I spy....

...with my little eye, someone crocheting! I am sitting here at Panera trying my best to focus on my online class forum, but people-watching too and I just glanced over to see a high school (maybe jr. college) aged guy crocheting in public. He is sitting with his family and showing off his latest WIP. I am trying to see what it is without being too obvious, but it is brown and blue stripes and rather wide....maybe the start of a sweater? I think it is so cool that not only is this young guy doing something that when I was that age would have been socially unacceptable. He is doing it unabashedly, in public, and proudly displaying his work. Awesome!

Speaking of show and tell....

I have a few older projects that I made before I discovered blog-land that I thought I'd share with you. I had a brief love affair with ponchos and fun fur scarfs...I'll spare you the photos of those. But these are two projects I am particularly proud of.

The first is one of my own designs. I saw these really cute cell phone cozies at a little store on the downtown mall. They were handknit and sooo cute, but also outrageously priced. I thought to myself, I can do that! So I went home and looked through my yarn stash and came up with this. It's not nearly as professional as the ones in the store, nor is it as complex, but it works for me and more importantly I didn't follow any kind of pattern. That's 100% me!

The second project is probably the one I am most proud of to date. I only have three finished sweaters under my belt, and the two adult-sized ones were pretty simple knit-in-the-round dealies with little to no finishing. This project incorporated intarsia, weaving in countless ends, finishing, and other little things I had to learn for it.

This is from Family Circle Easy Baby Knits. (I totally recommend this book if you have kids...the patterns are all super cute and pretty simple.) I made this about 2 1/2 years ago, just after I learned to knit. It was a super-addictive knit. I'm not sure what made is so addictive....maybe learning a new technique? It was a pretty quick knit too...only took me about 3 weeks including finishing. I remember trying to crank out a few rows on my lunch break. A few notes about this one...I made this before I discovered "real" yarn stores, so it's entirely acrylic. I suppose that is great for easy-care for a baby, but also dangerously flammable for a little one. It also means that I can't block it all, since synthetic fibers don't block. I also modified the neck a little bit....you knit it back and forth with an open seam on one side. I seamed up the side because I thought it looked funny, only too-late realizing that there is no way you will ever fit a baby's head through it. I just need to take out the side seam on the neck, though and it would be perfect.

I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but the ears are sewn onto the sweater so they stick out, and the sheep is made from a different yarn. I used a boucle to give him a fuzzy sheep-like feel to him.

One more note....the guy that is crocheting that I am sneaking peaks of is now teaching his grandmother how to do it. Cute!