Crochet on!

This, my friends, I am happy to say, is my first garment made with my own crochet hooks. After all these tiny ornaments, doilies and such, I finally took a deep breath and made myself a short sleeved pullover. I love it very much, although I wish it was somewhat longer. I used a different yarn than recommended, it is a wool from Drops Design, so the measurements are not what I expected, but I am still happy with the outcome. I chose this yarn because I fell in love with the colour, and it matches my hair dye, which is a nice touch. I even bought a lipstick in this shade, because girls just wanna have colour coordinated fun. And now on to the next project.

Crochet blizzard

I bought a book of one hundred crocheted snowflakes back in September. The plan was to make one snowflake a day, maybe, and hang them on the Xmas tree. But as you may know by now, I'm not very good with plans. Or schedules. So some days I make a dozen, and some weeks I make none. Anyway, I made over 50 by now and set up an album on Facebook. Feel free to browse!

See my complete list of crochet snowflakes here.

Joining SALs like there's no tomorrow

Being addicted to Abi Gurden's Tree of Stitches it was obvious that I would sign up for anything she had planned to throw our way. I have already stitched the original tree twice, and I'm in the process of picking colours for the third one. So when she announced the SAL for her Summer Tree of Stitches, I simply yelled "shut up and take my money" at the computer screen and joined up before even looking at the design. Which, by the way, is stunning and unique and calls out to me. I invite everyone to sign up and join us. Just click on the link above and get stitching! Here is the image to get your mouth watering:

The second SAL I signed up for is a special Inc Circles mandala design. We are invited to pick our favourite colours and stitch this beautiful design. You can get all the details by checking the designer's blog. There is also a Yahoo! group where we can share ideas and progress.

These are the colours I picked for this design, but I cannot make up my mind about which fabric to choose. Also, I don't wanna make the dividing line black but I cannot decide on what shade to use, plus, there is the difficulty to assigning colour families to shape families, so it is not as easy as it bloody seems and every time I go through this I have more and more respect for designers and all the hard work they put into their projects.

FYI the colours I picked are:

(from light to dark)

3608, 917, 915,

963, 962, 335,

153, 209, 3837

800, 813, 825,

I call this version Candyfloss. :)

No more Facebook

I recently purged my Facebook account. Last year I spent irrationally much time there, mostly playing FarmVille, Restaurant City and other virtual build-and-manage-an-environment games, befriending strangers just to get more neighbours so I can collect virtual tripe by the dozens and exchange them for rare and seasonal in-game items. At a time when real life didn't offer many chances of success and had no positive feedback, these games gave me proof that if I stick to doing something on a daily basis, I can build something big and beautiful. And in that way they were helpful for a while and made me feel better. But then I became addicted and needed to add more and more games, till I found myself clicking those things all day long.

Do you know the worst part? At a time I convinced myself that I am doing it for my daughter, because on my virtual farm I had a pink virtual house and stuffed its virtual garden with virtual toys, a virtual see-saw and virtual swings, etc, while in reality I spent less time with my baby, because I stole time from playing with her so I can build an unreal environment she may enjoy looking at but will never be able to access. How dumb is that? Yes, Tamara likes the way the virtual puppy wags its tail, but she doesn't enjoy my spending 20 minutes daily on virtual feeding it. And that is just one game.

Anyway, I snapped out of it. I removed 75 of my 85 games. I removed all the pages I was a fan of. Why on earth did I ever decide to "like" Celebrity Birthdays in the first place? And did I really think I can save the rainforests by sending 10 virtual seeds a day? The games I have spared are only there because I feel sorry for the time and energy I invested in building them. 

Next I am gonna start to remove all those friends I don't really know. I am only worried about accidentally removing a few stitching friends, as I remember most of them by email addy and not by full name. Should it happen to you, please let me know. I wanna use Facebook for what I believe it was invented for, to keep in touch with real people who are really important for me in my real life.