After a quick search on the internets, it turns out these people are responsible for beautifying the bike racks along the bike lane on Dunsmuir between Granville and Seymour Street. They really did a great job. Nearly every single rack is covered with either a crocheted or knitted sleeve of yarn. I think it looks lovely. I often walk by this cheerful set of racks with bikes and scooters on my lunch hour or on my way to work on the odd day I drive in and park the car nearby.
My question is always how they connect the knitted or crocheted tubes around the racks, trees or posts? Do they sew them? I did a little research and found…some people just sew their pre-knitted and crocheted rectangles and squares together once they find the perfect spot for their tiny blankets. Or, if you’re like crochame, you take your crochet hook with you and crochet it right to the post/rack/sign. You can watch her doing this on her video here.
This makes me want to yarn bomb our whole balcony. Sadly, it won’t make our posts any safer, but it will make it look a little nicer.
Since I have homework to do, create this year’s Christmas card, and make some presents for Christmas, I decided the best way to tackle my workload was to make a bunch of tiny Christmas wreathes shown above. I know. It makes sense to me, too.
I found a lovely site yesterday called, Natural Suburbia – by a crafty blogger in South Africa. She knits all kinds of cute little items – flowers, a tiny knitted Christmas shirt and some bats. She also knitted up these mini-wreaths.
Since I am the slowest knitter in all the land, I opted to crochet my tiny wreaths instead. Instead of knitting an i-chord, all I did was chain stitch a 10 inch row and then slip stitched back up the chain – just like in this video. I decided to use 3 – 10 inch slip stitched pieces instead of the 2 like she used. Her knitted i-chords are much fuller, so she only needed 2 to get a nice full wreath.
I used 3 different shades of green yarn for my wreath. Next, I connected the 3 pieces at the top and loosely braided them together – I couldn’t get my twists to look quite right without braiding the three pieces together. Next I just sewed the ends together to make a circle.
For the bow, I crocheted another slip stitch piece – about 8 inches long – with some red sock yarn and tied it to the bottom of the wreath in a bow. Too lazy to sew it on the wreath, I opted to tie it on (shoe-lace style) instead.
Linda (the blogger who posted the tutorials for this project) suggested using them for decoration on door knobs. I thought that was an excellent idea! However, the wreath stayed on the door knob for less than 30 seconds – Oscar and Donner were quick to pull it right off – while I was taking a photo of it. Sheesh. Kitties. They soon went back to trying to lift up the kitty robot feeder after I put the wreath away. This is their new thing now – I caught them with their paws UNDER the feeder – and Donner had it lifted up a bit, too. I guess they want to tip it over so the food comes spilling out? I’m not sure. Either that or they are just vandals.
That’s okay! I’ll decorate something else with them. I’ll be making others – in different colours. They are very sweet.
Thank you, Natural Suburbia, for sharing this great project. I’ll be following along to see how your Christmas unfolds this year.
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.
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