Now I'm warm again.
Every teacher needs a good sweater. So I made one. :) i made two front panels and a back panel, all rectangular. I connected the panels at the shoulders and up the sides, leaving armholes. I crocheted in the round for the armholes, and finished all the edges with front post ribbing.
Now I'm warm again.
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If you ever worry about the cleanliness of your CCC product... Look at what you may get elsewhere.1/25/2016 yall. YALL. The internets never cease to amaze me. I belong to (EDIT: used to belong to, until I left about 15 minutes ago) to a crochet group with over 500K members. And someone posted this. My stomach turned over that good crab gumbo my neighbor just brought me. I mean, here I sit in my Gain/Febreze-smelling controlled environment with protective sheathing for my yarn, I wash my hands whenever I start and stop an item, and most times I wash the item before delivery, so it reaches the recipient smelling like Tide and Downy and whatnot... While this person is crocheting with a MFn SKUNK ON THEIR LAP.
But that's not it... 412 likes. Whoooooo in the name of Elvis' girdle is liking the fact that her blanket is gonna smell like elephant pee and monkey az? I need Jesus to fix it. Today. The moral is, do know that Chrissy would never do this ish to you. Heck, my kids even get shooed away while I work... Unless they have to be my mannequin. And even then, they have on clean clothes. People like this- and the lady who knit from her vagina- give needlework a bad name. Yes you read that right. Vagina knitting, for 28 days. http://www.buzzfeed.com/catesevilla/theres-a-woman-who-knits-with-her-vagina-and-the-internet-is#.ul5OWkVr9 Enough gross. I have a sweater to finish. CROCRASTINATION (n, form of verb "crocrastinate") being in the state of knowing you have a project to crochet, telling someone you started it when you really didn't, saying you're going to start tomorrow for five days straight and have still not made a single chain.
Pray for me, y'all. My sister got me a new set of hooks for Christmas. They were of a brand I swore I'd never use again- they split my yarn plies, they snag, they don't flow easily through stitches, etc. You know how you make negative excuses and start believing them?
I sat down with some yarn I had bought on sale and got to work, inspired by a YouTube video. A couple days later, here I was. It feels like you're wearing a blanket- and the Lord knows we need that tonight in Portland. Never say never! Thank you sister. Size: one size Price: $120, more for materials if custom ordering A few weeks ago I was asked to make a cover-up similar to the one Angela Simmons wore (originally found online at Crave Boutique,) and I accepted the challenge. Just count some solid and open granny squares and triangles and join and block them. That simple, or nah? I'd err on the side of nah. After cockily counting and crocheting squares profusely, I put it on the mannequin and discovered it would fit. Me. I'm a size 16/18, a mannequin is clearly a 4. At least it fit somebody, right? I did what any good crocheter would: I took it apart. I frogged (unraveled) a row of each square, then reassembled. Miss Mannequin forgave me, and I tried a second go of fitting the dress onto her. Much to my chagrin, the space between the breasts puckered out. It woulda been fine- had God given us three. So I obeyed the design of Almighty and frogged the top three squares, adjusting even further. And then came the ends to be sewn in. The joining of squares was fast. I watched three full episodes of Orange Is The New Black, trying to sew in ends. Trigonometry tells us that that's three hours. I had my friend and faithful customer Cherrell come try it on. I had to make some adjustments on the fly... But I was able to turn my cockiness-turned-extra work into something beautiful. And beautiful she is! Hindsight is 20/20, they say... I'd probably use a thinner yarn next time like Caron Simply Soft. And I'd probably measure muuuuch more than I count. But I'm proud of the results. Have you ever gotten overly confident and wound up having to back-pedal and do something over? Stop lying! We're human. Share your cockiness story. Again, I figured it out... No pattern, not my original idea. Yea it's a screenshot. Deal. Angela Simmons is slayinggggg with this dress! And the designer thinks they're slick- all it is, is twelve granny squares (4 solid and 8 open) wth bikini- tie strings in back and around neck, and three open granny triangles. Ok, she is slick. Beautiful and simple to those with a keen eye for crochet. And guess who's been asked to duplicate this dress for an all-white party coming up? Me. And I'm gonna. And I will document each step. I will not write or sell this pattern, as I am not the originator. Sorry. But you can watch and listen and enjoy. When I hit my weight loss goal (and trust, honey, the butt is perking, the thighs are firming, and the beer belly is now a tater tot belly) I'm going to make one for myself. And you will deal, just like you're dealing with a ghetto screenshot on a professional website. Lol. Just prior to this entry, I posted a few of my favorites from my mother's collection of poems, written in the early to mid 90s.
I didn't get it as a kid. I had to listen to these poems again... and again... and again... and again... for what? Sheesh. What does this have to do with me, I used to ask myself as I'd roll my eyes and imagine I were at a house party or a church skating trip. I asked to do one but snuck to do the other. Anything to escape this droning on about love, relationships, and faith. Where's the remote? Another thing I didn't quite "get" was my parent's divorce. I was socially slow, just a tad, but I wasn't an idiot. My dad lacked the ambition, commitment, spirituality, and ethic my mom had, and his actions and inactions had caused the family to suffer. It was like rowing a two-person raft where one person held one of the oars hostage. I got that part. What I didn't get was how hurtful it is to leave and be left, to have promises broken, to be the only one trying to row a boat with an added man-sized weight. Though you know it needs to happen, and you may be the one pulling the plug by filing the papers - it's devastating. "You mourn what you never got," she said. I also failed to understand the ruins that this shockwave left in my life. I drank in secret. I took pills once. I experimented with hanging with people I probably shouldn't have. I fell in love - hard - had my heart broken, and fell for any boy who even looked my direction. In my downward spiral, I met a friend who also needed a shield. We became too romantically involved far too soon, and there were many times where I deliberately did things to push him away. I was regularly scrutinized by adults in my church and school communities. "Kids don't have trials, they ain't been through nothing" was the running sentiment of my elders. I wasn't talking with words - I was talking through risky behavior. For years, I passed it off as innocent teen experimentation. It wasn't until a reconciling discussion with my father some years ago, over Denny's breakfast, that I began to theorize this void. All this time, I had been searching for someone or something to soothe me, like a daddy's presence should. I never found it. I spent teenhood and some of adulthood "mourning what I never got." A couple times, I almost lost the best thing that ever happened to me - by expecting him to fill my father's empty shoes and being mad when he didn't. Now that I'm a full grown woman, I find myself identifying with each and every poem that my mother wrote in her short collection "Spoken from the Heart." I sat on the couch the other day, read them, and said "Amen, girl," at the end of each one. So profound. So uplifting. So identifying, especially after you grow up and go through some foolishness of your own - yet come out polished and shiny. It was after rereading that I have the courage to publicly talk about this - my parent's divorce - for the first time, bravely, without turning it into a parody. I can look back and understand why she left, why she cried sometimes, why we went to church twice as much during that era, why this shaped my life, and why I had to listen to those poems... again... and again... and again... We see the signs, but we don't follow them... because he has so much swag... because she got a booty... You'll live with them awhile and soon find out: Swagger ain't paid a bill, and rear endowment is just as genetic as pattern baldness. You better trust those instincts the Lord gave you!
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