Thrifty Crochet

After losing two lots of yarn in January to last-minute snipers at the online auction I changed my tactics and won this seven pound lot for the price I wanted to pay; let's see if it was worth it. There are 16 skeins and balls of yarn, mostly new and unused. Only five have labels, but they're pretty easy to identify. I have two of these Big Twist Cuddle skeins; this yarn has been discontinued since JoAnn closed. I know they run about $11.99 each. I was primarily interested in this lot because of the two wheels of Caron Colorama O'Go, of which I'm trying to thrift enough to make an afghan (and I might have enough now.) This line has also been discontinued and is very pricey now; I've seen them on Amazon from $14.99 to $23.47. This one is a Mandala self-striping yarn; I know because I used the exact same colorway to crochet a winter hat a few years back. Was it worth it? I thrifted this lot for $12.99, or about eighty-one cents per skein. So ...

One of the quilts I recently thrifted during my hodge-podge bidding just arrived, and it's even prettier in person. The log cabin pattern is a favorite of mine. Someone really had an eye for tropical color combinations, and using predominantly orange and blue novelty prints in such bold shades was brilliant. I also adore the black print sashing because it acts as the perfect foil (and I usually dislike dark colors.) The quilt was long-arm quilted with a simple loop pattern, and expertly bound by machine, so it's fairly new. Something tells me it was made during the pandemic lockdown, I don't know why but that's the vibe I get (I know, I'm strange.) The center of the backing shows moderate fading. Someone might have draped it over something that sat in the sun, like a table or a pet cage. Even with the fading I like the quirkiness of the backing fabric, too. Really interesting, and possibly east Asian in origin. I won this quilt with ...

Our local brick and mortar Goodwill is overflowing with craft donations since the holidays, and I think it's because everyone is spring cleaning and destashing. Since I want to replace the yarn I used up from my stash in January I picked up two bundles of yarn. Bundle #1. Boucle isn't my favorite type of yarn, and yellow certainly isn't a color I adore, but I have a project in mind for these skeins. I was mostly interested in the yarns on the left, which include a black and gold sashay-style ribbon yarn. Bundle #2. There's a one-skein pattern I want to try that uses Homespun, and the cream-colored fluffy yarn matches one from the other bundle. Altogether I paid $13.98 for these twelve skeins, which works out to about $1.16 each.

The yarn lot I purchased with the buy-it-now option just arrived in a very nice giant ziplock bag; let's see if I got what I paid for. There are twenty skeins, just as the listing photo showed. They have a faint bit of storage odor, but otherwise they're nice and clean. There are nine new cake skeins of Sweet Roll in Cinnamon Pop, which sell at my Wal-Mart for $7.99 each. These are the reason I was willing to purchase the lot outright; 6 of them made my money back. The seven unused skeins of Herrschners Worsted 8 (4 in True Red, 2 in Meadow, and 1 in Burnt -- Herrschners, you need to work on your color names) retail for $4.97 each. The large gold skein at the top came without a label, but it's a worsted and definitely worth $5.00 resale. The Grundl Pretty are discontinued; I found two of them selling on eBay for $13.95. The Premier Anti-Pilling Everyday DK retails for $4.99. Altogether the retail value of this lot is $130.64; I paid $49.99 with a pen...

Since I finished the January crazy-quilted tote for my calendar project I jumped back on making the Iris throw, working this time with Bernat Giggles in Cheerful Blue. From the start this skein seemed determined to give me trouble, not anything cheerful, as I had to contend with a big knot of yarn I tugged out along with the center pull strand (I didn't take a pic of that.) This yarn is 90% acrylic and 10% nylon, and come in a 3.5 oz. skein. Not sure why they added nylon to the acrylic, perhaps to make it softer. The color is nice, and it's fairly smooth, but it also splits easily and wants to pucker, pop and untwist, especially when you tear out stitches. Naturally I had to tear out two and a half rows to correct two mistakes, which aggravated me because the yarn was untwisting when I went to crochet it again. To add icing to this terrible cake, I ran out of the yarn on the final row. To keep the symmetry with the other sections I had to pull a compatible color fro...

Future me again. Since I finished the no longer mysterious 6 day star blanket (more on that in the future) I needed something new to work on -- all that pink and red in my face left me a bit frazzled -- and I thought it would be interested to document my process of how and why I decide on a new project. Disclaimer: I also need to practice using my new camera. :) I had no preconceieved notions, so I started with yarn by going to my stash and pulling some skeins with restful-to-me colors in worsted weight. Instead of going for my usual November beach colors I went more toward forest palette. I also have other colors that would go well with these. I wanted to try something new but decided against doing anything ambitious, as I've already made two throws this month. I'm also trying to finish my February crazy quilted tote for my calendar project. That meant getting on the computer and looking through patterns to find something simple. I found three new throw pat...