One of my New Year’s resolutions was to Make More Stuff. I’ve had Craft Envy for a while now, and when I watched my favorite Maggie knitting in the park last time I visited Santa Cruz I knew I was going to have to figure out how to make something out of yarn.

Knitting baffles me, but my mom taught me to crochet when I was fifteen so I felt a lot more comfortable giving that a try. I went over to Knit/Purl on Monday to pick up supplies…and promptly fell in love. I never thought of myself as the sort of girl who could develop a yarn fetish, but there you go. It’s the Apple Store of yarn shops. Gorgeously laid out, minimalist, and quiet like a library. The yarns sent me into a tactile stupor – so many textures! So many colors! My brain immediately went into overdrive, imagining all the things I could make. Assuming, you know, that I could figure out how. Compounding matters was the fact that there were all sorts of completed projects on display with the yarns. Each project (which looked like it would be equally at home in a designer boutique) bore a tag with a pattern number instead of a price.

On the clerk’s recommendation I bought a simple wool yarn (which I know will shrink all to hell the first time I accidentally throw it in the wash – and it’s not like I have any illusions about that) and a bamboo crochet hook, and I’ve been slowly re-learning how to crochet. I remembered having a lot of trouble with edges, but this time around they at least seem to be managable. I haven’t tried any fancy stitches yet, but every row I don’t screw up makes me feel a tiny iota more confident about the whole thing.

Crocheting is surprisingly Zen. I thought it would make me anxious because I could be using that time to do, oh, any of the ten thousand other things on my to-do lists, but instead it makes me feel wonderfully productive. I’ve been picking it up during my downtime – while a website is loading, or while the baby is napping on my lap, or while we’re upstairs and I don’t have my laptop. Doing something with my hands is a great way to quiet the chorus of “Oh my god oh my god I have so many things I should be doing right now” in my brain. Cheers to that.

technorati tags:crochet, crafts, knit/purl, yarn

I just put seven (yes, seven) crafting books on hold at the library. I love the fact that I can shop for library books from the relative comfort of my own home and then meander over to the library to pick them up at my leisure. It’s so civilized. Whenever I look for a book at the actual library I get so distracted by the elegance of the dewey decimal system that I end up with a huge stack of books which have nothing to do with the one I came in to find. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, except that my reading time is woefully limited these days, so I really have to stay on task.

Speaking of staying on task, I did manage to finish all my toycrafts in time for the Christmas cut-off at the post office. Yay me, singlehandedly saving Christmas, etc. My favorite is the PVC girl doll. PVC! Who doesn’t love it? (Although sewing PVC? Pain in my ass. Er, hand, actually, since I managed to slice right through the tip of my left index finger while trying to “hurry.” Remind me not to do that anymore, because ow.)

I also re-did (again!) the Cranky Pals site, and I have big plans for the content, which will be much, much more exciting than it is currently.

In (related) news, Not So got me a sewing machine for Christmas! I got to open it early because I was a very, very good girl this year. It’s beautiful and baffling and all mine. I would post pictures, but I haven’t taken any yet, mostly because it is currently sitting, half-assembled, on my kitchen table while I figure out how to thread a bobbin. You wouldn’t think that would be so hard, but you probably also wouldn’t think the last time I used a sewing machine was roughly 1986. I remember it being very, very hard, but since I was twelve at the time I assume this time will probably be easier. At least my hands are bigger, right?

technorati tags:sewing, crafts, cranky pals

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In the past month I have made:

• 11 tee-shirt designs
• 7 stuffed toys
• 5 designs for future toys
• 1 set of custom holiday icons (which went poof when Illustrator crashed, but whatever, it counts)
• 3 illustrated card designs
• 2 custom holiday headers for my personal blogs

I never considered myself a “crafty” person. Scrapbooking leaves me cold. Embroidery strikes me as a lot of effort with a relatively “eh” result. I do not embellish things around my house with bits of lace or frill. In fact, I have an aversion to frills. Yet last night I found myself telling Not So “If I learned to knit, I could make you sweaters to replace the ones I shrink in the wash!”

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, either.

So far on the crafting horizon: 3 custom Cranky Pals for my nieces and nephew, co-designed with Not So (whose concept drawings leave mine in the dust); prototypes of the 5 new designs I came up with; a re-vamp of the Cranky Pals website (I don’t like the header and I think the colors need some tweaking); some new tee-shirt designs, which then must be purchased from Zazzle or outsourced to a local printer so I can, you know, sell them; and some testing out of the freezer-paper stencil technique I read about on Alt Dot Life. And I need to decide whether or not I will reserve a table for the craft fair at Milagros in January. I’m leaning toward “no,” since I can’t imagine where I’d find the time to make enough toys to fill up a whole table, but I really want to.

It would also be nice if I could make my printer behave so that I could print my own greeting cards and stationary. Because I have ideas. Oh yes.

technorati tags:crafts, cranky pals, stuffed animal, zazzle

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