Stars / In your multitudes.... [A crochet tutorial!]

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?

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.

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....

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!

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

5,000 Hits GET!

I am seriously thinking about putting together something for this blog and all its friends, readers and visitors, because it's these wonderful people who have been supporting it for all the time it's been around.

Would anyone be interested in a giveaway or something? Like I could make a scarf or a hat for the winner of a competition centered on this blog? I'm serious, you know. I'll run off and make plans forthwith, and you, friends, will be the first to know what happens next.

Thank you so much for reading!

Crochet Hooks Galore

An almost-completed collection of crochet hooks [non-steel ones].

B-1 [2.25mm]
C-2 [2.75mm]
D-3 [3.25mm]
E-4 [3.50mm]
F-5 [3.75mm]
G-6 [4.00mm]
H-8 [5.00mm]
I-9 [5.50mm]
J-10 [6.00mm]
K-10.5 [6.50mm]
L-11 [8.00mm]
M-13 [9.00mm]
N-15 [10.00mm]

No, it's not a code. It's just a list of the hooks in the above photograph, arranged in ascending order from left to right.

With the arrival of the newest items - that would be the first four in the list - I'm pleased to announce that my battery of crochet hooks is pretty much complete.

I am a happy crochet geekette, yes I am. I'll just run along and go work up a few projects, shall I? :D Catch you on the other side.

This morning I was a bit of a stereotype....

Dregs of a latte + beautiful Parker ballpoint pen + trusty moleskine notebook = a familiar image about writers.

I was fresh out of my Friday night shift and waiting for a ride to a morning appointment. Having already tried to sleep at the office - and failing miserably - I decided to keep myself awake with a cuppa, and while I was there I decided I'd better get some writing done.

This year I'm a bit...daunted about even attempting to join NaNoWriMo. This partly has to do with the concept - sure, I've written fanfiction before, but do I have enough juice in me to pound out 50,000 words of the same?! And it partly has to do with the work, as I'm not sure how I can work in writing 2,000 words a day around the long hours of teaching people how to speak English.

[And November and December are busy months at the office apparently.]

So one of the things I wound up writing in the notebook was a series of questions regarding NaNo readiness. I wonder if I can survive the month if I take on the workload, write the daily 2,000 or so words, and sleep six or seven hours every day.

...Yeah, that's got me quaking in my shoes a bit. Let's see how it goes from here.

Ten-pointed crochet star - first attempt!

Well, gee, blogger-lady, that post title just says it all, doesn't it?

As soon as I had some free time to work in, I went ahead and made a first attempt at the ten-pointed crochet star that I mentioned in the previous entry.

The amazing thing is that it looks damn GOOD already and I've only done two rounds of the ten points of the star! According to the video tutorial, there should be four rounds of the star points. AND, given enough yarn, it's possible to simply keep on adding star-point rounds to the pattern to make it into something really big and gorgeous!

Just as it is, the star makes for a very beautiful motif, something to build onto or sew onto something else. Although one must be careful - the way the star is constructed, it really will become rather ruffle-y, so it cannot be made to lie flat unless one carefully blocked it.

Another thing I found out while completing this motif was that if done in worsted-weight yarn, it is simply too big to turn into a hair ornament. One motif is enough to wear in the hair as a large accent. I guess I will need a much finer yarn to create a smaller version of this star, such that it becomes possible to wear two or three of them in the hair at a time.

Nevertheless, I am quite pleased with how this first attempt has turned out. I must make more.

Starry eyes and star-studded ideas

So I once talked about something I'd found out that reminded me very much of Der Tod from the musical Elisabeth.

Well, now, I've run across an interesting set of articles that has to do with Sissi herself. [I should be using "Sisi", but for consistency's sake I'll stick with the spelling I started with.]

Writing about being on the trail of one of the world's most ingenious thieves, Wired Magazine wrote up an article about this man and his attempts at stealing various valuable items and huge sums of money - and opens the article with the theft of the Koechert Diamond Pearl - or what is otherwise known as one of the last remaining Sisi Stars.

Here is a lovely painting of Empress Elisabeth, with some of the stars crafted for her to wear in her hair.

So that got me to thinking, I wonder if it was possible to create a crochet version of the Sisi Stars? And in my searching I first came across this tutorial:


How to crochet a ten-pointed star. It has a lovely ruffle-like quality and a lot of space to sew beads into.

If I started with the White and Aran versions of this yarn type, made ten-pointed stars, and then went on to sew in some really magnificent sparkling beads...I wonder how close I could get to crafting some of those stars? :D

I have really got to try this project some time.

New Twists in Crochet: Front/Back Post Stitches

This post is for my dear friend Clair, who was wondering about whether she was getting her front post and back post crochet stitches right.

Crochet normally creates a flat fabric, but some stitches are used to give it a more three-dimensional feel. Both the front post crochet stitch and the back post crochet stitch can create a sort of raised ridge on either the front surface or the back surface of the work.

Front post and back post crochet can be worked on the "regular" stitches: single crochet, double, triple, etc. [American terminology.]

Here's a video tutorial for the double crochet variation, by DragonGrandma on YouTube:



Front and back post crochet are used to create interesting textures in crochet fabrics. They can be used to create variations on ribbing, but one of the main applications for these stitches - particularly when done in double and triple crochet - is for creating cables.

Cables are decidedly among the handsomest and most interesting knitting stitches, and they retain the same gorgeous effect when done in crochet. I've found a few sets of beginner's instructions for cables in crochet here and here.

And there's a particularly delicious photo of a scarf-and-hat duo in crochet cables on page 66 here. I have that book myself and really want to try making the project when I have good natural-hued yarn on hand.

Hope this helps, oneechan.

This week's post o' fannish doom

[Pictures ahead!]


I...I think I'll be able to purchase this gorgeous magazine book, or mook as the Japanese call it, very soon! This is the mook "The Takarazuka III: Cosmos Troupe". It's something like a yearbook, with interviews, pictures, and general silliness of the actresses in a particular troupe of the Takarazuka Kagekidan. In this case, this would be the third installment of this mook for my favorite troupe, Sora - the last one, in fact, for the Top Stars Wao Youka and Hanafusa Mari.


This is the poster for the final stage, or the last show before retirement, of current Yuki Top Stars Mizu Natsuki and Aihara Mika, Roger / Rock On! I have to agree with a friend of mine that the way the titles are written in the poster, they could just as easily be read as "Lodger / Lock On!" - and then you wonder what it really means in terms of the story....

...Yeah, I'm in sackcloth and ashes over Mizu's impending retirement, and I haven't even recovered from Ayabuki Mao's yet - Yumiko's last day in the Kagekidan is on April 25....


And just because all of a sudden the fannish circles in LiveJournal and, to a limited extent, Facebook, are all agog over him and his first full-length Doctor Who episode - I present the Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, and his absolutely EPIC hair.

I am SO looking forward to the episode written for him by none other than NEIL FREAKING GAIMAN.

Plot Bunny ATTACK!

*checks calendar* Okay, whew, it's still April.

But that means, OH NO it's still only April!

The first time I participated in National Novel Writing Month I wound up writing out an original story that had been knocking around in my head for a few years before I finally got the chance to start on it.

Now, I think I've discovered the seed of my 2010 attempt, several months WAY too early. The funny thing is that this year I may well find myself attempting to write a VERY long fanfic.

*embarrassed grin*

Again, I shall point to THIS GUY and say that it is all HIS fault:



Alistair makes for such a FUN target. Really. It's nice to be able to snark freely at someone in the party, given that I don't much like having Morrigan around (I don't DO three-mage parties very well).

[Oh, lord, he's part Xander and part MALCOLM CAPTAIN TIGHTPANTS REYNOLDS! This explains so much!]

News and Notes from A Strange Weekend

Friday: This was the first time I'd been to work on Good Friday in a few years. [The last time I did it, I was working at Convergys.] Had to settle for eating fast food because Eastwood City, where the office is located, was mostly closed down.

Very disappointing, that. And to think that the place is just teeming with call centers and BPO offices. So everyone who was working over the Holy Week had to eat fast food if they hadn't thought to bring their own snacks.

The bright spot at the end of that shift was my partner deciding he was bored out of his mind at home [because unlike me, he'd had Good Friday off] and coming to pick me up.

Saturday: After a nap and a little time trying to figure out where to watch, we headed out again, this time to catch Clash of the Titans at TriNoMa. General commentary and myth-y geeking out of the disappointed kind here.

We DID get a decent meal out of it, though, as we had dinner at North Park.

Sometimes we are REALLY lucky in terms of going out to eat - we come in just before the crowds, so we get to pick a proper table or booth to eat in and manage to order something before everyone else does.

Sunday: For Easter Sunday, we were meeting a dear friend of ours because she had recently gotten started on crochet, and I had a few spare skeins of various shades of pink yarn rolling around unused in my stash. Rather than letting the yarn go unused, I decided to sell the yarn to my friend. We met up at our neighborhood mall; we were craving yum cha and Chinese food in general, so we met up at a place called Go Fan.

Big mistake as it turned out. The staff filled an order for appetizers and drinks just fine, but screwed up a large order of main and side dishes. All three of us took turns chewing out the hapless manager, rolling roughshod over his feeble pass-the-buck protests, and walked out after irritably settling the bill.

[We shouldn't have paid for anything, since they really fouled up the food order something fierce, but my partner is an honorable man and insisted that they should still get something. If it had been up to me and my friend, we'd have cut and run, and that was the LEAST that place deserved.]

Anyway, we found a much better meal of proper buffalo wings and pizza at a place called Carlo's Pizza, and spent a few hours happily catching up. We did manage to recover from the Chinese-food debacle....

Monday: As Easter Monday is a holiday in France, I didn't have to go to the office [it was CLOSED!] - so I spent my night playing through Dragon Age: Origins. I have a female Elf mage and she now has the Arcane Warrior Specialization. Yes, she's in a relationship with Alistair; I think his sense of humor is all right in a few spots. Plus there was that WTF?! moment when he makes reference to BOTH Youko Kurama [Yu Yu Hakusho] and Tuxedo Kamen [Sailor Moon] - wow, are BioWare geeks or no?

***

Food for thought, which I find very crafty and adorable: Truckers Pick Up Quilting and Knitting. One of the guys quoted in there is a TOTAL thread geek, or I'm chopped liver....

And a rather neat idea for hookers: DIY Easy Comfort Crochet Hooks. So I guess I will try this one on for size and then get to sewing up my very own roll-up storage for my hooks....

Now, THAT'S Perseus.

Perseus holding the head of Medusa, sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini. This statue is located in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, Italy. Note the details: winged cap, no horse, a specific blade given by Hephaestus. Not included in the sculpture are the other iconic parts of the myth: the purse that could expand to hold Medusa's head, and Athena's highly polished shield, which allowed the hero to see and slay the only mortal Gorgon.

I find it a bit of a coincidence that the last two movies I saw have both been riffs on the myth of Perseus: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, and Clash of the Titans [2010].

What did not surprise me was that both movies got the story rather...wrong. The current generation of moviegoers doesn't know their Greek myths, and no one cares enough to get all the details right.

Coming out of the theater where I saw Clash with my partner tonight, I accidentally listened in on a girl as she enthusiastically explained to her companion that the movie was a riff on the Christ theme. This is probably due to how Perseus was presented: the only demigod on earth, therefore a "son of god" and a savior. Proves my point in the previous paragraph, really....

At least Percy Jackson made it a central part of the plot that the gods simply could not keep it in their royal pants and kept producing so many half-divine children.

When I was a kid one of my favorite books was Edith Hamilton's 1942 book Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. I had been given a paperback reprint copy for some occasion or another, and basically read it near to shreds. And one of my favorite myths was that of Perseus.

I've been cringing a lot at all these remakings and revisitings of the Greek, Roman, and Norse tales. I have loved these tales of tragedy and triumph for many years, and to see them get mucked around with through accident or design really rather hurts quite a bit.

More cosplay wishing

Previous posts/mentions here and here.

Summertime has come and with it, lots of opportunities for people to cosplay. I'd like to be one of those people who get all dolled up and parade down catwalks - but, as always, money (and the lack thereof) gets in the way. Another obstacle would be time - most cons take a whole day or a whole weekend; I'm on the night shift from Monday to Friday, so I spend my days and precious weekends sleeping.

I guess that I shall dream of cosplaying instead.

I wonder how long it would take me to gather up the components for these two outfits? And boy oh boy, if I wanted real-looking accessories I'd really be up a creek without a paddle....


The details on his coat just SHOUT custom-made. Damn, I want to kidnap the costume designer.


And good luck, self, in finding that bag!

*goes off to console herself with some movies and a liter of Gatorade*