Sunday, October 12, 2014

More Purple Baby Hats for Charity

Here are the hats that I made recently for Click for Babies: Period of Purple Crying Caps (A Child’s Light).  The hats are handed out to babies born in November and December (where I am) to help make parents aware of what normal infant crying is.  This is to help prevent shaken baby syndrome.   So far I have made 24 hats for this charity.  

I love making the 2 and 3 color spiral hats.  
I plan on writing up a pattern on how to make the 2 and 3 color spiral hats this week.  
For this hat I followed a pattern made by my friend Cindy.  You can find it here.   She actually designed it for this charity.  All of her patterns are well written and easy to make.  
I followed this free pattern to make this ribbed baby hat.  It is one of my favorite hat patterns.  I just love making front post stitches.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Tunisian Crochet Slippers

Following this very easy Tunisian crochet pattern, I made this pair of slippers in 2 days.  I did need to make some tweaks to the pattern, but they were minor tweaks.  The pattern said to make them the length of your foot plus an inch, but that made them massive.  They stretch, so the length of your foot is plenty.  Mine are 21 rows long plus the decrease row (size 9 shoe).  The other tweak I did was that I used a size J hook and did a slip stitch around the whole thing at the end (after the single crochet round with a size K hook).  The yarn that I used was perfect, and very soft: Cascade Yarns Pacific Chunky Multi.  I used about 96 yards of the 120 yard skein.  The cool buttons I bought at Aunt Margaret's Yarn & Gift Shop (as well as the yarn).

The only real issue that I ran into with these slippers is that I had to mail order the size N Tunisian crochet hook.  No one local sells anything larger than a K.

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Penelope Shawl

It took me most of September to make it, but here is my first triangle shaped shawl.  Since I have failed my numerous knitted attempts, I decided to crochet one.  That was the key.  It is a simple 3 row repeat with a special 3 row border.  You start at the top middle and work your way out and down.  It was so easy to make that I began to get bored somewhere in the middle of it.  I used up all 1000 yards of the James C. Brett Moonlight Sonta yarn that I had (2 skeins) and needed to beg for an extra 30 yards to finish it.  Thankfully my boss knew just who to ask.  After receiving a 30 yard donation, I was able to finish my shawl.  Here is the free ravelry downloadable pattern for it.