Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate crochet month!! Woot! We thought we would share some of the places we like to buy yarn or find patterns or get inspired and more!

http://lionbrand.com/

Great company! Lionbrand has been around quite a long time and has some awesome yarn. They have our favorite Homespun yarn -so soft and cuddly. This is also where we purchased our huge wholesale order.   

They aren't just a shopping site - they also have patterns for all kinds of crochet from home fashion to wearable fashions and some fun toys!

We haven't made this, but it looks so cute!

http://www.lionbrand.com/patterns/80686AD.html

This lovely scarf was made by following one of their patterns:
http://www.lionbrand.com/patterns/60027.html

I thought this would be perfect for Mom's day :)

Our latest creations the scarf/cowl/necklace that is interchangeable and customizeable is made with our fav Lion Brand yarn - Homespun! We might have mentioned we love homespun but if we haven't let me tell you we really like it! :)

We ordered some specialty yarns too. Here is a little shawl Kristina whipped up with the Moonlight Mohair. Unfortunately they may be discontinuing this yarn (very sad face). Soft, silky and with a cool shimmer, lovely yarn.

Another creation by Kristina using the Lion Brand Cotton and modeled by our lovely Rami! Isn't she the cutest! Kristina was trying out an idea she had in her head, sometimes you just have to get those things out, and created this oh so cute shawl. What's cool about it, is that it works great for an adult as well (like a large collar kind of thing).

Well that is probably enough on Lionbrand  yarn. We love it, know you know about it so you love it too! :)
Hey you know we love comments and you can leave them here (points to the comments area). Really, just drop us a line!   

We are currently helping our local animal shelter by making some bed blankets for the dogs.  It was hard to figure out what I could crochet that would help the poor sweet animals waiting to find a new home. While I'd love to adopt them all I felt providing sleeping mats might be a better option. 

I wanted something strong and sturdy, easy to wash, but still pleasing to look at. I went through a plarn kick for awhile (plastic yarn made from grocery store bags) and had some white bags that were cut earlier but not used yet. I also got some pretty looking, but not great feeling, yarn from a good friend whose mother had passed and left behind some unused rug yarn. 

I decided to combine them together to give the white bags a splash of color while still being sturdy and easy to wash. The two together worked out amazingly well. Not only did it give the bags a splash of color but together they were softer than they were separately. I don't know how that worked but the yarn and plarn are soft, supple, and not rough on the skin. These little mats will take quite a bit of abuse at the shelter but this combo of rug yarn and plarn should stand the abuse.

To make your own plarn/yarn combo just take one ball of plarn and one ball of your choice of yarn (rug yarn, or cotton yarn for sturdy easy to cleanness) and hold them both together as  you DC away the day. I just started with a chain as wide as I wanted the blanket and kept going until a) I ran out of yarn, or b) it was as big as I wanted it. 

Good luck and have fun! Remember to be safe while you celebrate Crochet Month!

As you well know, March is Celebrate Crochet Month!! WOOT WOOT! Crochet is our first and favorite medium so we are sharing all kinds of crochet this month. If you have questions, comments or suggestions on what you want to see, let us know!!

Kristina:
I was wandering around the inter-web (yes I was trying to be funny) when I stumbled upon a stubborn woman's blog. 
http://atkins-history.com/blog-me/
Being the nosy woman I am I went and checked out her Etsy page. 

Lo and behold she has some really great hat patterns on there! If hat making appeals to you but you don't know where to start her shop seems to be a good place to head (no pun intended lol)
http://www.etsy.com/shop/stubbornwoman?ref=top_trail 

This, something she says on her blog, really makes me sit up and say yes!
"It seems most people think of hats as something you wear on a bad hair day or outside when it is cold. Hats are much more than this. Hats protect your hair, scalp and face from the sun. They are also important as the finishing touch to your outfit, whether dressy or casual. I design and make Crocheted Hats and Leather Accessories for women of style with a bit of edge. My hats flatter you and my leather pieces set you apart."

There is a lot of great information on her blog, which has moved to here:  http://theoldhooker.blogspot.com/ and is more up to date than the one I stumbled upon. She has a great portfolio of some really great hats, tutorials, interesting tidbits, and more.

Finding her site has helped me to ground myself a bit. I always thought I made good hats but I am blown away by the great colors, the clean lines, and the attention to detail. The little details she adds, ribbon here, flowers there, really makes the hats sing (metaphorically of course)  

I aspire to have hats as amazing as hers! 

Not limiting herself to hats, Ms. Atkins also has cool crochet bags that show her unique crochet style. This is a favorite one with the bright colors and attention to details.
She has some other nice and unique creations but you need to go soon as she has been ordered by her doctor to quit with the crochet. Once her store sells out she plans to close it.

Go visit her blog and her store and let her know how awesome her crochet is! Thank you for sharing your creativity with us Betty Atkins!

I don't think we blogged on the craft room makeover last year so I thought I would mention it. Mainly because I had to do it AGAIN! The room had become quite a mess and with the new addition of our large yarn order in the middle of the floor, I realized I had to clean it up! (I know this is Celebrate Crochet month and this does apply - I crochet in there! Ok, I don't but I store my yarn in there!)

This first set of photos show the craft room before the original makeover. This was my son's room for several years and then a bit of a catch all room. The walls are painted a nice California Blue and while the color looks bright it really sucks up the light.  Most of our crafting items ended up piled in the corner and we didn't use the room to craft in but as storage.

Here are some shots after the original make over. We left one wall as an accent wall in the original blue color and painted the rest a nice light beige. Greg made the wood organizer that houses the plastic bins. On top we placed some baskets to organize our crafting items. Greg found an awesome sewing table at a local thrift shop and we placed that in front of the window for extra light. We set up a photo corner with a white shower curtain and added a folding table on the other wall for extra crafting space. On one of the doors we added a shoe organizer that we could use for yarn or smaller completed projects. On the walls we also added lots of interesting artwork and inspiration photos to encourage crafting.

Here shows some shots of the room as a giant mess!! You can see why I needed to clean up!

This shows the room in progress of clean up all the way to almost done. I purchased boxes from the local office supply store and used painters blue tape and a marker to label the boxes (this way you can reuse the boxes without scribbling all over them!). I have the wood organizer and the baskets to clean up but otherwise the craft room is back in business! 

The last picture is my spider plants. These plants originally started as a small baby spider plant that grew and grew. It was starting to look pitiful all squeezed into one pot so I transferred it into 6 new pots! Two small ones I took to work, one I set in the living room and these three are at the craft room window. Amazing plant!

As our celebration of Crochet continues, I thought I would share this fun way to use some of those small scraps of yarn - Scrappy Purses!

What I did was take some of those partial skeins of yarn and tied them together. Then I wrapped the yarn into a ball. As you crochet the yarn switches colors.

You can see that this purse changes colors as I crocheted along. Anything with this scrap method is automatically one of a kind and unique, there is no way to duplicate this purse without a lot of effort. Not everyone cares about one of a kind uniqueness but I like it. I am unique, why not have my very own unique purse?   

Here is another example. I just love the way this one worked out. I had a ton of purple but tried to break it up into several rows and this one you can tell started with a lot of purple. Sometimes there is a lot of a color, sometimes just a few stitches, but in the end it all looks cool!

Have fun hookin' this month and for the rest of your life! Share with us your fun crochet ideas, we love them!

Yes! We are still celebrating Crochet Month! We are posting blogs all about crochet this month and doing our best to enjoy the celebration!

This is one of our original patterns, the cowlcho - it's a cowl, it's a poncho - no it's a cowlcho!

We combined a cowl that can double as a hood and added it to a poncho for ultimate versatility in one garment.

We made the cowl and poncho in a lovely lacy open stitch and added armslits for comfort.

This one (our prototype) is in a tweed style yarn but you can't really tell from the pictures. Looks much prettier in person!

I showed the cowlcho to a lady at work and she wanted one with a few changes - arm holes and a smaller cowl.

The cowlcho v2.0 was created. This one is a bit warmer with shells that nestle into each other and some decorative v-stitching. This particular one is in Edwardian and Wildfire Homespun. I love the sideways box trim at the bottom and the decorative color change to edge the arm openings.

When bringing cowlcho v2.0 to the client her friend loved it but wanted to know if we could make it smaller, basically as a ponchette. So we made a few adjustments to the pattern and made her a ponchette to her specifications. We added the same trim and it looks excellent. Warm and fashionable!

We do sell both of these patterns - the original and the V2.0 w/bonus ponchette pattern. We will be adding more as time goes on so stop by and check us out. As you see, we love special orders and love to create something new!

Thanks for stopping by and we wish you lots of fun celebrating crochet!

According to Wikipedia, Crochet:
is a process of creating fabric from yarn, thread, or other material strands using a crochet hook. The word is derived from the French word "crochet", meaning hook. Hooks can be made of materials such as metals, woods or plastic and are commercially manufactured as well as produced by artisans. Crocheting, like knitting, consists of pulling loops through other loops, but additionally incorporates wrapping the working material around the hook one or more times.

To Crochet you just need some hooks, some yarn, a pattern and patience. Crochet isn't that hard to learn and the internet is plastered with how to videos so everyone can learn today at their own pace. And yes, if you knit, you can learn to crochet!

Crochet incorporates a wide range and types of items.

With tiny hooks and very thin and light thread you can make delicate and fragile Irish Lace. The origins of Irish lace date back to the Irish potato famine.

This shows the creativity people have as well as what you can craft with crochet. This 'coral' is crocheted! Yes, amazing isn't it? Wikipedia has several examples of unusual items that have been made by crochet.

A new rage across the U.S is Yarn Bombing.

Crochet hookers or knitters get together with some hooks, yarn and some item they want to bomb and voila! instant decorated vehicle, park bench, tree, sign and more!
Google it! Then join the crochet revolution!! Celebrate Crochet!
Pls share with us your yarn bomb experiences!!

Last year we went out and hit some yard sales, looking for some great bargains. Kristina found this fantastic sweater and we snapped it up.  While it is probably machine made and could be knit, I thought I would include it in our Celebration of Crochet.

We took the sweater home, washed it on delicate cycle and then let it dry. As it dried Kristina decided the sweater, cute as it is, needed a bit more. So I put on my creative hat and thought about it.

 Thinking about those old movies from my youth (well of course they were reruns) with Doris Day and Sophia Loren, I decided the sweater needed a little elegance. I think this soft little scalloped collar adds a nice touch that gives this lovely sweater a very grown up and sophisticated look. 

Not to be left out, I added a 'lace' edging at the wrist and then did a simple stitch all the way around the sweater. The white is brighter than the white embroidery flowers but I think it looks great!

This one of a kind sweater shows off very well how a knit item can always benefit from a bit of crochet!

How are you celebrating crochet month?

March is Celebrate Crochet Month! One thing we want to do this month is intro some fellow crocheters. So let us introduce Pamphylian, a fellow Etsian and fiber artisit. (http://www.etsy.com/shop/Pamphylian)

Nehire Tosun is from Turkey which is totally neat. I am enamored with over seas crochet as it always seem to be more complex than the crochet I am familiar with over here.
I mean just look at these cute coasters with hearts on them. How did she do that?! 

She has more really cool crochet stuff but I wanted to show that she can diversify. Here is a really cool quilt she made. It looks simply yet complex and was hand sewn. How cool is that? Quilting is something I've always admired but never had the patience to conquer. I love the optical illusion affect present in this quilt.

She also has a really cool mosaic tray, another thing I've wanted to try but haven't yet.

This really cool necklace is... well... really cool. I understand she crocheted over a cord and then tied a knot, but that knot is just so cool and the color is great. I really love this necklace.

I just love her Etsy store and she has some really neat stuff so please check her out!

GO! Spread the celebratory word - Yeah!! Crochet!!!