Dishcloth Advent Calendar 2 | Through The Yarny Curtain

WIP Wednesday: March 18, 2015

This week, I’ve been focused on only one project. Everything else has been left sitting while I worked on it.

Leafy Dishcloths

Last October, I made a single dishcloth in the shape of a leaf. Apparently, I never blogged about it, so I can’t link you to a previous post, but you can check out my Ravelry project page if you want to see it. That leaf was in stockinette stitch. On the same blog post, the designer had a garter stitch version, so I decided to try it out.

I liked how it looked, so I decided to use this pattern as one of the days of the Dishcloth Advent Calendars. I’m making 18 of those, so I’ve been knitting leaf after leaf.

The 18th one is on the needles now. I just have to finish it, and weave in all the ends!

The Trouble with Tribbles

Last week was busy, with little time for crafting or blogging. My sister arrived on January 10 for a one-week vacation. We went to see three movies (Into the Woods, Unbroken, Selma), which is more movies than I usually see in the theater in an entire year. We also watched Blu rays at my house; she saw Night at the Museum for the first time and I saw How to Train Your Dragon for the first time. We played lots of Pandemic, a board gamein which players work cooperatively to cure four diseases that are threatening to take over the globe. We played mini golf, went to Harry Potter World at Universal Studios and Universal Islands of Adventure, and spent a day in Saint Augustine. We visited family, including an impromptu dinner at my house one night. Three times we walked more than a mile: birdwatching with our father and other family, once to hang out with an uncle, and once to the library and back so I could return a book. It was a pretty awesome week! Although I didn’t have a lot of time for crafting, I did finish up three projects. All three were mostly finished, but needed a little bit of finalization. The Tribbles are the first of these projects.

2015 Goals and Plans

I do not set crafting resolutions. To me, the word “resolution” implies doing something drastically different than you had been doing before. I’ve been a fiber crafter for a long time and that is not going to change. Instead, I set goals and make plans. Goals differ from resolutions in that goals are smaller, concrete, and incremental. I already have a base of fiber crafting skills and I want to build on those skills. There’s many things I have never done, especially with crochet, spinning, weaving, and dyeing as these are the skills that I have only acquired in the last two years. Although I’ve been knitting for 20+ years, I spent many of those years knitting the kinds of projects where gauge is nearly irrelevant and so the list of things I have never done with knitting is longer than you might expect. I’m starting out the year by picking one or two skills to work on for each of the fiber crafts.

Ladder Stitch Dishcloths

SPOILER ALERT: If you are a reader who knows me in person and exchanges Christmas gifts with me, you might want to skip this post.

My friend Stacy taught me to crochet last year with this pattern. I have found it to be a good pattern for learning because it requires you to chain, single, crochet, and double crochet throughout. You also have to be able to recognize and count your stitches. Until May 2014, the entire extent of my crocheting was 3 of these dishcloths, and I the last one was completed in October. Since I was doing the granny squares to increase my crochet skills, I was planning to make only one of these dishcloths in May, as a way of remembering / reinforcing the skills I had learned from it. These dishcloths are so quick and easy for me now that I just couldn’t stop making them and I ended up making seven.