Thursday Thoughts

Source: Pinterest

Aaaah... love in the Movies!

You know what's missing here?

"Here's looking at you kid!"

(Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca)

What are your favorite Movie Quotes?

Meet Jenn from "Color 'n Cream"

Welcome to the first guest post of my new series "Meet in K-town"! I'm happy that Jenn has come over for a little Sunday chat. I've only discovered her wonderful blog Color 'n Cream a few months ago, and fell in love with it immediately. But let's hear what Jenn's got to say about herself and her blog:

"Hello, I'm Jenn from Color 'n Cream and Barbara asked me to do a guest post on her lovely blog. So here I am.

I'm a 30 year old craft addict. I live in the Netherlands and love it here, even more since we've moved back after living in Thailand for a year. It's been a great experience (also for our 2 girls), but I love the Dutch climate so much more...

I've been crafting all my life, owned a sewing machine by the age of 9  and was always busy sewing, felt crafting, drawing, embroidering, making collages, and what not. I started crochet only 3 years ago. Learning crochet took me quite some time, but I was determined to do so! I did it with tutorials and books, reading each word over and over 'till I got it right. I was actually inspired to start crochet by an article about Sarah London in Flow magazine. I tried when I was younger but didn't have the patience then. Luckily I grew in to it and I'm totally hooked now. I just can't stop!!! I love watching those little balls of colorful yarn turn into whatever I want.

My blog is only 4 months old. I kept on postponing it until 'the time was right'. I was always scared I wasn't capable or interesting enough. But after 3 years of wanting, I decided the time was right! And then my blog was born. I don't work much with computers and it took me a lot of time and energy to make it look like it does. Now I'm even making picture frames in Photoshop...

What's obvious about my work is that it's always colorful. Hence the name Color 'n Cream, my 2 favorite things in the world. Sometimes I try to work with less colors, but I always end up with a 'Color Bomb'...

I've been making tutorials and I love it! All the nice comments... It's just so much fun to help people creating. That's the way I've learned it as well. I must say it's pretty time consuming though!! This is my latest tutorial, the Vintage Flower Potholder.

Well, I hope to see you over at my blog Color 'n Cream and that you'll be inspired.

Thank you so much, Barbara, for your invitation! And good luck with you wedding plans!!"


Thank you Jenn for this lovely first guest post, I'm glad to have you here today, and I hope that a lot of people will visit you "at home"! :)

Have a great Sunday everyone,

Free Topic Friday at The Crochet Boulevard...

... please hop over and share your crochet!


Other than the link-party, there's something else I'm looking forward to this week-end: On Sunday I'll publish the first guest-post here on my blog. Want to know who comes to visit? Well, it's.... aaawh - you don't think I'm gonna tell you now, do you? :) Please come back on Sunday and join us for a coffee chat!

I also thought I'd tell you about my new obsession: right now I'm totally addicted to playing Songpop on my smartphone (but I'm sure you can play it on other devices as well, my brother's playing on his tablet). On their website they describe it as "Music Challenges between Friends", and that's exactly what it is: you pick a playlist (I mainly play 50's, 60's, 70's and all kinds of Country), then you listen to five song samples and try to guess them correctly (the quicker the better), and then you send the Challenge to a friend (or a random stranger). Your friend plays the same Challenge and then picks a playlist that he likes and challenges you. John usually kicks my butt with Motown and Hard Rock. It's fun! The more you play, the more "coins" you earn, and the more coins you've got, the more playlists you can "buy". (But don't worry, the whole game is free!) - So, does anyone of you play yet? Or would you like to start playing against me? My username for this game is barbara1811, maybe we'll play together, soon! :)

Have a great week-end everybody!

  

Thursday Thoughts

Source: Pinterest

May the Force be with you!

How are you doing on this Friday Night? Here's a little something that I've made before Christmas (I had already posted a little teaser on my brandnew Facebook-Page): Star Wars fans should recognize it at once (I hope): it's an R2D2-hat:

Some weeks before Christmas, a friend of my sister-in-law asked me if I could make this hat for her son, who is a huge Star Wars fan. She (the mother of the boy) gave me her son's Star Wars craft's book for kids with the written pattern for the hat in it, and I thought, well, that should be all easy-peasy...

For the basic pattern I had to make alternating rounds of single crochet and double crochet stitches. It didn't take long to figure out, that everytime the pattern said "single crochet stitch", they actually meant a chain stitch (easy to see: every dc-round started with three sc's...). It took a little longer to find out, that everytime they wrote "half-double crochet", they actually meant single crochet. Now you might wonder, if I just confused the British and the American crochet terminology, but no - the pattern was written in German!! But I guess it was due to a bad translation of the original pattern, that those mistakes occured - it's just sad, that the pattern wasn't tested (or even looked at) by a crocheter before they published this book...

Funnily, every other row started with something like this: "yarn over, make a stitch..." (which one??), "yarn over, make a stitch in the same stitch..." (okaaaayyy....) "yarn over twice, make a stitch, starting in the same stitch, ending in the next stitch" - WTF??? Honestly, I had no idea what that was supposed to mean, or how it would make an essential difference to the pattern (at the start of the row, which is the backside of the hat) and so I didn't even give it a try!

On we go: next came the big blue field for the camera, which was supposed to be worked in as you go, just changing from grey to blue at the right position in every round. In the end it looked liked a distorted trapezoid. I was disgusted.

Next came the little blue boxes/lines/windows. Although I had exactly the number of stitches that was written in brackets at the end of every round, the pattern didn't work. Not - at - all. In the first pattern round, I still had too many grey stitches left, in the following rounds their stitch count didn't come close to what I've made, and so I had to improvise and use the pictures of the finished hat as a help.

When I was finally finished, the hat was way too short, the form was somehow weird (a little pointy at the top), the fabric was too tight and not flexible (with lots of sc-rounds) and overall it was more than ugly. I didn't mind too much, though, because I had already decided to make another one when the big blue field turned out the way it did, and I just wanted to see where else I would have to make some adjustments.

I started a new try (the one you see here), and made all the necessary adaptions: I adjusted the shape at the top of the hat, making it flat. I've worked mainly with dc-rounds and switched to sc's only where the color-pattern required it, this made the hat more flexible. I didn't crochet the big blue field in, but made it separately and sewed it on afterwards. I improvised with the blue boxes/lines/windows rounds, using the pictures in the book to guide me. Instead of just crocheting little circles (representing cameras and light bulbs) and sewing it on, I added some buttons here and there for a more original look: e.g. the big black camera on R2D2's head was supposed to be a flat black circle only, but I added two black buttons to the circle, a huge one with a smaller one sewed on top - I think this part looks really cool, and very camera-like :)

Luckily, my younger nephew is a friend of the boy I made this hat for, and so I could use him as a model, to see if the hat fits - and it did (and I've heard that it fits the new owner, too)!

I'll be back soon, maybe next time with some more Wedding News - on Sunday we're going to a wedding exhibition with fashion show, that should be fun! :)