Friday, October 8, 2010

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart...

Or, the tale to how I'm spending my free time right now...


It all started... well, technically, it all started when I found a how to crochet book as a child and decided I wanted to learn.  I crocheted a blanket, and then couldn't stand the sight of the crochet hook for a while.  But I still loved yarn.  I've always had a bit of an obsession with yarn.

A couple years later, I taught myself to knit.  With my Girl Scout troop, I knitted a bunch of 7"x9" squares, which got sent off to be sewn into blankets.  After this, I continued to do some small knitting projects over the years... a hat, a couple purses, other things that the Klutz Press Knitting book could teach me.  (If you want to learn to knit, I highly recommend this book.  It comes with yarn, knitting needles and a crochet hook, and brilliantly illustrated instructions for the basics and 6 projects.)

Come senior year of high school, I was thinking about my Girl Scout Gold Award project.  For those of you who don't know it, the Gold Award is the highest honor a Girl Scout can earn.  I'd been working on the prerequisites a while, and just needed a good project.  I thought about what I enjoyed doing, and one of the things that came up was knitting.  So, with the memory of my earlier Girl Scout project in mind, I asked a lot of people to knit 7"x9" squares and planned to sew them together and then donate them to Union Gospel Mission in Seattle.  Thanks to some unexpected help, my project was wildly successful, and I was suddenly faced with the task of sewing/crocheting a lot of blankets together (having already officially completed the project).

Over the summer, I found myself without much to do.  So I started picking away at crocheting together some blankets.  This process takes a long time, and its very boring.  Besides, I'd been doing so much of it that I was starting to convulse at the thought of sewing one more blanket together.  Eventually, I just shipped the rest of my squares off to Warm Up America, the group I got the idea from.  In the meantime, in the midst of IM small talk, I told a friend I was crocheting.

He got super excited and started looking up patterns for crocheted Pokemon.  (I have nerdy friends, okay?)  My fingers itched for something more than just a basic stitch for long rows, so I told him I'd make him a plushie if he found me a pattern for one he wanted.  It was quite the adventure, but I eventually finished...


After that, I was *ahem* hooked on plushies.  I wanted to do more.  So I found more patterns, I packed some yarn when I left for school, and I started working.  I didn't want to do anything as complicated as the cyndaquil (for now), but I'm soon to have quite the collection of hearts and traffic cones, and maybe some soft crocheted balls (I could make a whole bocce ball set!)

So if you happen to find any cool patterns for crocheting online, let me know.  I just might waste another afternoon trying to figure it out.

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