Hello blog world

This is my first ever blog post :) I've been meaning to start a blog for a while. I started crocheting a few months ago and found myself creating a sort of picture diary of the experience. This isn't really strange for me, I take pictures of EVERYTHING but I also thought it would be nice to have a place to explain the pictures. So, here it is. I also make jewellery, mostly from wire and beads, so this is a mixed-craft blog. I'll probably also be posting a lot of things about my cat, Wernicke, as she is so amusing. Anyway...I'm going to start from my crochet beginning :)

This is my second-ever crocheted piece (the first is two very bad rows of single crochet, not worth a picture). It was supposed to be the body of a stocking...apparently I crochet quite tightly. So, to mix crochet with my love of jewellery, it is now a cuff. A good compromise I think :)

My second attempt didn't go as well as I'd hoped it would, it was a larger red rectangle but not as large as I wanted and a little wavy on the ends...

...but I'm still proud of it :)

Next I started on a scarf for my boyfriend. I figured it was an easy thing to do (the pattern for the stocking confused me, I still find some patterns hard to read but it was a mistake to try a multi-piece thing from a pattern when I'd just started. I had no idea what I was reading so I got really frustrated and discouraged.) and a great way to practice my double crochet. I just looked up a really simple pattern to get an idea of how to start, made a chain the width I wanted, and dc'd from there. A little early morning crochet by the Christmas tree lights was super relaxing.

All the beginner tips I'd read online warned against using a dark yarn to start, because it's harder to see the stitches. I thought "pfft, can't be that hard"...I was wrong. This yarn was also fuzzy so I couldn't see the stitches at all. But I could feel them, which was lucky, so I worked away because it was the yarn my boyfriend chose. And I used up the whole ball of yarn to get one wicked scarf :P

I was pretty confident in my double crochet abilities so I set out on a scarf of my own.

And then I got bold and decided to add a border, to make my scarf match a coat I'd just bought.

I thought it was going to be harder to add a colour in, but it was actually pretty straightforward. And voila! A yellow scalloped trim on a royal blue scarf :) The trim pattern is from http://www.woolcrafting.com/crochet-scallop-edging.html

It matches my bright yellow and royal blue coat! yay!

So those were a few of my first crochet items. Next up: some non-scarf things!