Not these colours, but soon, there will be beautiful springtime colours. I love this Squiggly Squiggles pattern by Sarah London. I found her website a little while ago and I like all the happy, cheerful colours she uses. Her entire site is just filled jolly colours.
Right now my version of the Squiggly Squiggles looks like a fishing net…the squiggly parts with the coloured yarn gets work in after you build the grid part. I’ll keep you posted.
Tomorrow Donner needs to go to the vet. He’s got some kind of sniffling thing going on. They said all the cats at the shelter had “a cold” but his hasn’t cleared up yet and he’s been here for a month already. Luckily Oscar hasn’t caught it. However, getting Donner into the carrier is going to be a whole other story. He hasn’t been cooperative and gets really frightened. But we shall preserve tomorrow morning. We have it so easy with Oscar. He’s way more easy going about this stuff.
I was as surprised as Dion Phaneuf* this morning to find that I had actually nearly finished my rug. Finally! The Year of the Ox wasn’t kidding. Just one long year of putting one foot in front of the other and feeling like the field would never be tilled. I didn’t think I’d ever get anything completed. But today, I finished the rug! I spent just about the whole day yesterday ripping and rolling fabric – the most time consuming part of the project. Crocheting it was easy.
I thought I would have to block the whole heavy carpet by soaking it in the tub and then drying it off in between towels and putting something heavy on it so it would flatten out. But instead, I just ironed it. I turned the iron on to the highest setting, hit the steam button a lot and it flattened out into a perfectly flat circle. Yay! You can’t do that for every crochet project, unfortunately. I only ironed this instead of blocking it because the fabric was made of cotton (I’m sure there was some polyester in there, too) and is safe to iron out. I would not do that with wool (NO!) or mohair (NO!), but piles of torn fabric you’ve had in your closet for at least 4 years? It’s totally cool.
Would you like to see it in our front entrance? You can see it below…
*Hockey Talk – Dion Phaneuf was traded this morning to the Toronto Maple Leafs from Calgary. I didn’t see that coming.
[click to continue…]
After making the little gold and yellow mat for the cabinet in the dining room, I decided to make a round red rug for the front entrance. I decided to throw away the worn out mat I paid $1.99 at Army & Navy about 3 years ago. I know! $1.99 for a little rug you wipe your feet on. Amazing. It’s like shopping in the Wild West over at A&N. I think you can find penny candy there, too.
I’m freestyle crocheting this rug. I’ve been ripping up all the dark red fabric I have in my stash. I did it this afternoon during a perfect movie for making noisy ripping sounds – a surprisingly disappointing Public Enemies. Oof. Sadly the dialogue was so terrible and corny, the rrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiip of the fabric was a welcome relief. And the ending? P.U. – that was the cornball icing on the cheeseball movie. But, if you enjoy a lot of tommy gun fire, I definitely recommend it. And the ripping of the fabric really didn’t take away from the rounds of shots.
After all the ripping, I connected the fabric pieces together and just started single crocheting in a round. I used the same technique I learned a few years ago at a crochet course I took. The instructor kept telling us to “put the crochet hook where it wants to go.” Very Zen instructions. Eventually it will be a great big circle. Right now it’s not a very big circle, but it will be once I get back to it. I think I’ll add a black border to finish it off.
While ripping apart many yards of red coloured fabric and turning it into yarn for a rug I’m crocheting in our very own vestibule, we watched a show about what makes people happy on the PBS. The whole show was about 6 hours long – 2 hours per episode over the past 3 days. There were many scientific explanations about the brain, medicine and placebos, lots of interviews, and a segment on shock therapy treatment. All very interesting.
Now, I can let you watch the whole show and decide for yourself OR I can summarize it in a few words for you.
One of the biggest factors that makes people happy?
Other people.
Even though money, jobs, having a purpose, doing things you enjoy doing all contribute to your happiness, the people you learn from and share it with have a huge part and most definitely contribute to your happiness.
And there you have it.
Also, I just needed a reason to post this photo of my sister actually smiling in her fancy pilgrim dress. We both had a dress like this and I loved it because it made me feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read all the Little House on the Prairie books when I was a kid and thought I wanted to be a pioneer. Now that I really think about it, I’m pretty I would have made the whiniest pioneer ever. What? No internets? Being a frontier settler is too hard! Where can I charge up my camera battery? What? No electricity? This place is crazy. I guess I’ll sit by the fire and crochet another rag rug.
Hey! Look at me being a pioneer. I’ll take a photo of my rug when it gets a bit bigger. Right now it’s only the size of a pot-holder. Boring.
