Craft Enabled, Domestically Disabled

My ribbon yarn stash and what to do with it.

So once upon a time, I started working on the ribbon top mentioned here. And then I ran out of yarn about 2/3 of the way through the sucker.

Well, tonight I was digging around in my craft crap and found an extra stash of ribbon yarn! One more precious ball of Incredible yarn (from before they changed the colors to something uglier)! Hooray, I can finish that top after all!

I also found 2 skeins of Mindfulness Zen Colors yarn (top right corner) that I bought on sale ages ago. What to do with it? What, indeed, to do?

I have a fair amount of leftover ribbon yarn around. I've got 3-4 little balls of yellow and yellow/green ribbon yarn samples. I've got about a ball left of the ribbon from the left (photograph left, not my left) side of the halter. I've got about 3/4 of a ball left of the ModaDea Ticker Tape yarn from the second shrug. And whatever's left over from the Incredible ribbon yarn tops project, after I finish this last gasp. And with regards to non-ribbon yarn that's unusual, I've still got most of a ball of the Hallowig yarn.

What do I do with it? None of it's big enough to make much of a garment with.

Try making a new Side to Side Vest? Make more iPod holders? (With all the new modern ones these days, perhaps not.)

Or should I give in and make scarves to sell? I really should take advantage of the whole Etsy thing before November 1, and then there's the auctions coming up. Or maybe I should try making headbands instead? Most of these (if I made scarves) would not be warm, but pretty. I guess they'd be fast to make and produce, plus there wouldn't be sizing issues.

Maybe I should do that.

I've got a month- what to do?

So, craft fair season is coming up, as is the volunteer fundraiser auction.

Luckily, the two sort of overlap this year, so anything that doesn't sell the first week of the craft fair I can hand over for auctioning if I really want to get rid of it. I really should try to make something that I'd never use (like a glass plate) to sell so that I can get rid of it at the auction if it doesn't. Either way, it'd leave my house. Plus I wouldn't care much about losing out on potential sale money to donate stuff for free.

(Yeah, yeah, sometimes I'm not all that charitable. Or at least, right now I'm pretty dang broke and it pains me to hand out something really nice for free.)

Either way, I am not sure what to sell off this year, exactly.

Possible ideas:

1. make the enamel fish into a full-on necklace with additional beads and chain and sell it.
2. maybe sell off a frit painting. (Though I like the ones I made, and don't really want to give them up.)
3. screenprint a shirt, preferably a Purple Hat Club one if I EVER FUCKING GET A WORKABLE GRAPHIC FOR IT. (Not that I'm bitter!)
4. make another sea necklace, because everyone loves those suckers. Plus I got a bunch of seashells at the beach while on vacation, so I could just drill holes in them and save myself some bucks.
5. sell off some of my marbling papers, because there's a lot of papercrafter types on 3WA and some of them might want to use them for more creative uses than I'm likely to do.

Anyone have any thoughts? I've got a month before these things start up, so I need to pick some stuff to work on and get cracking at it.

Yarn hacking.

Title of this one appropriated from this site, because it's darned appropriate, isn't it? I like the description of it: "He said I was a yarn hacker because I want to get into the yarn and the pattern and understand exactly how things work... and then tweak it to my own purposes."

I did some yarn hacking in order to make these two shrugs. The first one was a pretty dang good trial run for the second one.

Why, yes, I did finally (a) get back to that store, and (b) caved in and bought the ModaDea yarn. Fifty bucks and a few days later and.... you have this one. Alas, I hadn't seen this site before I started working on it, but what I did in the end worked out very well.

I ended up doing it with a very tight custom fit, since the first one came out a little baggy. I actually measured my arms and how wide they were.

(Note: this only applies to MY arms, but this is an example should you try to make your own shrug.)

1. I measured how wide my arms were at the top, just under the armpit (10 inches). This was how wide I did the back piece as well. I have a back seam because since I was figuring it out myself, I wanted to do 2 sides evenly again. Unlike the first shrug, I started from the back and not the arms.
2. I knitted 10 inches wide until I got to the elbow, which was 9 1/2 inches around.
3. My gauge for this was 4 stitches = 1 inch (length and width), so every time I had to decrease by a half inch, I decreased by 1 every other row. When I had to decrease by an inch, I decreased by 1 every row.
4. I measured how long my lower arm was (10 inches long), and measured how wide my arm was around at every inch down. Mine was 9 inches around 1 inch down, 8 /12 inches when it was 3 inches down, 7 1/2 inches around when it was 5 inches down, 6 1/2 inches around when it was 6 inches down, and 6 inches around when it was 9 inches down. So I decreased as indicated in #3 with every decrease in the arm size.
5. The last two inches of the arms, I switched to doing stockinette stitch in the other direction (did one row of purling on the front, then did stockinette as usual).

Alas, people STILL can't figure out what I made, and I keep hearing, "Is that a scarf?" NO. IT IS NOT A SCARF. SCARVES DO NOT HAVE SLEEVES.

I have tried to explain it as, "It's a sweater, minus the front and back bits," and then get, "Well, why don't you make a sweater?"

"BECAUSE I RAN OUT OF YARN, THAT'S WHY! THIS SHIT COST ME $50 FOR FIVE BALLS!"

Then they just look at me funny.

I think they look cool, but I have discovered that wearing them with a backpack er....doesn't work too well. Given that I'm always traveling around with a pack, I may only end up wearing these at work.

Now that I've finally made that shrug... I don't know what to make any more. Maybe I should just make little red sweaters for awhile.

How my shrug is going.

An arm's-eye-view. Luckily, the yarn has run out at convenient points, enough so that it looks like I'm doing this deliberately. Blue/purple fuzzy yarn at the wrists, blue and pink-purple arms, then darker blue/purple yarn at the shoulders.

Too bad everyone who's seen this thinks I'm making a scarf, but what can you do?

Saving for future reference.

Percent Bar Maker. I love the idea, though .png files tend to bugger up things for me. Guh.

My current knitting experiment.

Continuing with my "using up the yarn" theme, I'm trying to knit a shrug. Only from the arms up, and I'll try to meet in the middle.

I used some free sample ribbon yarn on the cuffs, and am currently using the remaining (around 2 balls) of yarn from my first knitting project on the arms. When I run out of that, I'll start doing the shoulders/back in the blue yarns from my halter top.

Let's see how it goes...

My enameling class is done, and so are my pieces.

Voila.

My latest glass piece.

I found a bunch of striped glass and wanted to make some sort of sunset.

Alas, the stripey pieces didn't come out looking so pretty after fusing.

Oh well.