Quilting Versus Crochet

This time last year I was working on a little quilt I made from a vintage embroidered napkin and a bag of thrift store scraps. This past month it gave me great pleasure to finally hang up this quilt in my home office. I think it's probably the best totally improvised art quilt I've ever made.

At present I'm working on preserving some crazy quilted fragments with my calendar project, but I haven't been quilting much at all this year. My hands have gotten so crippled it's become basically impossible to hand stitch, and I'm still having trouble mentally transitioning to machine quilting.

So I've been crocheting -- a lot. I'm currently working on three crochet projects at the same time, beginning with this throw version of the Ocean Tranquility pattern in a pretty sea glass light green for a friend.

I'm also crocheting a scarf with superfine yarn for the very first time, and slowly getting the hang of that. There's a third project in the works, but I'm holding off on showing that on the blog until it's finished, alongside my disastrous first attempt.

I'm a bit off-kilter these days, especially with working on multiple projects at one time. I wanted to try that for once to see if I like having many WIPs versus one (nope) and if multitasking my WIPs helps me be more productive (not really). I'm annoyed with myself, honestly. I keep thinking "If I were quilting I'd never do this." I still think of myself as a quilter, sadly, when I can't really call myself that anymore.

Life changes, and I try to be a good sport about that. I've been extremely lucky that I was able to hand stitch for as long as I have, considering my condition. Yet I still struggle with my increasing limitations, and how they've obviously forced me to give up what I love. Making peace means finding a new way to do it instead of mourning losing the old. I'll be working on that in June.

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On the Beach

Last week my guy and I went to walk Daytona Beach, which was mostly (and eerily) deserted. This is what our beaches used to look like when I was a kid. It was a beautiful day, cold and breezy but calm. It feels like 2026 is getting off to the right start.

Eight Plus Numbers

When I was looking up the retail on the small lot of yarn plus a tapestry kit I got a lot of surprises. This Red Heart Roll with It Sparkle skein in "Diamonds" was actually a cake that sells $10.99 on Yarnspirations. The lot included two Red Heart Super Saver Jumbo skeins, which retail for $8.99 each, and stuck in the center of the buff color I found a 5.5 mm crochet hook. This is a skein of 100% Icelandic wool, which can be really expensive. It's marked with a price tag of $7.00, and I found it selling for $8.00 online. The needlepoint kit is the biggest surprise of all. It makes a pillow, and hails from the UK, where it sells for £45.00 ($60.76 US). Since it's flamingos I definitely have to finish it if I can. Altogether my eight plus lot retails for $125.04; I paid $21.30 total for the lot with the buy-it-now option and one penny shipping. I indeed got a very nice bargain.

Not So Cheerful

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...

Thrifty Crochet

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