Thursday, May 30, 2013

One Little Plant Cozy

Today I'm participating in Habitual Homebody's crochet along!  This month, we're doing a cute crochet plant cozy.  This is my plant, meet Jill:


Jill is a plant that I got when I was picking up flower pots for my front porch.  I decided that I needed a little green for my office for work, and Jill fit the bill.  She's just a little succulent, and she looks a little like a cactus.  She looks pokey, but really she's just fuzzy.


I made Jill's cozy with leftover yarn from the big granny square blanket.  I followed the pattern from Hopscotch Lane as it applied to my plant.  However, my ruffle turned out a bit bigger than theirs.  I think I needed to tone down the ruffle a bit in order to get it to stand up straight, but I kinda like the way it turned out.


Jill now sits on my desk at work.  I hope I can keep her alive, I tend to kill most plants, but I think she's supposed to be pretty easy to take care of, so we'll see if she can last!


Friday, May 17, 2013

Crocheted Granny Square Afghan for our Queen Bed

It's Friday, but I'm off work today!  This is the first "vacation" day I've had in 2013.  And it's not really a vacation day because I'm pretty much just making up time off from all the extra hours I worked earlier this week going to Chicago for some training.  But it's GLORIOUS!  Nothing to do today except get some grocery shopping done.   How stinkin' lovely!  Wish I could have Fridays off every week :)

For the last few weeks, I've been working on a pretty big project.  Now, it's finally ready to show you!  Eeeeee!  I'm so excited about this one!  Check out our new granny square afghan!


This is the first time I've completed a really big blanket.  It's also the first granny square project I've done ever!  Sewing them together did take some time, but I had a system to it that made it not too bad.  I created all of the squares first, then sewed large squares together in sets.  Instead of going through all of my little squares & sewing in the ends all at once, I sewed them in individually as I chose them to sew into the large squares.  Does that make sense?  So kind of a sew as you go kind of thing so that I wasn't sitting around for days just sewing in loose ends.


I used the pattern & colors directly from the Garden Patch pattern on Lion Brand's site here.  It was just so pretty I had to keep it as it was.  It adds so much color to our previously pretty dull bedroom.  Plus, it's great for pulling over us in the middle of the night when it gets chilly with the windows open & the ceiling fan on.


There are many different ways to sew squares together, but I did mine by taking the two squares I was working on and placing them together, right-side facing each other.  Then I whip stitched the edge that I was sewing together through the back loops only (with one of the green yarns).  When done, fold it open & you can't even see the stitching, & it's pretty quick to get it all together.


I did end up with a good amount of yarn leftover.  I'm gonna run over to Ikea today too in order to pick up some fluffy pillow inserts & make a couple of pillow covers with the leftover yarn for the living room & bedroom.  Pretty excited about those too!


Have a good weekend friends!


Thursday, May 16, 2013

What's Up With Me Lately?

Maybe you've noticed, I haven't been blogging as much as I used to.  Time, you know?  It's just so stinkin' limited around here.  Mostly because I work 3 jobs - 1 full time, 1 part time, & 1 bookbinding business & I have a medical resident-husband (meaning, I have a 4th job as homemaker too).  Plus, bonus, I'm going BACK to grad school.  Why?  Because I'm nuts that's why.

I just started this week, but I'm going to Penn State - World Campus.  That means it's Penn State, but online, which is going to be interesting.  I'm enrolled to get a Graduate Certificate in Statistics, & I have plans to possibly go on for a masters when that's done (but that depends on the fellowship match results etc).  The cert will take a year, and the masters would take another year on top of that if all goes according to plan... a little longer if not.  I've been saying for a long time that I should have done something with math.  I originally went to college wanting to major in accounting, but after one really bad teacher, I changed it to law.  Then after being a paralegal for 3 years discovered I don't like law at all!  Woops!  Got a masters in public administration.  Got a job at the U.

Now, both my full time job & my race timing job involve a lot of data management.  Like, that's pretty much what I do... database development & management basically.  With a little finance thrown in.  I love data!  I love numbers!  I love manipulating data.  Thus... I'm getting some education in that field everyone seems to love to hate, stats.

Anyway, so there's that, I'm back at the school thing.  Also, I just don't have that much to talk about lately.  Life is in one of those stagnant phases where we're just hangin' out.  We've decided not to really do anything with our new condo since we wont be here but a year.  We are also completely lacking in the things that I assume most people our age are consumed with - working on the house/yard &/or raising kids.  So the majority of my days look basically the same.  Side note, have you heard this?  Anyway, that doesn't leave that much to blog about on a regular basis.

I have been crocheting a lot, & I have a big project coming up to show you tomorrow.  I also know of approximately a whole classroom full of babies being born soon so I'll have some things that I'll be whipping up for them... Then hopefully there should be some fun things happening this summer that I may blog about, you know, weekend trips & such.  Plus of coarse I'll be letting you know when there is anything cool happening in my shop, so my blog posts wont be stopping completely, they just may or may not be as frequent.  I'm not gonna stress about it, you shouldn't either :-)


Blogging tips