2010: The Year of the Dishcloth

A little blast from the past for you today as I don't want to inundate you with ALL BABY, ALL THE TIME (though the reality is that Colbie and Colbie-related things will be showing up here quite a bit as I don't have much time for anything else – how do those mommy bloggers do it?!).

Last year one of my resolutions (in an attempt to unclutter our house a bit) was to use up all of my stashed cotton yarn. I had a habit of buying Sugar N Cream when it was on sale for 99 cents a skein and I thought a color was pretty. Needless to say I ended up with more than enough single skeins of color which isn't very practical project-wise as there's not a ton I could make with one skein of 100% cotton yarn times 10.

So I started the year off determined to knit all that cotton (plus all my cotton-ease – which is cotton blended with acrylic) into dishcloths that I could then gift at Christmas to those family members that insisted we NOT give them presents, but could not even think about not giving them some sort of token while we were celebrating the holidays with them. I ended up creating little gift sets of 3 cloths and a bar of handmade soap that I bought on etsy, and they appeared to go over well as I've found hand knit dishcloths was the best dishrags!

And though it was nearly impossible to become bored knitting dishcloths – they're so small that you finish them quick and there are thousands of free patterns so you never have to do the same one – I will admit that by Christmas I was sick of them. And of course, wouldn't you know it, I still had to finish two cloths before our final Christmas celebration. Thankfully we had a bunch of driving to do, the only crappy thing is my photos of the last couple turned out bad because I was snapping pictures in route to the final holiday get together (see row 2, picture 3 & 4). Surprisingly I'm actually a little sad that I don't have a project going on like this this year.

***********

2010: The Year of the Dishcloth Fun Facts

1. Favorite Pattern: Circle Cloth pattern (row 1, pic 4)
2. Yes, row 2, pic 1 says "Your Mom" – a little tribute to my knit night friends with the sense of humor of 13-year-old boys.
3. 7 patterns were designed by one person, Kris Knits, many of which were part of her monthly Mystery Dishcloth Pattern series. Sadly she had to stop creating them due to some personal reasons.
4. I actually ended up knitting the same pattern twice on two occasions. Once on purpose, the other on accident.
5. Row 4, pic 4 is the Dharma Initiative logo from LOST, I designed the pattern to commemorate the ending of the show and then offered the pattern for donations to my Relay of Life team (this was the pattern I knit twice on purpose).
6. I actually knit the cloth pictured in row 1, pic 2 while participating in Relay for Life. I knit all but 8 rows while walking around the track all night – all in all I walked 10 miles (I wore my GPS watch) and only messed up once (this is the pattern, Waffle Knit Dishcloth, I knit twice on accident).

To Wipe the Tears...

It's the big weekend...LOST is officially ending tomorrow night and ABC has turned it into a weekend event - heaven, right?

In preparation for this momentous television event, I worked up a dishcloth pattern featuring the Dharma Initiative logo. I mean, I'm sure those in Dharmaville had something just like this to wash their dirty dishes, we just haven't seen it yet on the show. Though now that I think about it, it will probably be one of the questions we don't get answered.

I know I just recently said I don't typically do this kind of thing in this space, but later this summer (June 19, in fact) I will be participating in our local American Cancer Society's Relay for Life event. I typically stay way from doing fundraising events - basically because I have a difficult time asking people for money, but this year a friend, who is a cancer survivor, asked if I would join her team. And this year, I felt compelled to get over my issues and support my friend as well as my grandfather and uncle who have both been undergoing cancer treatments after being diagnosed early this year.

So as an incentive to donate, I'm offering this Dharma Dishcloth free with any donation! Please visit my Relay for Life donation page (for donations $10 and up) or donate via Paypal (for smaller amounts - on June 19th, 2010, I'll make one big donation on the behalf of my crafty friends on the interwebs) and give as much as you can to help fight cancer, honor a loved one lost or support someone you know who is fighting cancer or is a survivor.

You can visit the Ravelry page for the pattern for download instructions (there are also the instructions for donating too so all the info is in one spot). Or if you don't have access to Ravelry, please feel free to email me at craftnclutter {at} gmail {dot} com after you donate and I'll send it your way.

I really appreciate any donations you can make, and I look forward to seeing some other Dharma Dishcloths pop up around the web and on Ravelry - it will probably come in handy to wipe away the tears as the final credits roll tomorrow night (so you better buckle down and get this knit during the 2-hour recap before the finale - haha).

A Post A Day In May: Year 3 Starts

March Mystery KAL Dishcloth

In an effort to finally get back into a blogging groove, I'm attempting to do my annual "A Post A Day In May" challenge. I'm not sure if the official challenge still occurs, but May's kinda my month, so why not keep it going.

Hopefully this will help me get back into using my camera more regularly and more importantly, taking the photos off and editing them more than twice a month.

I have a few ideas for weekly "features' to make it a bit easier to post, so we'll see how it works. This year is a bit different the past couple, as my new job has my daily schedule off from what it had been, I don't have as much time for recreational internet usage, and then there's the whole being active thing. Exercising like 5 days a week also eats up my already limited time (and I won't mention my husband who has commandeered the netbook, leaving me with the super slow imac - just kidding honey).

Mario Dishcloth

I'm still hard at work making dishcloths. I believe I'm up to 7 for the year, not a ton, but a good start. I figure I need at least 8 more to at least do a limited version of the gifts I wanted to put together for Christmas this year. If I get more done, then more people will have the gift packs bestowed to them.

The funny thing is I actually finished another one, that I had been picking up on and off for about a month in between clues for the March KAL. Just as I was getting ready to bind off, I held it up and sadly realized I had repeated a row so my picture was split in half. One half facing the proper way and the other half upside down.

You're probably wondering how I didn't notice earlier. But I had made a push one day to finish it and just was work, work, working. Sad, but true. I ended up frogging it completely. I'll reknit it eventually.

February Mystery KAL Dishcloth

...eventually. But I've moved on for now.

I'm tackling my first full sweater! I'm hoping to have it complete for the state fair in August. I don't expect to place or anything, but hoping the pattern itself will draw some attention. It would be especially fun if I could get a pair of fair isle mittens knit in time as well - in a fun pattern. I guess I'm just hoping to spice things up in the competition. I learned last year when picking up my entry that the entrants are typically older women with very traditional styles, so it would be fun to see something atypical and maybe encouraging others in the younger age brackets to enter things. Fisherman sweaters aren't a requirement, so can do like anything with knitting.

Just in Time...

New season. New haircut. New hat?

Knitting sure has taken over my life. When I'm not working or exercising, I'm pretty much knitting. Housework is neglected (sorry mom). And I don't do things I used to do ALL the time. I haven't finished a book yet this year. So sad. Up until this year, I would read at least 2 books a month. Fiction, nonfiction. Classics, chick-lit, legal mysteries, biographies. Anything. And now, I can barely pick up a book, let alone read and finished one.

Despite losing my ability to complete even the shortest book, I at least have a small bounty of things to show for it. Loads of dishcloths (ok, not loads, but maybe 6 or so), some mittens that live a state away, slippers, and now a new hat to go with my Gay Paree City Scarf.

And hopefully soon, I will be starting on my first full sweater! The yarn has been bought (thanks to a special car trip to a yarn store into a neighboring town), I'm just waiting to finish up a couple small works-in-progress and then it's time cast-on. So it may just turn out that I don't end up finishing a single book this year.

Perhaps you could suggest some that I just won't be able to resist?

Let Me Brag a Minute...

The proof is in the photos.

Two fair isle mittens knit, complete with thumbs. Though tempting to leave as baby-like hand socks, I pushed through and got those thumbs a home of their own. And most importantly, they fit!

Though there are a few minor issues in the final product, I hope they are happily received. It's a bummer I finished them right at the end of winter, but knowing the midwest weather, A Small Fox should probably get at least one chance to wear them before they need to be put away for next fall.

Actually though, I'm surprised they only took a month and a half to finish. Sometimes I can barely get a dishcloth done in that amount of time.

And if I learned one thing from this challenge (yes, a challenge - I jumped at the chance to knit for A Small Fox, despite never having knit full mittens, let alone fair isle!), it is that I am in love with fair isle knitting. It is definitely my kind of knitting.

I love needing to focus on what I'd doing. And the reward of seeing it build before my eyes is so motivating. It seems when I am knitting projects like this and charted dishcloths, I tend to make less mistakes (that is of course if I'm not at craft group watching LOST, but that's another story because I was able to knit perfectly fine in a dim room while watching the Godfather 2 and actually keep my eyes on the screen almost constantly). I guess that's probably because I can very clearly see a mistake I make, and can therefore fix it almost immediately.

Now I'm not saying these mitts were without problem. As I was nearing the end I twice needed to rip out several rows in the same night. Funny story - the first time, I was holding them by a DPN with only a couple stitches on it, and what happened, well of course they slipped off completely. But stupid me immediately grabbed them to keep from falling...by the live yarn end. Yikes! Stitches undone galore and as I tried to repick them up, I dropped a stitch, therefore needing to tear back a few rows to get everything right.

But all in all, I feel like I do better when working on projects like this.

So in the past few weeks my Ravelry queue has been filling up with fair isle patterns. More mittens than I could possibly wear. Sweaters (scarily knit up in fingering weight yarn). Pillows. I'm anxious to pick my next project, but then again I'm conflicted because I'm really hesitant to buy new yarn right now. I so want to stick with my goal of clearing out my stash, so fair isle knitting might be put off for awhile until A - the yarn stash decreases more and B - I get the balls to knit a sweater out of fingering weight.

Cleanin' Up

Kris Knits' St Patrick's Day Dishcloth

I started the year on a major dishcloth-making kick. I probably the first month and a half I made four (I probably could have made them faster but the fourth was part of a KAL and there were some major delays in clue-posting). Not only were the dishcloths extremely satisfying quick knits, they were great ways to bust through about a quarter of my stashed cotton, and as it would turn out very useful in the near future.

This weekend, in attempt to try and push Spring a little faster into existence, Mike and I have declared it The Big Spring Cleaning Weekend.

It's much needed.

As embarrassing as it is to admit, I will for the sake of honesty. In the two and a half years we've lived in our house, we've never deep cleaned it. And scarily, I don't think we've "done" the windows at all, ACK, I know!

Chinese Waves Dishcloth

So this weekend was marked a few weeks ago as THE WEEKEND.

We tackle the house.

Mike, being Mike, drew up detailed task lists for both of us (I absolutely despise him giving me tasks! I'm the one who is supposed to be giving "Honey Do" lists, not him!), and it seems I've been given the monster rooms.

You know, the rooms with the most stuff. And I only have half a day each to complete them. He's ambitious, what can I say. Well-meaning, but certainly not realistic. It could take me the entire weekend to tackle all the deep cleaning in the kitchen alone.

I'm pretty sure we have very different ideas on what "deep cleaning" means. I'm thinking that involves pulling everything out of the fridge & freezer, scrubbing it out, purging the old stuff, organizing it back in, taking everything out of the cabinets & pantry, wiping them down, reorganizing the places that weren't working, among all the normal stuff like scrubbing counters, sweeping, mopping floors.

Oh! And did I mention I spilled 16oz of fruit punch tonight. Luckily it was in the kitchen and before I did my massive cleaning. But the front of my oven is stained red and the floor is a sticky combination of fruit punch, dog saliva and dog hair.

Pleasant, I know.

But this is life.

Kris Knits' Be My Dishcloth

Instead of getting the head start I thought I would tonight (hey, I did dust my cookbook shelves which were caked in greasy dust...and managed to drop my beautiful Nigella Lawson's "How to Become a Domestic Goddess" cookbook with PMS 871 metallic gold ink into Nibbler's full water bowl), I decided it was a good time to blog.

I never claimed to be logical.

I blame the cup of hot chocolate at 9:30pm for the lack of #1 tiredness & #2 focus.

.Kris Knits' January KAL Mystery Dishcloth (psst, it's a snowman)

I must also note that I don't actually plan on using any of these dishcloths in our cleaning binge this weekend. That way when one of my family members receives one of these come Christmas, they aren't a little grossed out that I gifted them a hand knit, used dishcloth.

My plan is to continue to add to the pile of dishcloths throughout the year. Kill two birds with one stone. Use up my stashed cotton (part of my 2010: The Year to Finish It Up) and have useful, handmade things to give out to family members as Christmas gifts. So dear family, if you read this now, act surprised up December, ok? Sure it may be weird to receive a shamrocked dishcloth on Christmas Day instead of St Patrick's Day, but know they were made with love and are just as handy as something that would be seasonally appropriate come December. It's not that I don't love you enough to make something to match your decor, I just think you'll have a better chance of actually using them to wash your dirty dishes if you're not TOO in love with it.

Despite not really being evident here as of late, I have been crafting up a storm (I believe I'm up to 5 completed projects and 2 works-in-progress for the year, not that I'm counting).

A few weeks ago, right after committing to knitting Fair Isle Totoro mittens for A Small Fox, in typical Sarah fashion, I went out, bought the yarn for the new project, got home and promptly decided I needed to knit a surprise baby hat for my college roommate's newborn daughter.

Why my brain works like that I do not know. It's just something I've learned to live with. At least I was getting something done because if I try to fight it, nothing (and I mean, NOTHING) gets done (that includes housework).

At least this time, I didn't choose a big procrastination project. Just a tiny little baby hat that I've had my eye on for months. I'm so happy I finally jumped in and did it because though I swore off hats for a while in December, having zero pressure to do this one made it a breeze. No problems. Yay! And it knit up quick, but you know what was even quicker than knitting it? The USPS. I sent it out standard 1st class mail on a Saturday afternoon and by Monday evening I was seeing picture of my adorable teal hat on an adorable baby girl.

I think the Aviatrix will become a go-to baby gift (that and the Saartje Bootees).

...................................................................

The Aviatrix is actually being modeled by my childhood baby doll, Rosie (wow, mom dropping off all those boxes of toys came in handy!). If you saw Rosie without this adorable hat you would think that I was a very bad child, but actually it was my sister who was the bad one. You see, Rosie belonged to her well before I was even a glimmer in my parents' eyes. And it was my sister that took scissors poor little Rosie's head. So Rosie has wildly chopped hair, but after searching around for what kind of doll she really is, I think I'm partial to the chopped look as opposed to the 70s bob I think she originally came with - from what I can tell she's a 1975 Vogue Hug-a-Bye Baby (life-size and she used to cry) - she's just a little bit hardcore. ;)

Let me tell you what a pain it was to search for information on this doll. All I had to go on was the copyright imprint on the neck (1975 Vogue) and that brought up only one result that was feasibly her (the rest were tiny little dolls). I also tried searching by the information on her pajamas, but it turns out those belonged to another doll, a World of Wonders Pamela doll, who I guess was a little like Teddy Ruxpin, but I have no recollection of her at all.

....................................................

PS I'm still not done with that Teal yarn. Despite making an adult size hat and a baby hat, I still have more left. When it's not going into a dishcloth, this yarn I'm trying to destash sure does take a long time to use up! Any ideas what I can do with 1/4 - 1/3 of a skein of teal acrylic (it's surprisingly soft) and 1/2 - 2/3 of a skein of guacamole colored yarn (same stuff as the teal - see here for the color). I've been tempted to do a scrap yarn blanket, but I don't think I have enough scrap yarn in non-clashing colors. Hmm, maybe I should just do it. It can be a hodge podge of colors & fibers, just adding to it when I have those partial skeins. Ugh! I just don't know. Does anyone have experience working a bunch of different weights & fibers together into a blanket or something?

2010: The Year of Finishing Begins

Here it is over halfway through the first month of the year and I'm just getting around to sharing a project I finished on January 1st or 2nd! Yikes. Maybe 2011 should be the year of timeliness.

So I ended 2009 by whipping up a draft stopper for our front door using the leftover fabric from Braydon's stuffed animal carrier and well, there was plenty more fabric and corn cob (even after my first ill-attempt which resulted in a tube so small it got stuck under our basement door and Mike couldn't get in the house).

I did what any good crafter would do, and I started the new year off by making a more complex version of the first. This time the door in question was our basement door in our kitchen which leads to the side entrance which we use almost exclusively. We live in an older house that has had some upgrades to it, so the small, old door has a bit of a gap at the bottom which surely lets more cold air into the main house than we'd like to think.

So learning from my first ill-attempt (see parentheses above), I decided that the only way a draft stopper would work on such a heavily used door was: #1 if the tube was significantly larger than the uneven gap, and #2 had tubes on both sides of the door that were in some way connected.

Mike didn't see how I was going to accomplish this, but I had a plan. Being a frequent craft/home blog reader for several years now, I knew I had seen someone tackle this same problem before (not martha, it turns out). So I sent my mind to work and devised my own way to use what we had on hand, took a few measurements and was off to the sewing room.

Lined again with the hideous brown & pink flower fabric I somehow ended up with several yards of, I made an approximately 8 inches wide by 2 feet long sock. I marked the center and measured out the width of my door from there. Then I sewed the sock into thirds (the long way) and filled my outer two thirds with corn cob and then sewed the open end closed across all 3 thirds.

Wah Lah! I had a draft stopper that easily slip under the gap of the door and covers it on both sides. The door can easily be opened and closed from both sides without losing the functionality of the draft stopper - which is perfect for the main door of the house, it is used all day, instead of only when we're home. And surprisingly Nibbler doesn't find it tempting, despite loving popcorn and gobbling up all the corn cob I spilled with trying to fill this thing alone. Hopefully one day she doesn't get bored enough to tear into it just for the fun of it.

I still have enough fabric and corn cob for at least another stopper, so perhaps I'll make one and put it on etsy or something, that way I can truly "finish it up" because the only other thing I can think of to use the corn cob is tas "brown" matter in my compost bin.

Cookbook Challenge: How to Eat Supper #19

The Splendid Table's Cheese-Gilded Linguine with Smoky Tomatoes

Sooo...

I have quite a backlog of food posts and craft posts. Since I don't think I can commit to blogging every day, I think my choices are either to dump everything in one post or just forget it. Hmm, I'll have to think about it.

Anyways back to the food.

I've been a busy bee in this new year. As I've declared 2010 the year of finishing things, I've not only been destashing my yarn stash by making dishcloths and decluttering random spots in our house, but have also been flying through recipes in my cookbook challenge.

Let's see, it's the 14th and I've made 6 recipes. You'd think at that rate I'd almost be done, but I'm not.

In my quest to eat less processed food, I spent part of the summer experimenting in making my own pasta sauce and wasn't really successful when I tried to wing it. Bland, flavorless, mealy. Little did I know that the answer to my pasta sauce quandry was right in this little book of mine...twice. You may recall back in August when I took some leftover tomato soup made from How to Eat Supper and made a delicious pasta sauce. Well, this is a nice counter to that. Where the soup based sauce was rich and slightly creamy, this is chunky with a kick from some red pepper flakes.

Both ends of the spectrum covered, and I'm not sure whether I'll try my had at perfecting my homemade sauce any further. I mean, why bother...someone else worked it out for me ;)

Now to decide which will grace my first version of homemade pasta using my new Kitchenaid pasta attachments that I plan to make this weekend.

In Which I Finish.

Project #50 in '50 in 2009 Challenge' - Front Door Draft Stopper

Ahhh, look at that!

50 projects completed in 2009, how's that for following through?

I'm not sure how I got the idea for making a draft stopper for our front door, but it came to me and it was the perfect last project of the year. Easy, which was essential considering I only had a couple day left in the month.

I actually made another one today (a bit more complicated because it stops up both sides of the door, to use on our basement door that we use as our main entrance), which jump started my mission for 2010 - "2010: The Year of Finishing Things," which includes finishing up my various stashes (and by finishing up, I mean destashing).

So instead of trying to complete 50 projects this new year, I'm just going to focus on getting things done, crafty or otherwise. Rather than share my personal New Year's Resolutions (I've been sharing a bit too much here lately ::cough cough weekly weight updates cough cough::), I've decided to outline the things I want to get done...at least so far. I'm sure the list will just grow longer & longer as the year goes on. Hopefully I'll be successful in knocking things off as well.

- knit a winter hat to coordinate with my french yarn scarf

- use my italian yarn to knit mittens

- my May One for Me, One for You quilt square

- my June One for Me, One for You quilt square

- my July One for Me, One for You quilt square

- both August One for Me, One for You quilt square

- put together, bind & quilt my One for Me, One for You quilt

- finish the AFI Top 100 films (so close, so very very close)

- finish cataloging my PEZ collection on Flickr

- declutter the house (got a great start, just need to finish up the basement & lightly go through the rest of the house)

- deplete yarn stash to fit in my wicker laundry basket with room to spare

- deplete fabric stash

- update my inspiration books completely

- transfer our favorite recipes onto cards

- complete the sock monkey blanket

Big list so far, huh?