Still busy!

I haven't had much crafty stuff to blog about recently because I've been working on an order of soap sweaters for Seattle Sundries. Anne makes this wonderful round soap, and I make little sweaters to go over the soap. The idea is that the sweater acts as a washcloth, and as the soap gets smaller over time, you can tighten the drawstring at the top, so that you are able to get the most life out of even the tiniest slivers of soap. Pretty awesome! :)

Assuming all goes well, I'll be finishing these up this weekend. Then I get to move on to my next big project, which is a super sekrit custom order. I won't be able to share what it is until April! All I can say is that I've gotten about 1/3 of the way done, and it looks AWESOME so far. The next step is going to be the most difficult one, so I'll be glad to figure that out and then get it out of the way, because finishing the rest will be smooth sailing after that!

Sorry for the vague teasers! I can only promise that if you're a fan of video games, you will love getting to see what I'm making!

They're back...

My crochet hooks, that is. Anne ordered another batch of soap sweaters, which means I shall now go into "crocheting during every spare moment" mode. Especially since I also have to finish the baby afghan for Sarah's imminent giving birth (her due date is March 5th, I think), and I haven't had a Dalek in my shop for months now. Never mind making stuff for my shop that isn't just reproductions of popular sellers. :)

I made myself a little schedule to get all of this done by the end of the month, and ambitious doesn't even begin to describe it. So far, I've stuck to it, and maybe even gotten a little bit ahead, but that's only one day of the schedule. We'll see how it goes when the schedule gets crazier. :)

Luckily, I've got an hour+ each way bus commute for 4 days next week, with the possibility of that extending into the following week. So that's some prime crochet time. I even managed to get a little work done on the afghan this morning on the bus, despite my regular commute being pretty short. But right now, I'll take whatever time I can get. :)

Crafts? Yeah, I still do those...

I was going back through some old blog posts yesterday, and I realized I haven't really talked much about what crafty projects I've got going on lately. Part of this might be that I haven't had many crafty projects lately. :) I'm working on more soap sweaters for Seattle Sundries mostly, and not much for my own shop.

I am working on a few neat things for Christmas though. I decided to give all of the kids on my mom's side of the family crocheted things. Some of them were things I had worked on previously, though I am now faced with the need to figure out how to make a teapot to go with Darci-Anna's tea cups. I know what I'm doing for the basic shape and the handle, but the spout has got me all confused. Teapot spouts are really strange when you try to break them down into simple shapes!

I still have to work on Peter's gift, of course, but at least Sarah (my sister) told me just what he wanted, down to the colors it should be. I wonder if that's more of an attempt to match his room than his personal preferences, but I don't know a lot of almost 3 year olds, so who knows if he has a personal preference yet. :)

And whether the new baby (Sarah's due in early March) will have an afghan at Christmas or not is debateable. For the sake of my sanity, I may put that off until after Christmas. :)

As for my shop, I know what I WANT to be working on, when I have the time. I sold four Decapitated Dollies to one person, so that section of my shop is looking a little sad. All the historic ones are gone now, and all of the dark haired girls as well. Those blondes just won't sell!

I also bought a sweater that I'm going to take apart for the yarn, which will then become some hats. I think that one of them is going to be my entry for the Secret Serenity challenge of the Big Damn Crafters, and I think I just figured out how to make it work even better. Now whether anyone will actually want to buy and wear this hat is another matter entirely. Here's a hint for those who will get it: layer cake dress hat. :)

And in other news, I joined Twitter today, because people have been talking about it on the EtsyRain message board. You may find me here.

A fun collaboration

About a month or so back, Anne of Seattle Sundries contacted me to see about having some soap "sweaters" or "socks" crocheted to go around her soap. Of course, the interesting aspect of this request was that since her soap is round, she wanted something that could fit to the shape of the soap.

I'm always up for a good challenge, and by the time I had responded to her initial inquiry, I was already sketching out little ideas on paper. To my brain, the best way to figure out how to crochet something unusual is to break it down into its component shapes, figure out how you would crochet each shape separately, and then put it all back together. It's trial and error sometimes, but with these little soap sweaters, it didn't take me long at all to figure it out. Even better, I hadn't seen the size of Anne's bars of soap before I made my prototypes. But between a pretty good guess and the stretchiness of yarn, they fit perfectly.

And I have to HIGHLY recommend Anne's soap across the board. She gave me a sample bar to try out the soap sweaters on, and then she swapped me a bar of soap for something I had made. I picked out the Manly Man and Backwoods varieties, thinking that Jerome might like one or both. Well, I'm using the Backwoods in the shower, and it's great. It's fresh and clean smelling, without being overpowering in the slightest. And the lather, both in and out of the soap "sweater" is fabulous!