Crochet to date

It has been a while since I made a post here of any kind.  I had a month of a combination of medical problems and transportation difficulties. In all, I was unable to get to my mom’s house for nearly a month.

I have done no wood working at all, not having the energy, physical ability, or gumption to do any of it.

I usually try to do a set of four Christmas ornaments each year, and this year it is out of the question. Usually, I would be already showing them off and I have not started. This is a year that a number of things won’t started, let alone completed.

I have two large carving projects to complete and this weekend, I just did not feel like getting dusty and dirty. Both are power carving projects where I would use the Dremmel to grind away the wood. That creates a lot of dust and I was just not in the mood to get dusty at that time.

I have done crochet, mostly at doctor’s offices.

I am working on a hot pad using Tunisian crochet and found it has a few “little” problems. I am working with three colored yarns, yellow, red and green. The design is that you make it twice as long as it is wide, and then fold it over and stitch it.

One problem I found is at about half way, I lost a couple stitches. It is easy to do when you are also wrapping the other two colors on the hook at the start to keep them tied in until they are needed. I skipped a stitch two, maybe three times.

When I folded it over and started stitching it, I decided to correct the skipped stitches by going with a half double stitch until I got to where the mistake happened, and then go to a single stitch. That is not really a good thing to do and did not look great, I did the red row around the outside first, and when I had the yellow row of all single crochet, the whole thing was getting wavy. I somehow added extra stitches into it, which is not hard. The green made it even worse.

I plan to rip it out completely and start over. I intended to have green, white and red stripes, but only had yellow. I have since picked up a ball of white yarn. I really do not know how that happened. I walked past the craft area in Walmart and the balls just appeared, just in the colors I wanted!!!

This weekend, Mom gave me a project. She likes to wear scarves and she picked up a couple knitted/crocheted scarves and liked them, though she did not like the color. She gave me a package of yarn that had three skeins of her color (pastel Aqua, pink, yellow, white, and then some other small amounts of yarn I could keep), and asked me to make the scarf for her.

Using a G sized hook (that I made from a dowel) and went across 14 stitches which was about six inches, and then crocheted one and a half Skeins of yarn, making about six foot long. She then showed me how to add a row of tassels across each end. This is part of her Christmas present this year. 

I was surprised at how fast this project went. I figured out that I was doing roughly a foot of crochet an hour (about six square inches).   For some, that would be slow, but for me it is pretty good.

I did see in the project that the yarn going over my finger for controlling tension, was getting rubbed raw on that line where the yarn rode. I put a piece of tape around my finger after it started bothering me and that helped some, but since it was already irritated, I still felt it.

                                         Six foot long scarf I made in one day

I am trying to finish up her yarn with another project. I won’t be sitting and doing “nothing” for a while so it will not be going fast.

My brother and I was trying to repair my truck and we found the problem was not what we thought it was, which we thought might be a blown head gasket, and when we got it to a garage to do the work right, we had no clue that the computer was the problem. We had replaced several parts and that worked, but my uneducated guess was that the computer was killing the parts.

Someone who had the truck before me, used a paint brush on the hood. I sanded the hood with 600 grit sand paper to smooth it out and clean it up a little. We found that there are some nice drips frozen in the finish that will take heavier sand paper. I was not in the mood to deal with it so I left it as it is. I need to wash the hood down to see what my work did. It is dusty at the moment and there is no rain in sight.

 My plan is that once I get it sanded down right, I will spray paint the area, and then give it several coats of gloss varnish. It might not be a professional job, but it will look better than it did.

I will have to see if there is any projects that get started or worked on over the next month. This one has been a total loss.