Lisa Lian Finds and Designs

Monday, April 16, 2012

Name Tag for Crochet Guild

Each of us in our Crochet Guild is supposed to make ourselves a name tag to wear to meetings. It is also a contest where we will vote for our favorite. I was really happy with the way my turned out and luckily I took some pictures of it because I decided to cover it in mod podge so everything would stay in place nicely and so the tag could withstand more wear and tear. Well it pretty much ruined it. So I'm hoping with a little more drying time it will look better but if not then I will just use a picture of my name tag for my name tag.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Spring Cleaning

One huge box of books has been delivered to Bookaholic. They only wanted about half of them but that was still worth over $100 in store credit. The rest of the box went to a literacy charity group. Now I need to get busy on the rest of the books.

Colwich is having their city wide garage sales on Sat 4/14 and for the first time in probably 7 years or more we are actually going to participate by having a sale instead of buying up the town.

It will feel so great to get rid of a lot of "stuff". I am starting to feel a little closed in by it all. My craft room, in particular, is so full I have had to make "paths" to get to my sewing machine. I know that if I get it lightened up and organized it will be a much more productive workspace.

The plan is to clean out my library room and keep only the books I will probably read and then to fill the shelves that once had books with the yarn that is now in totes in my craft room.

So I plan to really get busy --tomorrow.

Monday, April 2, 2012

Adding Crochet to a Second Hand Purse

I have been noticing how many of the new purses coming out have elements of bright crochet. Every time I see one I think "I can make that". I also love ruffles so I came up with this.

I started with a purse I found at Goodwill. The one I found is made to look like crochet. You should be able to use any purse that has a good open weave. Here is the purse I used before I crocheted on it.

As you can see this purse has obvious rows. There are nine rows so I crocheted a different color of ruffle in to each of these rows. I used sock yarn and it took about 30 yards of each color for a total of approximately 300 yards of yarn. To make the ruffles I did six fpdc in each spot (see below). I think if you use heavier yarn it would take less yarn and you probably could do less fpdc in each spot to make a ruffle.

Here is how to do a front post double crochet (fpdc).

The first two rows don't go all the way around as they are interrupted by the leather loops that hold the handles so for those two rows I went back and forth on both sides. For the rest of the rows I was able to crochet all the way around.

I added some beads and here is the finished project.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Two new projects this week

These are two projects I finished this week. The first one is an egg cozy I crocheted on the fly. The egg cup is a vintage one I found at a flea market. My second project started as a plain purse from Goodwill. I will put directions for this in a new post soon.

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Free Pattern for Measuring Tape Cover

I put all 5 of my crochet covered tape measures on etsy and while I haven't yet sold any of them I got a number of messages from people on etsy asking me to sell the pattern. So I went ahead and put it on Ravelry like it is. It is a free pattern so it won't be on etsy. You can find the pattern here http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/erins-rose-measuring-tape-cover

Friday, March 23, 2012

I was asked to do a presentation on Irish Crochet for my Crochet Guild. I decided to come up with a pattern for a tape measure cover with an Irish rose. I am not yet happy enough with this pattern to publish it. A true Irish rose can be a little tricky for a newbie so for the Guild, I wanted to keep it simple so anyone at the meeting would be able to crochet it. These are the covers I came up with while trying to develop a pattern. I am still going to work on more of an authentic Irish rose but in the meantime these were a lot of fun to crochet. I am happy with the pattern I came up with for the crocheted leaf but I had quite a few leaf buttons and beads so I used them as well to attach to the end of the tape. I'm planning on putting these on etsy.