Craft Enabled, Domestically Disabled

Summer of Flowers, week seven

Continued from here.

A note regarding all of the crocheted flowers so far: I've had a bit of trouble reading the instructions, but I've managed to complete them all so far without too much difficulty. Whew. Also, I am now all caught up because I could do like, four crocheted flowers in a day compared to the knitting. Whew! Did pretty much all of these except the last one while on a 3-day trip. 

43. Chrysanthemum. 

Yup, that is definitely a bit easier to do in crochet.

44. Lazy Daisy.

It is pretty lazy!

45. Flared Rose. 

Basically crochet a strip and wind it up.

46. Centifolia Rose. 

Another crocheted strip, though I had a bit of trouble figuring out what it meant by the petals. You crochet petals 4 times in one style, then 4 times after that slightly differently/in a different color, etc.

47. Michaelmas Daisy

Kind of like the chrysanthemum, but you do a lot of decreasing on the center rather than winding it into a tube.

48. Trandescantia

I don't know what to say here. A little awkward, but it worked. 

49: Forget-Me-Not

This started out confusing because it is basically having you make what are really quadruple crochets--which is a very long stitch. And I was all, this is not looking like the picture at all, it's too big, shouldn't I be like, doing something else....? I went to yarn club and said as much, and then one of my compatriots decided to try it out herself and concluded, "It works once you slip stitch at the end and it all pulls together." This is why I have a shot of the back end of the flower so you see what it's supposed to do 

Summer of Flowers, week 6

Continued from here. I am so behind. SO BEHIND and it only gets worse! (This should be flowers #36-42. It is not.)

35. Peony. I took days to make this one too. The petals are pretty easy to make, there's just a lot of them. But the center...It has the same kind of weird looping thing as the Clematis, which sucked a second time. I still can't figure this out at all. The instructions actually say "bring yarn over between needles, take it clockwise around left thumb and back between needles, k st on left-hand needle again, slipping off in the usual way...." I cannot for the life of me get this. Wrapping it around my entire thumb is a huge awkward loop and doesn't work or look good, so wtf? I get that she wants loops to be sticking out so I just kind of gave up and started yanking out extra yarn instead for a loop, but then I couldn't get them to anchor well and....Argh, I gave up. I knit the center flat and just decided to sew loops in at the end.

I hope I never have to do anything like this loop thing again on future flowers.

 

37. Sunflower. This is pretty easy to make--a lot of moss stitch and the cast-on-cast-off petal technique. Dunno why it's in advanced designs, I found it easy. Which i needed at this point.

38. Common Blue Butterfly. This is my favorite one so far, though I did find the directions a bit confusing as to where I was picking up and knitting and how to reverse the petals. But I figured it out in the end!

39. Asparagus. Why is asparagus in here? I do not understand this. It is weird to knit asparagus. (And then have to explain to people in public that you are doing this.) I could follow the pattern just fine--actually the add-on petals are pretty interesting--but still, asparagus? White asparagus?

40. Morning Glory

Pretty much knitting a funnel in the round. Pretty easy to do that. However, the green bit? Who does a "p5tog?" Very hard to do logistcally. Likewise, the 'k1, yo, k1, yo, k1, yo, k1 in one stitch, repeated 4 times...can't physically do this, I had to throw in another DPN after the first two. But that said: it did come out as a pretty cool sepal. I wish I'd done the stems longer, I think I misread them as being around an inch long instead of being closer to two. The flower is kinda large and floppy (as others on Ravelry complained about) but ah well 

But wtf was with row 21 on the leaf? What the fuckery is all of this? It doesn't look good, either. I do not comprehend this worth a damn. Took me forever to get that it seems to boil down to a whole lot of "slip over stitch 1, then move it over and slip another stitch over that, then do it again and again in a pileup" Oh, and I think when she says "bind off," she really meant "bind off so that you only have 7 stitches left, then do it all over again." Grr. Argh. But even then I could never, ever get it to come out right. Over and over and over and over again for hours. I gave up on this shit. I fudged the hell out of the bottom of the leaves in the end. Her other leaves have been great, so hell if I know why this one was so bad. 

AND NOW WE ARE DONE WITH THE KNITTED FLOWERS!!!! HUZZAH!!!!!!

41. Hellebore

42. Buttercup

Oh thank god, so much easier to do and so much quicker. I find the instructions a bit hard to follow (if you're a newbie to yarncrafts, this may not be the book for you), but I figured them out. 

And now I am only four days behind!

Summer of Flowers, week five

Previous week here.

29. Campanula.

Not too hard to make, though the center of the flower was a giant "That's IT?!" reaction from me. Three knots and that's the entire center of a giant flower center? No wonder there's a wide variety of what people did on Ravelry. 

30. Petunia

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I liked doing this one, though the center on it seems a bit ... puny? I like short rows. Took me two days to do two of them, though. 

31. Anemone.

This is kind of awkward to set up, but gets easier to do the closer you get to working the petals. The bobbles are a bit awkward to do, not to mention juggling the colors, but I managed it. I did have to sew it together a bit because the petals seem a little floppy...oh well, I guess it's supposed to look like that.

33: Rosebud

I needed to skip a flower for a bit (see below) and I was already behind because several of these flowers are taking me two days, but the rosebud was pretty quick and easy to make. I don't know why this one's in the intermediate section.

34. Rose

Also pretty easy to make, you basically make a shaped tube and coil it up. Pretty fun. I also skipped ahead to do this one.

32. Blackberry

This is the one I have been dreading doing, because it involves knitting with beads. I had to find a day where I could just sit on my arse with a table around to do it. I took a one-off class in how to do this a while back, so I technically knew how, but if I wasn't doing this daily project I probably would have skipped this one because it's a pain in the ass. I had to go out and buy size 1 yarn and attempt to find big enough beads to thread onto it. I bought a batch of mixed size crafting beads and found out the hard way that finding enough beads for it that were all the same size was an issue. The pattern says to use 54 beads...and it turns out that approximately means "per side, and there's two sides." And I did it the first time in pretty large sized beads, used up 54-ish (it seems to vary how many end up being used in the pattern), and then didn't have enough to do the other side. It didn't look terribly great either, but that doesn't surprise me. So I had to switch to smaller beads (the ones with the most in the box), which was a pain to thread on with a smaller needle, but doable. And it seemed to work better in the knitting, though knitting with beads is kind of teh suck for awkwardness. 

Anyway, I am making the same number of everything that is pictured in the book, but since I ran out of the size beads I ended up using after 2 blackberries, the third uses smaller beads. That actually looks the best, really.

It was kind of a pain in the ass and took me most of a week to do these things. I am waaaaaaaaaaaaay behind now. I don't get why this one is in the "intermediate" section, it should be advanced! i will give the author credit for writing out exactly how to do the beads and explaining what "b1" means in the instructions, thanks! 

On to the advanced designs...gulp 

36. Tea Rose

I skipped ahead to do this one as well. It came out kind of weird somehow--the petals are really floppy and don't really tighten up much when you put the stem on. I also am not sure which ends I was supposed to sew together, so one of them I did the "points" and the other ends I did the larger ends. Sewing the wider points together gave it a more orchid-y look, which I was cool with. I don't think the people who were around while I was finishing it off were too impressed by the final product though. Oh well. 

I'm supposed to be on #39 by now and I'm four behind. Ugh. Waaaaaaaay behind. 

Summer of Flowers, week four

Continued from here.

22. Oak Leaf

Leaves are still pretty easy to do. Huzzah. 

23: Lemon

Again, why is a fruit in a book of flowers? I have no idea. 

This was fairly easy to make except for the fact that "make 1" (which is pulling string from the bottom of your knitting you just did) is pretty easy if you're only doing one or two of them at a time, but doing "make 1, knit 1" for like 4 times in a row is really effing *tight* to knit and is a pain. I tried doing some yarn overs instead (i.e. just wrapping some yarn over the stick to make a new stitch) and it left weird gaps, so...yeah, you really do have to do all those make ones in a row. Ouch, but there it is.

24. Lemon Blossom

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I started and restarted this flower over and over and over again throughout the day. Since I'm imitating the pictures in the book, I then had to do three of these effers.

Why on earth would you k1, p1, k1, p1, k1 into one stitch? Why is this a thing? Such a pain to knit. I was confused at the "slip 2nd and 3rd sts over first" bit. (Seems to boil down to "bind off until you have one stitch left on the far left side.") When you're done with the white, you get a semi-sketchy looking flower that you really need to run some more yarn through to get it to be more flower shaped instead of amoeba-ish. I never did figure out what "with st-st to outside, join cast-on and bound-off edges" meant and gave up on it entirely because it sounded like it wanted me to sew the farthest two petals together and that can't be right. 

 As for the yellow centers: one person on Ravelry was flat out like, "that made no sense, I just sewed a yellow button on instead." I can understand this logic. The instructions kind of sound like they're supposed to be similar to the clematis, except written somewhat more comprehensibly. Which still doesn't make these weird loops any more...yeah, I still don't get this. I just made some stitches I didn't pull all the way through and then did a stitch on top of that that I did pull all the way through, repeat repeat repeat around and around. It's still weird. I can't help but wonder if/when I get to the crochet flowers, if gee, there's a better way to do stuff like this. 

25. Arum Lily

What is a "kpk?" This is in the instructions for this one but there's no definition of it in the book. I eventually figured out it was like the "k1, p1, k1, p1, k1 in first stitch" thing from yesterday, minus a p and a k. Thanks for defining it!

Also irritating: remember how I said while making the lemon that after awhile it is just too hard to keep on doing make ones? THIS PATTERN HAS SO MANY OF THEM. It has you do SIXTEEN OF THEM IN ONE ROW! I have now scientifically figured out how many you can do before you just literally, physically, cannot move the needles or fit on any more of them, and the answer is ten. After ten, you just cannot do it. Graaaaaaaaar. I ended up having to do some yarn overs. For the record, I think it's fine to do on this pattern, you really can't tell since it's so stretched out in that part.

I took a class at Stitches West on pattern design, where I learned that usually someone else is actually writing up the pattern and someone else is testing it. Didn't the test knitter have issues?

Other than that agony, I liked making this one. It looks cute. 

26: Bluebells

I liked this one for the most part, I was able to execute the "knit in the stitch and then pick up a stitch to make a hem" thing pretty well. My only critique would be that the instructions are all "make a small tassel" for the center of the flower and then don't tell people how to do it. I knew how, but not everyone does.

27. Cornflower

This was complicated-ish. The center is done in odd rows of stripes that made me think, "Whaaaat?" (Probably another pattern that would execute better in crochet.)  It also says to repeat the pattern for 9/10-ish times (approximately, I was confused) and I ended up having to do it a little longer to make the center long enough to cast on 22 for the side. However, I did like the cast on/cast off petal overlap thing. Then you basically drawstring the center to tie it up into a pinwheel.

In retrospect, I wish I'd ordered the colors of the petals a bit differently, but somehow I didn't realize that until it was a bit too late and then decided "screw it." 

28. Lavender. 

I liked doing all of these, though it took me a while to get the hang of the lavender. A shorter version of the "cast on a bunch and then bind off" technique.