roll, than the left.

For the rosy pink I mixed pink with a little red and gold, and decided not to repeat the capillary action method, lest I get a muddy mess where the colors met. Instead, I mixed up less-dilute paint, scattered it across the top of the fabric, and used my hand (and water in a spray bottle) to distribute it to be unbroken across the top, with an irregular bottom margin. There was some drippage, which was perfect, although I did have to rescue one fiddlehead from a pink splotch with a judicious spray of the water bottle. Here’s a very sunny picture of the wet pink paint.

The next step will involve heat-setting and washing the fabric, but the paint has to set for 72 hours first. This project will see you again next week.

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I started working on fiddlehead-themed crochet last night, and I must say, my blogging partner picked a tricky challenge theme. With all sorts of spirals on my mind, my first attempt was a two-strand spiral beginning with single crochet into a magic ring (with strand A, let’s say) and then alternating between slip stitch into back loop only with strand B and single crochet with strand A into the front loops of the slip stitches. The single crochet gradually grew to half double and then double. The result, which looks more like a seashell than a fiddlehead, is the first picture below.

The second picture above is my second attempt, a strip of foundation sc (then fhdc, then fdc) that I then coiled up and sewed into a spiral. To me, this one evokes seashells even more than the previous one.

The commas below are my third attempt. Chain 2 and make 6 sc into the second chain from the hook. Increase around in back loops only, except the last (12th) stitch of this round was an extended sc that led into about a dozen foundation sc. Here and in the second coil I made sure *not* to pull the linking loop of the fsc out very far, so the strip would naturally curl toward the bases of the stitches.

The last picture is of a mess. I chained for a while, then I slip stitched into a chain a little ways from the hook, and alternated ch 2 and sl st into somewhere further around the ring for a while. When I was only a few chain-lengths away from the previous linkage to the starting chain I slip stitched into it again, and went back into the ch-2/sl st pattern. Ultimately I think this is best described as a coil of ch-2/sl st going counter-clockwise on top, and a coil of a periodically-secured starting chain going clockwise on the bottom. It was an experiment.

The challenge goes until the end of the month and this won’t be my last attempt, but I’m going to change media for my next effort.

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