arts and crafts

So it’s been awhile, yes. But knitting has been happening. Well, sort of. Crafty things. As well as a lot of school things and plenty of freaking out over what is happening after school is finished. After four years of preparing to go into either history or museum studies I have finally decided on library conservation. So yeah, I wasn’t expecting me to spring that surprise on me. I think it’s definitely the right thing to do (how can repairing old books all day not be the right thing to do?), but seeing as I spent my undergrad career skimping on the art and chem classes I need to take a year off to catch up on that good stuff. And then I need to go to school for many, many more years. This in itself is not a problem, but I would at some time like to make some sort of salary so I can actually, um, move out maybe? Yeah, that would be so awesome right now.

Anyway, I’m sure you’re all enthralled, onward to arts and crafts:

Over spring break I drug out the sewing machine; the very old, very awesome, very avocado green sewing machine. Box bags were made. (http://dragoknit.blogspot.com/2007/02/box-bag-tutorial.html)

Directions confused me so much at first, but I caught on. You have to be very clever to come up with these sewing things, I would never have thought of this.

Originally I wanted to make an art supplies bag but the first one wasn’t big enough for paintbrushes, thus my only option was to make a second, larger one.

Sorry for the bad angle, the other one turned out blurry....

And since I was working on art supply storage, I made this thing to keep/organize/protect my brushes.

And it wraps up like this, how nice!

I also decided that I want to make an afghan, so I bought 12 balls of Lion Brand Jiffy yarn. I know! But I decided the acrylic was a good decision because a) I think machine washable is a must for all large blanket things and b) I’m too poor for superwash wool. And it’s working out alright, very soft and easy to work with. Does not rip out well. At first I made the whole thing too wide, and with only 12 balls of yarn it would have ended up not very long at all, so ripping out was necessary. The yarn sticks together and doesn’t hold up so well, so don’t make any mistakes with it and you’ll be fine. Oh yeah, and it’s crochet, I thought I’d give that a try. I will say that things are going a lot faster then it ever would with knitting!

And some knitting, yes. For a friend’s future child, it’s the Baby Jiffy Knit Sweater (http://wishingiwasknitting.blogspot.com/2007/07/baby-jiffy-knit-sweater.html). I don’t know what’s so jiffy about it, it’s not going so jiffy for me. I never seem to have the right number of stitches at the end of each row but everything still seems to look alright and it’s turning out to have a really pretty stitch pattern. Gage and size info on this pattern is also rather vague, so I really don’t know what size I’m making here. I chose size 4 needles with Knit Picks Shine Sport. I’m just hoping I don’t run out of yarn, I seem to have a habit of doing that.



And so that’s what I’ve been spending my time doing, along with writing papers about medieval architecture and doing tedious color mixing projects such as this

Later dudes