Purses? Clutches? Get it?

Bear hat for my friend Luke: completed. He was delighted. It fit perfectly. It had better — it was the fourth or fifth time I’d knitted the damn thing. Knowing he liked it, I no longer hated him or the hat.

Not pictured: the Knucks I knitted for a friend. No lettering, just a band of skulls and crossbones running around each hand. My friend hounded me for them for ages, then once he got them, begged that I drop the temperature in Los Angeles so his hands wouldn’t get sweaty as he wore them everywhere. In August. Rico is a lunatic. Fortunately, 1. that’s why we like him and 2. he’s in Europe for a bit, exclusively on bits of the continent where gloves will be a very welcome thing now it’s fall.

Now my projects are down to various knitted projects I’m inventing, adapting and refashioning that will probably take months before they’re done, and that damned pink crocheted purse that only needs blocking, assembling, finishing, lining, and abandoning to its new owner’s clutches.

So much pink

Pink! So much pink!

At least I’m getting to a point on the bag where I have to start thinking about finishing. This whole “create vast swathes of fabric from string” phase is nice, seeing as it’s near-impossible to screw up, but I’m spoiling for the more challenging parts of the project.

Yesterday my brain was practically spilling over with neat ideas for an appliqued design to go on the front of the bag and I can’t wait to get rolling on them. Note to self: Draw at least a few rudimentary sketches in the sketchbook before the ideas disappear into the ether, blown there by a few hours of pagination while I’m at work. Nothing like drawing boxes in Quark to slowly kill the spirit!

Man. The macro capabilities of the camera I’m using are, like, suck and a half. I’m all spoiled by the boyfriend’s beautiful digital SLR. I kept trying to get one part in focus and in all the pictures, the plane that’s nice and sharp is actually six inches behind where I told the camera to aim. I ain’t no raw amateur at macros, either, so I know it’s not just me, and I know I had it set to “macro.” The Cann S45 is a great, sturdy little camera, but it definitely balks at being told to take pictures of things less than two feet away. Which is a problem — who wants to see pictures of yarn taken from across the room?

Intermediator

I’m crocheting away like mad, showing an almost alarming level of dedication to that foofy pink bag I’ve decided to design. From scratch. As a first crochet project. For a pattern I’m going to write.

As I work, I also pause to add to the hectic, out-of-sequence scrawls filling several pages of a little notebook that at least half of the time I actually remember to tuck into my knitting bag. Those cryptic little notes will one day become a pattern.

Nerdy design geek that I am, I’m only a third of the way through the actual bag, and I’m already dreaming of the finished PDF. What will I use for accent colors?, I ask myself. How do I want to shoot the picture for it? And when I look actually look at the notebook to find out how on earth I did that one thing on the other piece that looks like that instead of this, I ask What the fuck is going on here?

There are a lot of scribbles and a lot of little circles with long lines rising from them, and there are things written next to the lines that I think are meant to clarify the mess beneath. They don’t do much about the omissions of little last-minute, “Uh … maybe this will work” adjustments and impromptu increases. (Corners, man. Corners are rough.)

There’s also the difficulty level. I was pretty sure that it’s a beginner pattern — straight lines, no increases, almost all back-and-forth rows — and then I got to the strap and thought “Hmm. Afghan stitch. That looks pretty cool.” It does, too, especially with a variegated yarn with short repeats. It’s such a narrow little strip of crochet that I don’t need the special hook for it, but does it still count as a beginner pattern if you have to learn a whole new kind of technique just to do it?

Not having ever made anything from a crochet pattern, I don’t actually know what a beginning pattern is. I haven’t found a beginner-level pattern that doesn’t make my eyes cross with boredom just looking at it, so making one is out of the question. And I must know what the skill level of the pattern is — how else do I design a really, really cute icon for it?

Update: To hell with Afghan stitch! Curled too much and wouldn’t behave. I may have come up with something cuter, though.