Crochet Rug 2.0

So I started over with just the t-shirts and I'm much happier. My camera still sucks though. Oh well. I fix as much as I can but there's only so much you can do with a crappy shot.


It's so much thicker and wider and better. I'm 10 shirts into it here and I've got 10 more that I've pulled out to use. We'll see how far that gets me.


I'm most excited about that dark pink shirt there. The color doesn't exactly come out here, it's more vibrant than it looks in this picture.


The only part I'm displeased with is how big the holes are in that white section above the purple. I may cut a strip just to weave through there to fill it in. I'm not feeling that particular about being able to see the stitches here, I just want it to be squashy and comfy under my feet.

A year ago today...

I was living in Cambridge, MA. I was working full time but I took that day off. I woke up without an alarm and got ready. Got some coffee and a bite to eat at the cafe and hopped on a bus to East Cambridge. I went into the courthouse there, the second time I'd had occasion to visit. I paid some nominal fee and got the official decree with the raised seal. I got back on the bus to Davis Square and I went to the Social Security office, took a number and filled out the paperwork. Showed them the official decree and they said, "Yes of course you can have your name back, paperwork looks good, have a nice day." Then I went back home to show my roomie. She was pleased. I was pleased too.

Today....
I am living in Morgantown, WV. I work full time but today I got to leave a little early. I woke up late, grabbed some fruit for breakfast and hopped in my car to go to the office. I came home for lunch and made myself french toast. Went back to the office to wait out the afternoon till my boss said "Yeah of course you can take off, nothing's going on here, have a nice weekend." Went to the grocery store. Now I'm sitting here, having a little glass of white wine and feeling pleased.

Crochet Rug Update

In a previous post I alluded to needing advice on the crochet rug. "Needing advice" - at least in knitting circles - is usually code for "I hate this now but I've spent so much time on it I can't bear to redo it and I'm so emotionally invested now I can't make a rational decision." I didn't really need advice, I needed to acknowledge that this simply wasn't going to be a perfect start to finish project.

You can see here how I started adding t-shirts to the end where I ran out of sheet. What's not completely apparent from the picture is how much thicker the t-shirt section is. I should have realized this before hand, although I cut the t-shirt strips to about the same width, the fabric is much thicker than the sheet. So the rug got much thicker in the t-shirt section than the sheet section. I stood on it several times to test, it was clear that was going to annoy me if I kept going this way.


What also started happening is the t-shirt rows were noticeably (to me) wider than the rest of it too. What to do? I loved making the part with the sheet so much cause it went so quickly and smoothly and it was my first real crochet project. But as I fixated on the thicker t-shirt section, I realized I liked that section better. The holes in the first part of the rug suddenly seemed so big and weird, I think the hook I'm using (size Q) was too big for that part.

So I tried think of ways to save it without undoing it, but deep down in my heart I knew what I needed to do. I just had to take the time to come to grips with it. I unraveled the t-shirts, vowed to figure out what to do with the sheet part later, then started again with an all t-shirt rug. I'm about 8 t-shirts into it (but no pictures yet) and I'm not sure I have enough shirts that I'm willing to cut up on hand to finish it, but I'll find them somewhere. I decided to make the whole thing wider too, I really want this baby to cover up some serious real estate on my gross linoleum kitchen floor. And I'm much happier with how it's progressing now. Pictures of Crochet Rug 2.0 to come. In the meantime, here's some gratuitous cat pictures.

Mindy is unimpressed with the whole thing.


But she does like the hook. It's too bad she doesn't have thumbs or she might have actually been able to get it. Mork is in the back marveling at how much my cheap little camera sucks. Why is the only part in focus that little bit way on the right side?


I have a cat named Mork. Mork has a cat named Mindy.

Amazon Rank: Behold the power of the internet

I think stuff like this is really cool.

Amazon Rank

As if I needed another reason to love Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, they've done this in honor of the Amazon debacle involving stripping sales ranks from books with "questionable content." Here's a couple of updates on Amazon's response.

SBTB was actually how I first found out about Flight of the Conchords and I have enjoyed many a laugh since then. About a year and a half ago, a co-worker pointed out the Smart Bitches blog to me and on the day that I clicked over to their site they had fatefully posted the "Business Time" video. I laughed so hard I disrupted work for an entire morning. Though I am not a romance reader per se, I really enjoy how much they enjoy the genre. And the cover snark is hilarious and awesome.

In honor of SBTB and the genius of the Amazon Rank Google bomb, and how much I like Flight of the Conchords, and my previous history of posting lots of YouTube videos on my blog, I leave you with this oldie but goodie:



That's why they're called business socks.

I feel fat... Gonna try to sleep it off

I've talked about my scale before. I dislike how much I weigh. And it's not just the number, I dislike how I feel in my jeans (and these are jeans that I bought last summer because I was feeling fat in the jeans I had before that) and my arms are getting flabbier and my waist is getting thicker. And I ate three doughnuts at work today.

My new year's resolution was to either get down to 130 pounds - or, if I fail at that, resolve to stop caring about my weight forevermore. So far this year I've put on about 6 pounds. hmmm.

I've tried different stuff and usually something works for as long as I can stand to stick with it. The Sonoma Diet worked well for me but I lost so much so quick right in the beginning (5 pounds in 5 days) that I freaked out and stopped doing it all together. And it made me a little crazy about my food: I almost started crying once because my mom made something for dinner that involved white flour and I didn't want to offend her so I ate it. I almost started crying about eating a refined grain. I become an emotional cripple when it comes to diets that scare you into eating healthy.

And that seems to be the major issue for me, I don't want to do something that makes me mad at food. Or guilty about food. Or scared about food. I have too much inclination to go off the deep end with it.

B posted this about a picture food diary. I've done food diaries before, but it's the same guilt/anger issue for me. I don't want to be shamed into eating less. I do like the idea of using pictures more than just writing it down, cause then maybe you're more inclined to see patterns, and you're doing the recording before you do the consuming... But still.

Then I read this and I'm so all over it. Sleep more and lose 10 pounds? Sounds perfect. I need to lose more than that to get to 130 but still, it's a hell of a start. And I love sleeping. I was already thinking about how I wished I got more sleep more consistently. So I'm going to try it and I'll let you know how it goes. =)

Crochet rug update later. I've hit a decision point and I'm in need of advice. I'll post about it when I have access to the pictures on my camera.

Almost finished before I even blogged about starting it

I didn't go to church today, a fact about which my grandmother had uncharacteristically non-passive, yet still aggressive, things to say. Instead of church, I listened to my heathen boyfriend play Phish bootlegs on the college radio station while I drank tea and started making this:


The sheet I'm using is a batik style print that I used to individualize my bland as bland can be comforter freshman year of college. Over the years it's gotten worn thin in places and the cats have clawed holes through it. So now I'm excited to give it a new life. I cut it into a long continuous strip about an inch and a half wide.


The rug is 20 stitches across and I'm just going to keep going till I think it's long enough. It's already more than twice as long now than it was this afternoon when I took these pictures. But my camera battery is low and I don't have any more lovely sunshine coming in my bedroom window so I may just wait to stage another photo shoot once it's done.


I think I'll have to cut more rag strips to get the length I'm looking for, not sure how that will look with so much of this patterned sheet. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, I do have a lot of t-shirts in colors that would look interesting striped on the end. Or I may expand it by doing denim around the edges. We'll see.

I'm pleased to have such a successful project to post about after the last post of failure. Happy Easter to all the other pagans out there! I had a lovely day despite the fact that I'm going to hell.

When do I just give up on this yarn?

I really wanted to make this adorable little capelet/cropped cardigan thing that I found randomly clicking through knitting blogs. I even happened to have two leftover balls of Rowan Polar (the now discontinued yarn that this pattern originally used) that I bought along time ago for a different, and also ultimately failed, shrug/cardigan thing. She only uses 1 1/2 so I thought I'd be able to motor along just fine and wind up with a cute little thing without spending any money.

Now, I should have known better. I've knitted long enough to buy into the superstition of the craft. I originally bought this yarn for the Hot Lava cardigan but I ran out and some wonky things had happened along the way that I don't even remember now so I decided to rip it. Of course when I did that it stuck to itself and got kinky and weird so I threw it in a basket without even winding it. Then I found the kitty pi and figured some frogged yarn that had practically felted itself already would be perfect. I knit it up, felted and blocked it, but I quickly realized that the increases that I had ad libbed to try and accommodate my two cats were deeply flawed. And to this day no amount of catnip will get either of my kitties into the pi. They hate it. Since you can't frog a felted project that left me with just two skeins. I was going to make a hat, but I don't really like wearing hats all that much so I never got the mojo for it.

Then I saw that little capelet and thought it would be perfect. The major problem here is that while my neck is skinny like the blogger who designed it, we have vastly different proportions below the neck. I knit it to just below the underarms and I've only got a few yards left. I think it'd take at least another skein if not more to get this thing to cover my boobs. And even then I don't think the shape would wind up very flattering. I could make a smaller version and foist it on my friend's 8-year old daughter. But even if I managed to crank it out in her size without screwing up, I'd be paranoid about giving her bad luck via this yarn that been involved in so many failed projects.

So when do I give into my suspicion that anything I try with this yarn is doomed? Maybe I'll just knit a big stockinette rectangle for a felted bag. Hard to mess that up.

B, do you like how I keep writing posts like anyone might be reading when really it's only you?