Own Your Awesome!

Here are some of the crafty things I've been doing this past year.



I knitted these sweaters a while ago. Found the pattern I liked, which called for acrylic yarn. I don't really like acrylic sweaters, I find them a bit itchy. But I wasn't sure how well it would work to swap in cotton yarn, which has quite a different feel and stretchiness from acrylic. I was going back and forth trying to decide which yarn to get and ended up putting both in my shopping cart at the yarn website, seeing what sort of similar colors were available in the cotton and comparing costs and then realized that, with the acrylic yarn on sale and the cotton Handicrafter yarn being cheap anyway, I could get both sets of yarn for around $50. So I ordered both, figuring I'd make the acrylic one first and see how I liked it, and then do the cotton one and see how it came out. So now I have two almost-identical sweaters. (The acrylic one is on the left, the cotton one on the right.) I like the cotton one best and wear it most. The cotton yarn doesn't hold its shape quite as well (you can see that the collar is looser), and it's not quite as warm as the acrylic, but it's more comfortable.

After I finished the sweaters, I bought yarn to make a knit top and some scrubby dishcloths. It all sat in the closet for a while, as I switched to making bracelets for BTS movie/concert freebies, but lately decided to dig it out and work on them.



First, I made this top. It's a top-down knit, made on circular needles, so there are no seams! No sewing! I dislike sewing seams (and finishing in general -- it's not really difficult, it's just tedious, it doesn't flow by like basic knitting does), so I thought this would be easy, but the pattern presented its own issues. The yarn was a sort of knobby, textured strand that looks pretty but is a bit difficult to handle. It was hard to make the stitches even and harder to count rows, so I ended up tearing the whole thing apart an starting over several times. But finally it got done, and I was pretty pleased with the way it turned out. It's been too cold to wear it yet, but it will be nice when the weather gets better.



Most recently I made these scrubbies. The scrubby yarn was even more textured than the top, but the patterns were simple and quick and didn't require too much counting so they were pretty easy. I'd bought two skeins of scrubby yarn, one in a blue/green/purple mix and one white/green/orange. I'd downloaded some patterns when I bought the yarn, but I must have deleted them by mistake or hidden them somewhere because I couldn't find them when I finally went to use the yarn. So I hunted up some more patterns and ended up making these.

The bottom two are dishcloths. The one on the left is a striped pattern, alternating the two skeins of yarn. Then the one on the right is a corner-to-corner knit, using the blue yarn. The top right is a washcloth, knit with the white yarn. (The washcloth and dishcloth patterns are all 7-ish inch squares, the only difference is the dishcloths are garter stitch and the washcloth is stockinette with a garter stitch border. You could easily use either pattern for either kind of cloth, it's really sort of arbitrary which is which.) And the top left is a scrubby, which I made using up what was left of both skeins of yarn, so it's sort of awkwardly half and half. I could have made it striped so it would have come out looking neater but I didn't feel like alternating yarns and I figured, what the heck. I just used the white till I ran out, then finished it with the blue. If I end up using it (rather than just hanging it from a cabinet knob), it will just get stained and raggedy anyway. I kind of like it the way it is. The only thing that makes it a scrubby rather than a dishcloth is the hanger loop, I guess.

Those were fun but I whipped them all out in a couple of days, so they weren't very long-term projects.



Today, I finally made these earrings! I'd bought the kit way back in October? November? planning to make them for my SIL for Christmas. (Pretty sure she doesn't use Dreamwidth and won't see this, but if she does... Merry late Christmas!) I'd been making bracelets for BTS freebies and thought, Oh, I can make earrings, too, and sent for the kit, not taking into consideration that making earrings requires working with wires and I'd only been doing bracelets with stretch elastic, which is quite a different thing. So I got the kit, opened it up and read the first instruction, and said to myself, I don't know how to do this. Figured I'd look up tutorials on the bead website, but Christmas season got kind of busy and I never got around to it. Didn't get them done in time for Christmas, then didn't get them done in time to give them to her before they left for the winter, so at this point I guess they'll be birthday presents. Anyway, I finally decided to watch some tutorials and learn how to make these, and here they are! I think they turned out pretty well for my first attempt at wire beading. They're supposed to be like little Santa Clauses, which makes them Christmas-y, but I think they're abstract enough to use at other times of the year too.

Not sure what to do next. I've got some spare yarn if I can find a pattern to use it, and there are always more BTS bracelets to be made for the concert in August! And I have some cross-stitch kits I bought ages ago and never finished, I could dig them out and give them a go.