Related posts:
Starry eyes and star-studded ideas
Ten-pointed crochet star - first attempt!
What a difference the right hook makes
Talking about stars again, so I thought it might be appropriate to have Philip Quast in the 10th Anniversary Concert of Les Miserables, singing Inspector Javert's theme, "Stars".
[He holds that final note for about 12 seconds! No wonder people jumped to their feet to applaud!]
So, you know that my current crochet pet project has been these ten-pointed stars that I keep making, sort of like piling up a series of motifs and then deciding what to do with them after they threaten to overrun a project box or two.
As a thought experiment, I started wondering what it would take to create a twelve-pointed version.
Those who are more skilled at crochet than I am, and who watched the video tutorial multiple times, will quickly have worked out that if each star point spans four stitches and a circle of forty stitches yields ten points, then a circle of forty-eight stitches will yield a star with twelve points.
I am only a newbie, so forgive me for taking so long to arrive at this conclusion.
Pictures and comments beneath the cut. I guess this is my first real crochet tutorial?
Friday, April 30, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Gotta WTF 'em all - jejemons!
Okay, I admit it, the first time anyone tried explaining to me what a jejemon was, I thought of THIS demotivational poster:
I was going to let that poster stand for all my thoughts on the subject, but I thought it would be nice to have my statement on these sorts of people right here on the blog for all the world to see.
If I really wanted to be honest about it, jejemons are just the latest in a long line of people who make me despair for the future of the English language. I can live with the fact that a living language is an evolving language, but I personally cannot abide such hideous constructions as "bestfriend" and its equally obnoxious contractions "BFF" and "bestie". [Oh, don't get me started....]
And then there are the jejemons. I won't strain my fingers and my brain trying to type something up in their representative idiom, and I won't break your eyes - so, all I want to say is this.
Look, I can understand that jejemons think their language is fun and, yes, unfortunately, uniquely suited to their way of thinking. But if a jejemon really wants to put in so much effort in encoding his/her thoughts in this particular way, and if he/she really wants other people to pretty much break their brains trying to decipher the stream of visual gibberish....
How will I know that you're actually trying to send me something as profound as
Four score and seven years ago,
or
To be or not to be,
or even
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,
if the alphanumeric symbols are just a mush of visually unappetizing soup?
And that is all I have to say about that.
I was going to let that poster stand for all my thoughts on the subject, but I thought it would be nice to have my statement on these sorts of people right here on the blog for all the world to see.
If I really wanted to be honest about it, jejemons are just the latest in a long line of people who make me despair for the future of the English language. I can live with the fact that a living language is an evolving language, but I personally cannot abide such hideous constructions as "bestfriend" and its equally obnoxious contractions "BFF" and "bestie". [Oh, don't get me started....]
And then there are the jejemons. I won't strain my fingers and my brain trying to type something up in their representative idiom, and I won't break your eyes - so, all I want to say is this.
Look, I can understand that jejemons think their language is fun and, yes, unfortunately, uniquely suited to their way of thinking. But if a jejemon really wants to put in so much effort in encoding his/her thoughts in this particular way, and if he/she really wants other people to pretty much break their brains trying to decipher the stream of visual gibberish....
How will I know that you're actually trying to send me something as profound as
Four score and seven years ago,
or
To be or not to be,
or even
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,
if the alphanumeric symbols are just a mush of visually unappetizing soup?
And that is all I have to say about that.
Monday, April 26, 2010
SABLE Strikes Again
And what does SABLE stand for?
Warning, as always: There is a TVTropes link in that blog post.
***
I've been trying to eat up and/or otherwise dispatch several items from my yarn stash lately since my stashing policy is not to buy anything new if there's still something that can be used. It's a good thing that lately my interest has turned to motif-type work: see my sudden burst of making granny squares, and then my current mini-obsession of ten-pointed stars.
Having finally made some headway in clearing out the bits and pieces of yarn in my stash, I felt justified in buying something like THIS:
Caron One Pound Yarn in Royalty (a sort of dark royal blue). One skein is 16 oz and costs about PHP600.
When I went to Dreams Yarnshoppe to pick this behemoth up over the weekend I was pretty much the first customer for the day. (Work ended at 4am; I killed time till 7am, picked up the boyfriend from his office, we went to Banchetto in Ortigas to eat and kill more time, and arrived in Makati just before 10am.)
The saleslady there, who knew me by sight, was pretty curious as to why I hadn't been dropping in - I laughed sheepishly and said that I was on the night shift, so couldn't really go gallivanting freely about the city.
I must have looked so strange exiting Dreams since I was carrying a whole pound of yarn in my backpack - and I was grinning like a loon to boot. The feeling of having new yarn is really quite intoxicating, heh.
Anyway, this is a lot of yarn to get in one purchase and I'm already lining up a host of projects in which I can put it to good use. There's this really pretty mesh shopping bag to start with (my first time to make one of those), and of course I want to make more granny squares and a few more ten-pointed stars, and then I want to try making a cable scarf....
Warning, as always: There is a TVTropes link in that blog post.
***
I've been trying to eat up and/or otherwise dispatch several items from my yarn stash lately since my stashing policy is not to buy anything new if there's still something that can be used. It's a good thing that lately my interest has turned to motif-type work: see my sudden burst of making granny squares, and then my current mini-obsession of ten-pointed stars.
Having finally made some headway in clearing out the bits and pieces of yarn in my stash, I felt justified in buying something like THIS:
Caron One Pound Yarn in Royalty (a sort of dark royal blue). One skein is 16 oz and costs about PHP600.
When I went to Dreams Yarnshoppe to pick this behemoth up over the weekend I was pretty much the first customer for the day. (Work ended at 4am; I killed time till 7am, picked up the boyfriend from his office, we went to Banchetto in Ortigas to eat and kill more time, and arrived in Makati just before 10am.)
The saleslady there, who knew me by sight, was pretty curious as to why I hadn't been dropping in - I laughed sheepishly and said that I was on the night shift, so couldn't really go gallivanting freely about the city.
I must have looked so strange exiting Dreams since I was carrying a whole pound of yarn in my backpack - and I was grinning like a loon to boot. The feeling of having new yarn is really quite intoxicating, heh.
Anyway, this is a lot of yarn to get in one purchase and I'm already lining up a host of projects in which I can put it to good use. There's this really pretty mesh shopping bag to start with (my first time to make one of those), and of course I want to make more granny squares and a few more ten-pointed stars, and then I want to try making a cable scarf....
Saturday, April 24, 2010
What a difference the right hook makes
Related posts:
Starry eyes and star-studded ideas
Ten-pointed crochet star - first attempt!
I'm still churning out those beautiful ten-point stars, but now I am working with an entirely different material: cotton crochet thread, like this:
I'd actually gotten this ball of thread early on when I took up crochet again, but found to my dismay that I had serious problems working with it. Now I know why: I was using the wrong hook. Maybe the largest steel crochet hook would work with this, but I prefer to use the new arrivals. Specifically, I've found that both the C-2 and D-3 hooks work well with this fine thread.
And here is the result of my hard work with these two new hooks and this old material.
This was done with the C hook, incorporating three rounds of star points. Looks kinda ruffly. This one just will not lay flat, no matter what I do. That doesn't mean it's not pretty or whatever - it's just that it's got limited uses if it cannot be flattened out.
And this motif was made with the D hook, incorporating only two rounds of the star points. I've come to the conclusion that I'll just stick with the two rounds for all other examples - not only can the star lie flat with just a little persuasion, it actually rather looks so much prettier.
And a stray example with some blue ombre crochet thread that I had on hand. I love the color of the thread, but I've decided that it doesn't quite work out so well with this motif. I'll look for some other way to use the thread.
All of these stars, including the MASSIVE gray one I did as a first attempt, are now hanging from the sides of my cubicle. I tend to think they give my workspace quite a bit of personality.
I wonder if I could try assembling multiple motifs into something like a scarf. Something very light and breezy, obviously, considering the cotton crochet thread and the fine hook and close work. Hmm.
*wanders off thinking*
Have a nice weekend, everyone!
Starry eyes and star-studded ideas
Ten-pointed crochet star - first attempt!
I'm still churning out those beautiful ten-point stars, but now I am working with an entirely different material: cotton crochet thread, like this:
I'd actually gotten this ball of thread early on when I took up crochet again, but found to my dismay that I had serious problems working with it. Now I know why: I was using the wrong hook. Maybe the largest steel crochet hook would work with this, but I prefer to use the new arrivals. Specifically, I've found that both the C-2 and D-3 hooks work well with this fine thread.
And here is the result of my hard work with these two new hooks and this old material.
This was done with the C hook, incorporating three rounds of star points. Looks kinda ruffly. This one just will not lay flat, no matter what I do. That doesn't mean it's not pretty or whatever - it's just that it's got limited uses if it cannot be flattened out.
And this motif was made with the D hook, incorporating only two rounds of the star points. I've come to the conclusion that I'll just stick with the two rounds for all other examples - not only can the star lie flat with just a little persuasion, it actually rather looks so much prettier.
And a stray example with some blue ombre crochet thread that I had on hand. I love the color of the thread, but I've decided that it doesn't quite work out so well with this motif. I'll look for some other way to use the thread.
All of these stars, including the MASSIVE gray one I did as a first attempt, are now hanging from the sides of my cubicle. I tend to think they give my workspace quite a bit of personality.
I wonder if I could try assembling multiple motifs into something like a scarf. Something very light and breezy, obviously, considering the cotton crochet thread and the fine hook and close work. Hmm.
*wanders off thinking*
Have a nice weekend, everyone!
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Earth Day 2010!
"...[a]ll of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, which is our only home." - Carl Sagan, talking about the "Pale Blue Dot" photograph. The pale blue dot is, of course, our very own planet Earth.
At the end of his documentary/presentation film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore condenses the message down into four simple words:
That's all we've got.
It's Earth Day today. What have you done for our planet lately?
***
References:
Earth Day
Pale Blue Dot photograph
An Inconvenient Truth
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