Scraps and computer problems!

*sigh* So the main reason why I haven't bothered to actually blog much so far this year, is because I haven't really done much interesting in the world of crafts. The only interesting projects I've been working on are either secrets or scraps. I've spent a whole lot of time trying to catch up on my Granny Bacon eternity scrap blanket...also known as solid rectangular granny square. It's actually become so big now that I can use it while sitting in my chair, and it is warmer than any other blankets we've got in the livingroom...not really surprising since it's about 60% wool scraps...

I almost managed to empty out the jar with scraps, but now I've started to fill it up again after roaming through my acrylic bags...there's so much icky scraps in those...

But the other, more complicated reason why I haven't bothered to blog to much lately is because I've been having computer problems...again. I swear, this laptop of mine have given me nothing but headache... I'm never buying a laptop from Dell ever again...or a computer with Windows 8 for that matter... It's been constantly a mess of freeze-ups and internet cut-outs, from the very start... I regret not calling up Dell sooner.
Two days ago, I decided to do back-ups of my important stuff because it started to stall again, and Bård figured that it was about time we rebooted Windows on it yet again. And good god that was a good thing to do! Wouldn't you know, yesterday when Bård got a call from the delivery guy that his new desktop was at the door, my laptop froze up completely and we weren't able to do shit with it. I were going to get Bård's old desktop when his new one arrived, so I've jumped from that shit to this shit. And this thing is shit because the monitor I'm using is crap and a half!

So, I spent a whole hour on the phone talking to a swedish guy at Dell, trying to fix this problem. He ended up sending me a new harddisk and new Windows disks that'll hopefully get here tomorrow at the earliest.

But Lizzy, I hear you say, this has only been the last couple of days, what about the entire month of january then? Welp! My danged laptop have had this problem where it stops pinging in certain programs...one of which has been Dropbox, which is the program I use to transfer the pictures taken with my phone to my computer so that I can blog them. This happened in early january, so getting the pictures off my phone have been too much of a hassle to be dealt with.

While I've been without a stable computer, I've frogged and restarted the "Fåvangkofte" jacket for my mother, but because of all this stress, I haven't been able to make much progress on it, sadly. But I'm getting there. Do not like to work this pattern with this yarn and colours though...

Scrappy New Year!

Woop! I have totally given up on blogging every day over here, I just don't have the motivation anymore, so please excuse the long breaks inbetween each blogpost.

Anyway! It is 2015 suddenly, not only that but it is my birthday as well! Nothing exciteing happening today though, I'm just gonna stay in, craft and enjoy my pizza.

I haven't really done much important crafting at all this year...or at all since I came back from visiting my parents over the holiday. I just couldn't get myself to focus on anything cause I was stressing too much with crafts before christmas, I couldn't find time to stop and breathe and do something for myself. So this past week I've done nothing but scraps.

I've spent DAYS working on my Granny Bacon eternity scrap blanket. Just look at all of the scraps I still need to work into it!

It's so much! I haven't touched the blanket since summer, and the scraps have just been builing up, so much that I've had to get a bigger container for it...henche the glass jar. So far, I've managed to work about 9 rounds into my blanket since I started just before new years eve.

The reason why it has taken so long, is because I'm russian joining them all together. That limits me to use scraps that's from 30cm (11,8") and up, when I've used scraps from 10cm (3,9") and up before. So I need to measure them all up and toss out the ones I can't use. All of the shorter ones, I've collected in a bag and I might use them for a scrap yarn bowl.

Trying to use every single bit of scraps. I hate tossing yarn away, no matter the lenght or quality. So I'm also using the longer scrap bits in a certain wool weight for a different scrap blanket. A normal granny square blanket.

I've got tons that I need to work up on this end to, it all just keeps piling up and makes my whole crafting nook like a mess. There's also very few bright colours on these...so far. Might be a very gloomy granny square blanket. There's loads of scraps to get from these for my Granny Bacon blanket as well, so they kinda flow into eachother.

AND EVEN AFTER ALL OF THIS!!! There's the bag of leftover yarn from the mystery advent scarf... I need to do a couple of sock pairs and so on from those though...but I need to sort them all out so I can use the smallest ones for these two blankets.

*sigh* I think I need to make 2015 the year of scrap and storage busting...

Slow works in progress!

And sorry for yet another quick break there... Attended Torucon in Trondheim this last weekend and it really tired me out on top of my "vacation" earlier. There haven't been much crafting either to be honest. I brought some WIP's with me to Trondheim so that I had something to do during the down times at the stand...which happened to be almost all the time we were there (I hardly sold anything, pretty dissapointing).

On saturday, I brought my Granny Bacon blanket. It has really grown now and has reached a size where each round feels like an eternity...which is crazy since I'm still at the very beginning. I did get 4 rounds done, so that was nice! Still not 100% happy with this new style on it though. It grows more evenly, yes, but it uses a lot more yarn for each stitch, and it really rules out a lot of my smallest scraps. It doesn't look too bad right now, but that's just because there's tons of bigger scraps (too big scraps if you ask me...what was I thinking?), after I hit the half way mark on the scrap ball, I'll run into many many small scraps that I'll just have to exclude for now. I'll have to figure out something else to do with those later.

On sunday, I brought the leggings I'm doing for my niece. I've made leggings for my oldest and my middle niece already, so of course I had to work up a pair for my youngest as well. But as it turned out, the ones I made for my middle niece didn't fit her, so they went straight to my youngest niece...which of course is fine, I'm happy that they're still useable, but I wish that I was told so that I could maybe have fixed it. Anyway, I was ready to start this pair for my youngest niece since her birthday is comming up real quick now. Luckily my mother stopped me just in time and told me about the previous pair I made. So I contacted my sister-in-law and got some measurements for a new pair for my middle niece instead. And here's the weird part. I made the last pair to fit size 7/8 year olds. My niece turned 4. I was hoping it would give her something to grow into. But it didn't fit her at all, even though she's not overweight or anything. To be bloody sure these will fit now, I'm working them probably way too big, but I went up one size, so they're going to fit kids 9/10 AND I'm working it in ribbing...and I hate working in ribbing for this long on 2,5mm needles. These will probably fit my oldest niece that actually is 9 years old.
Enough backstory... I brought these with me on sunday to work on them cause I need to hurry the fuck up. I started knitting, good mindless knitting... 2 knit, 2 purl and cable every 8 round, no biggie. When I get home and look at the pattern, I see that I've missed the fact that there's supposed to be decreasings. That just shows how tired I've been lately. So here I've been working for a whole day, doing 1/4 of a leg on these leggings...and I just have to frog it all again... That's a whole day wasted!
But I'm back on track now and it's tuesday! It's a really unmotivating project though...

On a more fun note again though, I just recieved yarn for a commissioned sweater that I'm gonna start as soon as these leggings are done with. My friend Linda whom commissioned a sweater for her boyfriend last year wanted one for herself, and we've been talking about yarn and patterns for quite some time now. I ordered the yarn before the weekend and I got it today! Fast shipping ya'll! Love that shait! This is all merino yarn from Drops! Soft and silky and oh so warm and cozy and I just wanna cuddle it all! Can't wait to get started!

With this yarn order though, I did order some yarn for myself. As you probably know, I've yet to make Lewis and Duncan in these amigurumi dolls, and the reason for my hiatus on that project, is because I'm still looking for a good burgundy for Lewis' coat. The yarn I've been using mostly for these dolls so far do have a burgundy colour, but the website I order that yarn from has mixed up the numbers on their website, so I've been putting off ordering from there lately until they've fixed it (which they did today actually), just to be sure that I would get the right colour. While ordering all this merino yarn though, I looked through all the other kinds of yarn Drops sells just in case I find something that catches my eye, which I did this time! Looking at their thin sock yarn "Fabel", I saw that they had a beautiful burgundy. It looked maybe a tad too red in the picture, but I've noticed that some colours on their website aren't 100% accurate, so I took a chance and ordered one skein. But, I'm not pleased with it's colour I'm afraid.
Once I pulled it out of the bag, I though it was just normal red. Comparing it to the fingerless mittens I made some time ago in the most perfect burgundy colour ever (couldn't use it for a amigurumi jacket cause it was too thick), it looks all kinds of wrong. Doesn't even lok burgundy, more like wine red. Of course, no picture makes it any justice either. I tried with flash (which is the picture underneath here) and it looks way more pink than it really is, and without flash, it looked more like a dark magenta colour. It's just not purple enough... The search continues! Now I'm just hoping for a yarn sale on Spark Kjøp or some kind of free shipping offer and I'll snatch up some skeins in what's hopefully a better burgundy!

Granny square scrap blanket?

Hello everybody! Thought I'd do a little update on the scrap blanket after my kinda grumpy and frustrating blogentry from yesterday.

As I did mention, I was tempted to just say "fuck it" and do the scrap blanket in granny square so that I could get it more or less evenly no matter what I did. The normal back and forth one did not go so well...at all. Actually, I haven't told you guys that I did try out two other stitches before going back to single crochet again. I did half double and slip stitch and also a combination of the two, but I did eventually decide against that because the edges looked too jagged for my taste.

Please, don't pay tpp much attention to my keyboard. It's not dirty, it's actually yarn dust from when I frogged the blanket in the first place.

So yeah, I scrapped that idea and went back to single crochet, which didn't go that well if you've read my previous blogentry. I don't know what caused it, might be just my horrible crochet "talent". I did pay a lot of attention to my tention and the stitches that time around though...

I ended up having to give granny square a try. More precisely, rectangular solid granny square. I found this one guy on Youtube that had a little tutorial up about it, and I decided to give it a try to see how it went. And after a few tries and one frogging, I think I've got a result that I'm pretty happy with.

I've yet to frog the previous attempt, so I ended up just winding up a new yarn cake and start with that one istead of going back to the very start. Lucky for me, there's longer scraps here, so I've got a good beginning. These are also long enough for russian joining, so I'm trying my best to keep knots and ends at bay. I did have to work with one scrap that I couldn't do the russian join with though, but since I'm doing solid granny square, it's easier to hide the ends than with normal granny square by just crocheting over them. I'm still not 100% sure, but I will most likely work up this whole yarn cake and see how it progresses and then make a decision.

Also, I decided to give it a nickname. It'll still be called eternity scrap blanket, cause that's what it is in reality, but I just can't decide on what to call this thing otherwise. Rectangular solid granny square scrap blanket is too much of a mouthfull, so just to cram another reference into everybody's faces, it's now called Granny Bacon! Cookie if you get the reference.

We'll see how it goes from here! I might have to toss out a bunch of the smallest scraps if they can't be worked into this one...which I'll be pretty sad about, and will set me back a little. But I'm already cutting out some of the biggest scraps that I added at the very beginning of this blanket, scraps that I can work into ugly scrap socks instead. Here's two examples of what I've taken out already, expecially the blue one. These are way too big for this blanket in my opinion and could easily work several rounds on a pair of socks instead.

Eternity scrap blanket: starting over again?

*sigh* I'm trying to not freak out and give up on everything at the moment.

The eternity scrap blanket feels like a total waste of time and yarn right now. After now have worked up three whole yarn cakes of the gigantic ball of scraps, I'm already noticing signs of the blanket curling inwards. I was just now placing the blanket on the floor to get some WIP pictures taken when I noticed that the ends had the same curving as it had before I started frogging it this last weekend.

At this point, I'm tempted to just frog it all again and just work it in granny square...which I said I woul not do because of the small scraps and ends would stick out everywhere (as I've mentioned at some earlier point, my smallest scraps measures 7-10cm (3-4 inches) and that makes them really too small but in my head too big to just being tossed out).

I've been thinking about working it as a solid granny square instead, which would hopefully make covering up ends more easily. So right now, I'm doing some Youtube research on how to do solid rectanular granny squares. Hopefully this will work and I'll come back with either good or bad news when/if I've worked this out.

Again, if you've got some tips for me on this stuff, please let me know. Right now, I'm starting to become really desperate.