A New Addictive Hobby

My sister-in-law got me this amazing gift for Christmas this year - a Drop Spindle and plenty of roving in a gorgeous color!!!

I haven't started using it yet, but I can't wait to! I've looked into spinning my own yarn before, but thought I shouldn't even attempt to convince my husband I need ANOTHER form of wool. Now I have no excuse! I can't wait to see how this colorway works up. It looks like pink and purple cotton candy right now, and is insanely soft.

My Fancy Yarn Box

A good friend of mine's retired father loves woodworking. While I'm over at this friend's house playing D&D, I often bring a crocheting or knitting project along to keep my hands busy. All of the ladies in my friend's family also work with yarn, so the father has been making by hand gorgeous accessories to make life easier for them. He described a yarn box that he was interested in making and a few weeks later showed me this masterpiece and offered me one! It's two different kinds of wood all cut, sanded, and lacquered by hand. It comes in handy to keep the working yarn away from my helper-kitties, that's for sure.

Another Pokemon, another day.

Goomy here was made for my husband for Christmas. He has to be one of the cutest Pokemon ever! I'm so pleased with how he turned out, I'll be adding him to my Etsy Store soon!

Post-Christmas post

Christmas is a crazy time for a crafter. Suddenly those extravagant plans you had for a gift for loved one turns into "I have one hour to get this finished before I see them!" scenario. Well, that is, if you're like me. I seemed this year to have a pattern of crochet, frog half the project, then continue crocheting again. I know most people can't see that tiny little mistake BUT I KNOW IT'S THERE! In the midst of all of this I decided that I needed to make myself my first stocking!

                                                 Hand for reference - it turned out pretty big!

I reverse-engineered this pattern to make it: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/stuffable-stockings Instead of doing another hexagon for the tip of the toe, I did a pentagon to give it a more rounded-shape. It also made it easier to sew on, as I wasn't left with one wonky side. Sewing it together was much harder than making the hexagons!

Other than crochet...

I realized I have a bunch of non-yarn-related craft projects waiting for me in the basement. I have a metal coffee table to repaint, a cool chalkboard-letterbox thing to refinish and repaint, and a small end-table to sand/refinish. It needs to warm up a little more to get rid of all of the snow outside so I can get to work on these things! You can be sure that once I'm working on them, you'll see pictures.

In the meantime, while it's been cold outside I've been experimenting with cooking. This is a very brave venture for me, as I'm the kind of person who burns EVERYTHING. I once ruined Ramen by forgetting what I was making part of the way through and I drained all the water and strained the noodles. Once I realized my mistake, I tried adding hot water from the tap. It didn't taste good. I had Papa Johns Pizza on speed-dial when I lived alone. All of the delivery people knew they'd be greeted with a cloud of smoke when I opened my apartment door. But I'm trying to fix all of that by making easy recipes and staring eagerly at my family while they eat, asking constantly "Is it good?"

Here's some awesome Sugar Lemon cookies I made. They were a little bit too-tasty, and disappeared shortly after I pulled them out of the oven. I made something edible AND delicious, yay!

Cephalapods Ahoy!

This giant guy is still awaiting a name. I was asked to make him huge, and he certainly does fulfill that requirement now! It was actually pretty difficult to sew him together at the end, as he took up more space than my lap could hold. At some points it took teamwork to hold and sew. But I think it's pretty worth it!

Lymph Node Buddy

I recently did a test crochet for this awesome blog I discovered - http://mixedmartialartsandcrafts.com .

Behold Larry the Lymph Node! (I don't know what makes it a Larry, but it felt right.)

 Check out her site for the awesome pattern! 3$ of the proceeds go to a Cancer Charity, Stupid Cancer.

I have a confession to make...

When it comes to Ravelry, I am terribly hypocritical! I easily spend hours each week browsing patterns. When I find one that catches my eye, I start looking through how other people have done the same project. I hate when people don't upload pictures of what they did! Yet I never do that myself. So, I'm confessing this to you so I can change that! My Crafter's Resolution this year is to keep my Ravelry Project Page updated!

Follow me on Twitter ( @DoPinkCowsMoo ) / Ravelry ( http://www.ravelry.com/people/missmatchedcows ) for updates on current projects!

Rupee Storage

Just a quick look at a recently finished coin bag for my Husband. He requested a Rupee bag from Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword so I had a little making-up-on-the-go to do! I love how you can do that with crochet. It's a great medium for being inventive!

A House Hippo To Love

Here's a little Canadiana for you - Have you heard of the House Hippo? Have a video: it's short, you'll love it!

Recently it was a Canadian friend's birthday, and like any Canadian around our age he always loved and wished he had a House Hippo. Being American myself I missed out on this phenomenon. However, even seeing this as an adult I still want one. So I set out to make one.

Hippo-colored yarn is hard to come by, so I went with a more eccentric hippo. I have requests to make more for friends - I don't blame them, he's adorable!

Some projects are nerdy, some are beautiful.

I'm trying to go on a yarn-diet so Shane stops getting mad at the fact that I take up an entire dresser and then some for nothing but yarn. Which leads me to my stash of Fun Fur. During my latest Ravelry-Pattern-Cruising fest I came across  this adorable pattern for that eats up the stuff.  In celebration of finishing my latest big project, I decided to whip up one of these cuties as a cat toy. My Aunt-In-Law grows catnip on her property so the buds in this Hedgie are super-fresh and potent.

Hooray, it passes muster! Vixen is currently laying all curled up with it. 

And this is the project I am celebrating finishing: 

Completed, but not blocked yet

Close up shot of pre-blocking

My very first shawl! I on a whim decided to start this gorgeous shawl with my fancy Malabrigo yarn. I can honestly say I have fallen to the dark-side...shawls are very addicting to make. This is the most fun I've had crocheting in a long time. I am already deciding on my next one. 

As you see I did one nerdy thing to balance out the beautiful thing I made. What an odd day!

Social Media Ahoy!

Be sure to follow my Facebook page and Twitter for the latest shop updates, coupon codes, and more!

Now on Etsy!

I opened up a store on Etsy! Go check it out! http://www.etsy.com/shop/MagentaMoo Soon to come - the Facebook page for Magenta Moo!

Gotta Crochet 'em all...

For a friend who loves Pokemon, I made a Shroomish. To do his "ruffles" around the waist, I had to learn to do the Crocodile Stitch. I love a project that forces me to learn something new! That's how I've learned to crochet - each project I make myself try something different. I now have requests for many other Pokemon. I wonder if it's possible to crochet all 649 Pokemon...

Calendars and Schedules

Life is always great at changing your routine. I've never been one of those people that can just remember things, so I have to keep visual track of my days. I was going to buy a new wall calendar, but then saw a post in Pinterest about making your own dry-erase calendar using paint samples from Home Depot or such. What's that!? A craft that also fulfills an actual need? I'm on it!

 Here's the complete strip I used. I drew a line on each with a ruler and cut the words off, then trimmed the white spaces out.

These three photographs were trying to figure out what arrangement I wanted. I like how the most-white space is Wednesday in the bottom picture, so that's what I went with. (Wednesday, White...get it?)

  Centering and gluing each tile was the most time consuming part.

The completed calendar, with bonus overhead-boob-lamp reflection!

And here's the calendar filled out for this month.

All in all it was a simple project that already gets tons of use. Total cost for this project was -

Frame - .50 @ yardsale

White Board -  .75 @ Dollar Store

Paint Chips - free @ Home Depot

TOTAL = $1.25 for something I would have paid much more for!

I knit something!

I stepped outside my Crochet-Comfort zone and did something new - 

My first knit scarf!

The yarn was one I was sent from Germany. It changes size throughout as you can see, which I thought would be great for hiding mistakes in my first ever knit project. It's a Wool / Alpaca blend which is why it's slightly hairy. The button is one of my Oma's antique buttons that matched the scarf perfectly.

I love working with the knit. I didn't have to make a buttonhole since the fabric is so stretchy. As you see here the scarf is somewhat rolled around the neck, but it can be opened up to be larger. I used giant needles which felt a little silly and cumbersome at first but I got the hang of it about halfway through. I've attempted to knit before with metal needles and found them terribly slippery, so using these wood needles was perfect. Who knew it could really make that much of a difference?

Yard Sale SCORES!

A few weekends ago I hit absurd pay-dirt at some garage sales. I typically go for Montessori-useful things, but happened to find LOTS of yarn.


First score of the day was this gorgeous yarn:

It is %100 Alpaca. YES! One cake has some minor damage, as if someone cut it with scissors. There was also a Work In Progress on some circular needles included, as well as some random green yarn that feels like wool. This bag of treasure cost me 50 cents!


Thinking it couldn't get any better we continued yard sale-ing and found this mysterious bag:

The packaging is vague and not something I recognized so I asked the person selling if we could look in the sealed bag. I found two awesome yarn balls inside, so I offered 50 cents to start.

 The woman kind of scoffed at me, then said "My son gave me that for Christmas...Oh, sure!" We looked through the bag when I got in the car and noticed it had a pair of giant needles, sewing needles, some patches and a pattern. We looked it up when we got home and found this: http://woolandthegang.com/en/articles/view/490 . Notice the price? I sure did.

As far as plans for each - the Alpaca yarn needs to be washed before I decide what to do with it, it's shedding quite a bit right now. I also need to take that one cake apart and find out how much is lost to the cutting. The Wool and the Gang yarn is so oversized and thick, I'm not sure what I want to do with it. Maybe an awesome double-thick Mobius cowl or something...I'm still tossing ideas around.

Time skip to present!

Lets just pretend I've been updating this whole time, shall we?

I've made new things! Lots of new things!

This was originally supposed to be a Nintendo DS case that I started over a year ago. It has since been re purposed into a coin pouch for using while going to Yard Sales, my favorite Saturday pastime. May it be known that this is the fist time I've ever done a zipper. Not too shabby!

This is my small coin flower for my card game dough. I really enjoyed making it, and it turned out more flower-like than I envisioned. I wrote the pattern down so I'm going to try making another. I might post the pattern because everyone needs one of these.

Blue bag here was supposed to be an awesome pattern I found at the library, but ran out of ribbon-yarn for so I just made it a simple bag. The ribbon gave the bag a very interesting texture / shine. The bag is reversible so the tassels can be on the outside if I desire.

As a way to make myself blog more, I have another post all ready for some awesome stuff I've found yard sale-ing so stay tuned!

N2RQR7YWE8RF

I opened a store!

I decided to try selling some of the things I make and opened an Artfire store. I'm adding new items pretty frequently, so check back!

Crafting as always

 Here, have a smattering of button bracelets to view!