Christina's crafts, dedicated to Kerrie

Some crafts would never have been taken on without the influence of someone else - in my life, my friend Kerrie is frequently a direct (and indirect) source of inspiration. She is the one who started me making soap, and who has supplied many of my scrapbooking embellishments. More recently (okay, over a year ago) she found a rocking chair near a church with a "free" sign on it. She couldn't pass it up, but asked us if we were interested. We definitely were - the catch was, it had a broken seat, where the caning had been ripped apart. After spending about a year thinking about the many ways this could be repaired (buying new caning, learning to cane, cutting out the cane and replacing it with a wooden seat, etc.) Kerrie inspired me with another of her favorite crafts - crochet. Here is a picture of the chair as we first ran nylon cord all around the intact parts of caning. Then, I superglued the caning near to this nylon cord to make sure the caning didn't unravel any more.




Then, the single crochet started. I went all the way across doing single crochet, about the rate of an inch an hour. You can tell that this took some steady time in front of the tv (oh, my suffering!)

Finally, I had my own pseudo-caning in artificial nylon:

This, I determined, was just for structural purposes. Luckily, a trip to Linens and Things yielded a seat cushion which sits very steadily over my handicraft, and the seat is now fully functional!



Inspired by Kerrie that crocheting may in fact be superior to knitting in many ways (um, especially the speed and the odd shapes you can make on purpose with crochet!) I decided to try making a star blanket for our one-day-to-be baby. We're getting rid of the carpeting upstairs, and I decided a baby needed to have something to play on that wasn't hard. Yes. And also, I found a new yarn store and fell in love with new yarn, so also that. Using the pattern here
and new yarn ( heathered green and a heathered blue in the very soft but affordable Plymouth Yarn Encore, and indulging with the beautiful Italian Tonalita colorway) I made this:





It was so much fun - not just doing the star, but using the Tonalita in between color changes. I never knew which color was going to come up next, and it was a nice change from my usual drab colors (yes, see the green and the blue). I always envy the colors Kerrie picks, and I thought she might approve of the bright interspersed in here.

That's the crafting as of late! Yarn has been my thing, but now that it's spring we're moving back into the garden, so hopefully there will be some things to show there soon.