A day of rest – and crochet yarn bowls!

Usually, my daughter works a short shift on Sundays, so I spend time in town as part of keeping Sunday as a day of rest. It feels weird to not be doing that, but the pharmacy is now closed on Sundays. It’s also totally messing with my sense of time! :-D

When my husband called in his prescription refills, he was asked to get our daughter to pick them up during her break, so we figured she was getting another weekday to make up for the loss of Sundays.

We were wrong.

Her hours have been cut back to just 3 shifts every 2 weeks. The pharmacist must have assumed she’d be in. I’ll just have to make a special trip in to town for the refills.

I just checked the government website. An $82 Billion aid package was recently passed to help people who are struggling financially due to the Wuhan virus shut downs. Last I saw, people who lost more that 8 hours a week could get aid, but that was before the bill was completed and passed. That is gone now. She’s have to lose all hours completely, in order to qualify for aid. :-/ Thankfully, she’s okay with that.

Once again, I am so incredibly thankful for my husband’s excellent private insurance disability payments. That and living here on the farm, where we pay “rent” by taking care of the place.

Last night, I managed to find a Canadian Orthodox Lutheran church service for this 5th Sunday of Lent to watch this morning. Celebrating Easter this year is going to be another strange one. No blessing of the baskets at church this year!

One of the things I decided to do to recharge my batteries today was finish a small crochet project; a yarn basket. I’ve made three slightly different versions of them so far, and am quite enjoying the process.

Here is the first one I made. (click on the images to see them better)

I used 2 strands of Handicrafter Cotton yarn, which holds structural shapes quite well. (I can get the little skeins of this yarn at a dollar store in town, but have to go to the city to be able to get the large skeins it also comes in.) I had no pattern, but saw one on Pinterest and realized it was just a simple bowl shape with an opening for the working ends of yarn.

This is the one I just finished.

This is actually the third one I’ve made, and the first where I added an extra colour. I wanted to use up some of the little balls of yarn I had left over from other projects.

I like to reball my yarn into centre pull balls, and the first yarn bowl I made was large enough to hold two full sized and one little centre pull ball of yarn. Having the yarn threaded through the opening in the bowl helps keep it flowing smoothly – especially when using multiple strands at once.

It also helps protect my yarn from cats! :-D

The second one I made used one strand of solid gray and one strand of variegated yarn that included the same shade of grey in its colours. My daughter picked that one for herself. :-) Each bowl is slightly different in size and shape as I experimented with the design.

I’m quite happy with how these are turning out. They are great to work on while watching a movie or something, since they’re made almost entirely with one stitch, and require very little counting.

Tomorrow, it’s back to work. The girls plan to do baking, so I plan to head out and shovel away the drift in front of the barn doors, so we have someplace to store the things we will be taking out of the basement. Then it’s time to start clearing things out, so that we can clean it and turn it into …

A maternity ward. From the looks of her, Butterscotch is pregnant, and may have kittens before things melt away and dry up enough to empty and clean out the sun room, so we can use it as a maternity ward like we did last year. Plus, we have to get Two-Face indoors as quick as we can. She’s booked to be spayed in mid April, but there’s a risk of her going into her first heat before then.

*sigh*

So we’ll have inside cats, outside cats and basement cats!

The Re-Farmer

A perfect fit

I made myself a hat today.

I’d made myself a ponytail hat last winter, but forgot it at the clinic during one of our doctor’s visits. No one turned it in to the lost and found. I finally got around to making a new one. :-)

I used two strands of medium weight yarn and a 6mm hook. The main body of the hat is just half-double (hdc; known as a half-treble in the UK) worked in a spiral. To figure out where to put the opening, I just kept putting it on my head until it was long enough to reach where I usually wear my braid, then did a chain 4, skip 4 stitches to make the opening.

Warm hats are, of course, a necessity for this time of year, but most hats irritate the heck out of me. If they’re long enough to cover my ears, they get into my eyes, and every time I move my head, the back of my hat gets pushed up. My ears get uncovered and the hat gets pushed into my eyes. My long hair, of course, also gets in the way of having it sit right on my head.

The joy of making my own hats, is that I can figure out how to work around that.

Along with the opening to pull my braid through (which then helps keep the hat in place), after a few more rounds, I switched from hdc in the back to dc (double crochet, or treble/triple crochet in the UK) on the sides, and sc (single crochet, or double crochet in the UK) across the front. The end result is a wavy edge with longer sides that snuggle warmly around my ears, while the slightly shorter back doesn’t get pushed up when I move my head around, and the even shorter front doesn’t get into my eyes, but it still long enough to keep my forehead warm.

I probably should have done this at the start of winter, rather than the end, but it’ll do the job just fine! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Well, that didn’t take long…

On learning that my nephew and his wife will be having a baby, I started working on crocheted baby gifts. I’ve just finished the last of them – a gift for the mom – to go with the stroller blanket and matching hats I made for Baby’s first winter, including adult sized hats for Mom and Dad.

I made a capelet for our new mom to wear while cuddling Baby, and wanted to get a photo of it. I can post those here, as my family doesn’t know about this blog, so I won’t be ruining any surprises. ;-)

It’s pretty big, so I cleared my bed and stretched up to try and get the whole thing in the shot.

rainbow.wrap.1

Oops. I cut off a couple of corners. Let’s try that again…

rainbow.wrap.2

… and again…

rainbow.wrap.3

… and again…

rainbow.wrap.4

… one more time!

rainbow.wrap.5

Okay. I give up. They win.

I then removed the cats – plus the clump of fur already left behind = and the capelet is now safely put away with the rest of the items, out of reach for cats!

Now I have to find a box big enough to hold it all, so I can mail them out. Baby will make his debut in July, so I have a bit of time. :-)

For those who are interested, I made this using a simple pattern I found online – click here for the link – using Lion Brand Mandala yarn in Thunderbird, and a 5mm hook. The only change I made to the pattern was to add the trim on the bottom. I wanted the starting and finishing rows to match in both colour and width, which left me with just enough yarn to work my way across the bottom.

The Re-Farmer