2014 Mood Blanket

I am trying to post this from my phone, so excuse any strange autocorrects that I may miss.  =)

I have always wanted to do some sort of "one-a-day" type of project, but I am afraid I won't follow through an entire year. Well, I think this is going to be the year. I am going to make a mood blanket.

My color pallet is a bit monochromatic, but I want something for my bedroom and I like pale blues and greens.

It took me a while to finally decide on a pattern. At first I didn't want to do granny squares so I thought about making a blanket out of flowers. But when I thought about that, I realized it would end up small and bulky. After racking my brain, I decided to make another Babette blanket. But the pattern only has 126 squares. After doing some math and trying to revise the pattern a million different ways, I finally realized that if I dropped the last section off, there are 90 squares.  I will just duplicate it 4 times to make an afghan that will probably be almost queen size!  Perfect! Add a border 5 rows wide and I have 365! 

I am really excited about this and looking forward to what I hope will be a very light blue and green blanket!

Christmas Run-down

I need to stop promising to make blog posts about things. 

I have a lot on my mind with the New Year coming, things I will share, but for now I need to show off all my Christmas crafting...

First, the dresses.  Unfortunately, I do not have any good pictures of my kids wearing their dresses.  I had hoped to get some yesterday, but they got other new clothes that were far more exciting and they passed on wearing their dresses for pictures.  Plus, it's really difficult to get them to pay attention to me long enough to stand still and pose for a picture right now.  Chaos rules.  But here are the dresses on hangers...

Olivia's dress... Lorelei pattern by Lilygiggle

Zoe's dress... Secret Garden pattern by Lilygiggle

Isabelle's dress... Juliet pattern by Lilygiggle 

(this is my favorite of the three, especially once they tried them on)

I made a doll each for the girls.  And Grover Cleveland.  And an elf.

The Prez and our elf Cinnamon

Olivia's Princess Selenia from Arthur and the Invisibles

Isabelle's Bunny

Zoe's Monkey

I need to make Zoe a Bunny for her birthday (tomorrow!) but it's going to be late.  I needed a small break.

And hats... I used my family's Christmas presents as a chance to try out some ideas for hats to make for my shop I plan on opening soon.  The first one probably just seems weird to anyone not from Arkansas...  Razorback college football (and basketball) are huge around here.  I need to make some revisions, but this is what I like to call "The Mo-Hawg"



For my mother, I got inspired by the Stained Glass afghan I made a few years ago, and I turned it into a hat. 



Then, as I was making it, I thought it might make a really nice snowflake if I changed up the colors...  and my sister's hat was born:



And that's about it... I did make a mohawk hat for my brother-in-law, but I didn't get a picture of it.

I have so many ideas running around in my head to work on for my shop.  I'm excited.  =)  It'll probably take me a little bit to get it up and running, but I'll let you know!

I am going to do a mood blanket over the course of 2014.  I will go into it more later (I'm tired, can you tell?) but I thought I'd give you a sneak peek at what's to come:

Keeping busy...

I have quite a few things to show off, but I'm too lazy to upload them right now.  I have the next week off of work (WOOO!) so I promise I'll get them up soon.  I've been so busy the past few weeks, and I've loved every minute of it. 

Unfortunately, I haven't been working out, and that's something I need to remedy.  Next week I really have no excuses (although I'm sure I'll try to find a few) and I plan on getting back in the swing of things.  I had to bow out of my half-marathon tomorrow because I just haven't been able to train at all for a while.  First my diabetes made me feel like total poo, then I got sick, then we had an ice storm... I know I could walk 13.1 miles tomorrow, but I'd be in a world of pain for it.  I'm just going to suck it up and focus on my one in March.

As for day-to-day, I've let crochet take back over all my time.  I have to learn to balance it all, but I've been having so much fun.  Making dolls and hats... and decisions.  When I got into making my half-marathon hats, I had that spark ignite again to try to do something to make money with my hobby.  At first I thought about making up patterns, and I may do that some, but I've had people asking me to make them things left and right.  I made 3 hats for one coworker, need to make one for another coworker, and another friend asked me to make her a doll for her granddaughter's birthday after the New Year.  I have another coworker making a list of things she wants. 

So, I'm going to call it official.  I'm going to do custom dolls and hats.  And I also will make a lot of Christmas things and next Christmas do a booth at a craft fair... ornaments, elf dolls, garland, things like that.  I'm super stoked about it.  I don't anticipate making a ton of money or replacing my job (although wouldn't that be awesome?) but I love doing this and even if I'm not making a lot of money, I'll be enjoying it.  I had, a few years ago, tried to give this a bit of a go, but I wasn't very confident about it.  I think now is the time though to revive ZIO Creations.  =)

I have a lot of non-crochet details to work out in the next few weeks, but I'll be sure to let you all know about it.  =)