Bigfoot

A little while ago my husband requested a pair of socks that weren't made from wool. (His feet are naturally warm, and wool socks are just too hot for him.) After looking around I found a perfect yarn for some socks. I chose Knitpicks Comfy Yarn in fingering weight which is 75% cotton and 25% acrylic. Cotton doesn't stretch like wool does, so the acrylic gives it that little bit of extra stretch. He picked out the Jalapeno colorway.

It's been a while since I have made socks for him and I always forget how much longer they take to make than socks for myself. Not to mention that his feet are extra wide, so I had to modify the pattern to make the feet wider.

I made them toe-up so I could try them on his feet as I went and so that I wouldn't have to worry about the possibility of running out of yarn by the time I got to the toe.

In the end, they seem to fit and he likes them. (Even after I made him put them on for pictures.) Yay!

Hello World!

Welcome to post #1 of the CrystalCrafts blog. This is a place where I can keep track of what I'm working on while sharing them with you at the same time. In fact, over the last few days I finished some projects that I want to show off. The first one is a knit tank top. The pattern comes from Lion Brand and it is called the All Season Shell (60433). I used 100% cotton yarn (Loops and Threads Brand Cotton Club in Wild Rose) in the hopes that it would be nice and cool for the summer. Turns out the yarn is thicker than I intended and it may not be as cool as I wanted, but we'll just have to see what happens. At the moment it has been washed and it drying in my craft room. I am very glad it turned out since the first attempt was kind of a failure. I finished it, went to try it on, and my head didn't fit through the head hole. Oh no! Anyway, I Un-did the shoulder seam, picked up the stitches, added a few rows and used kitchner stitch to seam it back together (which looks a lot smoother than when I had sewn it).  I tried it on again and voila! my head fits through the head hole. Yipee! I don't have a picture of me wearing it yet, but here it is drying:

The next project that I recently finished was a diamond pattern crochet hat. This hat is kind of special because it is the first item I made from fiber that I completely processed myself. A friend of mine gave me wool from her sheep. First step: skirting. I took the wool out of the bag, got rid of the dirtiest parts and saved the rest.

For this step I decided to take the wool out to the porch. I bought some cotton zip-up pillow cases to put the wool in for the next step: washing.

Then it was bath tub time. I turned up the water as hot as possible, filled up the tub, and the wool went swimming. The tricky part here is making sure that the wool is not agitated because heat+water+agitation=felting which means a huge blob of wool that cannot be spun. 

After combing out the wool with some dog undercoat rakes (which I will never have to do again since i got some awesome home made wool combs- thanks Dad!) I spun it on my amazing Kromski Sonata. I ended up with quite a bit of yarn. (576 yards if you want to know exactly how much.)

I took 1 hank, dyed it with blue raspberry kool aid and crocheted it into a hat:

Voila!

Now I'm off to go work on a new project. Not sure what it will be yet, but I'll let you know when I figure it out!