Shamrock Garland

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And when you make too many shamrock pins for a craft fair; make St. Patrick’s Day garland!

The pattern for these shamrocks came from  the 1984 Leisure Arts leaflet 328; “Holiday ‘Fridgies’ to Crochet.”  Though this leaflet is 27 years old, you can still find it for sale online at places like Ebay, Etsy vintage, and other sites.  Or, if you are lucky like me, perhaps you already have a vintage shamrock pattern bequeathed to you by a relative.

To make the garland, I first carefully removed all of the pins from the backs of the shamrocks so as not to damage them and so that I could use the pins for future projects.  Then, using my light green yarn I made a chain, attaching the shamrocks at regular intervals using a single crochet stitch.  That was it!  Now we have a pretty garland to dress up our dinning room window or fireplace.

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Winter Wonderland + Cozy Fireplace

After some beautiful weather last week (clear, sunny skies and mild temperatures), winter has officially returned.  The following are some photos that I took from my apartment this morning.  Surprisingly, it didn’t feel that cold on the balcony where I took the close-up shots of the frozen branches.

It’s easy to romanticized winter in November and December when holiday decorations and excessive amounts to hot-out-of-the-oven cookies are surrounding us.  It’s a time for shopping, giving, and over-eating that makes us feel so good at the time, yet so bad for the first few months of the following year (i.e. now).  Hence the need for New Years resolutions.

I always think it’s kind of sad to see the Christmas decorations come down around January 1st because they represent so much warmth and coziness, even if we are sick of seeing them by then. It’s as though the house becomes ten degrees colder because their aren’t strands of twinkle lights and Santa Clauses surrounding us. Almost everyone wishes for a “white Christmas,” when in reality the snow is usually at its worst from January through March.

This is why I wanted to do something to add some warmth and coziness to our apartment now, when we really need it. So I directed my attention to the prominent, beautiful, yet unused fireplace in our living room. It seemed like a shame to leave it empty, but we didn’t know what to put there.

Finally, I decided on a small Christmas tree. When I first mentioned this idea to my husband he was skeptical about my interior design taste. “A Christmas tree? It’s January,” he said. I could see his point. After all, the tree did have a red, velvet bow around its base and a strand of blue lights which seemed to choke the poor thing more than provide festive decoration.

After I removed the lights, the bow, and fluffed up the branches it looked nice, and much less Christmas-y. However, it still looked a bit sad and lonely in the fireplace all by itself. It was as if it was waiting for us to come along, light a match, and burn it to ashes at any moment.

That’s when I thought of the crochet snow flake ornament patterns my Grandma Virgie had given to me recently.  Why should snow flakes be reserved strictly for Christmas? Below is the pattern booklet, circa 1983, along with some of the snow flakes that I made.

I like the way that the crisp, white flakes pop against the dark cavity of the fireplace, while being framed by the white mantle and book cases. In the spring I’d like to paint the walls a light, warm gray to make the mantel pop even more.

Old Scool; Crochet Slippers

Today I’m going all the way back to 1977 to bring you a design from a publication called Creative Hands.

Maybe you have some magazines like this lying around your house. If you’re like me, you might have inherited them from someone else. Maybe you think the pictures and projects look dated, frumpy, or just plain ugly.

I have a small stack of these magazines that I’ve acquired recently and I cherish them all. Some of the pictures and projects are absolutely comical. While others really do seem to be timeless.

My mother and grandmother both crochet and I still have the blankets, toys and doll clothes they made for me over the years.  I remember asking once or twice if they could teach me how to crochet, but I never did learn until I went to college and taught myself from a library book.  I don’t remember what book it was.  It was probably at least 30 years old.   I wanted to learn, but I could barely keep myself focused enough to learn how to single crochet in the round and back and forth.  That’s it.  That’s all I learned (and actually, I didn’t even do it correctly.  For the next four years or so I made my single crochet through the front loops only).   I had no desire at all to learn how to read patterns, so everything I made was an original design.  I liked it that way.

But then I went into the Peace Corps and I took up crochet with a new-found energy after borrowing an early 1980s edition of  The Complete Guide to Neddlework.  I was ready to learn every crochet stitch there was, and as it turns out, there really isn’t that many of them.  Then I learned how to read patterns.  Soon I was able to write out patterns myself so that I could remember how I made something.  I even created a simplified way of writing out tapestry crochet designs so that non-English speakers could follow them.

As it turns out, there are a lot of valuable lessons you can learn from making something from a pattern.  So when I moved to my current home a short while ago and didn’t have any original design ideas that I wanted to work out, I turned to my stack of vintage magazines for a lesson in construction.  That’s how I came across the pattern for the slippers above.

And learn I did! Namely, the importance of swatching!

The pattern should have made slippers in an adult size 6, while the booties I made would probably fit a five-year-old.  Yes, I realized fairly early on that my gauge was wrong, but since I wasn’t making these because I desperately needed a pair of slippers, I didn’t care.  I just wanted to see if I could follow the pattern.  I could have stopped after one, but this way I can give them to someone.

Stop by again for some more old school designs as I make my way through my musty pile of vintage relics.  Oh, and my apologies to anyone offended by my calling something from 1977 a “relic.”