beck's blog

Thursday, March 06, 2014

Close Encounters of the Crocheted Kind - Meep & Stella

I love to play Scrabble and joined an online gaming site a while ago just so I could play it without any of those dang annoying ads. I've learned how to play lots of other games at the site as well. 

When someone at the site made a graph with which she created a Perler beaded coaster, (out of one of the characters from one of the games), I knew I had to try and crochet an afghan by doing the same.

 I uploaded the character's photo to the knitpro graph generator site and made a graph I could crochet from.
Ta-daaa! It's Meep from Stellar Sweeper.

I used the left-over sparkly yarns from the Harlequin poncho a couple of posts ago, plus, added the ocean colored variegated I Love This Yarn for the background and some sparkly soft fuzzy purply yarn for trim.

I think he's supposed to be giving a sort of 'Spock-like', V-shaped, greeting with his fingers only he's doing it with both hands and has them touching at the fingertips.

I also crocheted a dress for a stuffed alien doll I found at Goodwill. I think the doll was originally made as a toy from that partially animated movie with Michael Jordan in it from a while ago; Space Jam.

The doll had a cloth basketball outfit that was red with black and white trim and a number 23 on it. (Like Jordan's Chicago Bull's outfit).
Anyway, I stripped that outfit off and crocheted this cute dress onto the alien.



I named her Stella.



The dress is made with 100% cotton Sugar n Cream yarn. I added a necklace which is just two green pop tabs strung on a metal bead link chain, (like for a key chain).


Here they are together. Meep and Stella.
The afghan is really small. It would fit into a baby crib.





Sunday, March 02, 2014

Baby Animals Afghan - Team Sasquatch - Winter Olympics Games 2014

This year for Ravelry's Ravellenic Winter Games 2014, I joined the Team Sasquatch and finished up an afghan I started a while ago but had never finished until now.

I had wanted to make a tunisian afghan using graphs made for filet crochet. I also wanted to use two different patterns and pick out and match up the animal graphs from each pattern into one blanket.

I used the two Design carriage crib cover filet crochet patterns originally available as mail order patterns.
Design 915 and Design 7757.
I took the dogs, cats, and rabbits from each and made them into one afghan.


In order to fit them into the same size squares, I decided to leave out the ball, bows, butterflies, and ribbons that were in the original graph patterns.

Each square is 50 stitches wide by 45 stitches tall. (Since tunisian stitches are taller than they are wide, the squares must be shorter in stitch length so they would be perfect squares).

I made two squares at a time going across row by row so I didn't have to join squares when done - they were already all together as it is made as one whole piece.

Each animal is a different color. I added the flowers, (snowflakes?, sputniks?, lol), after it was done by using a yarn needle and simply stitching/weaving them onto the afghan.

The border is single crocheted row by row alternating between black yarn and one of the colors of each animal. Kind of gives it a rainbow look.

Since I finished my UFO project during the games I was awarded a cute virtual "gold medal" along with most of the other Team Sasquatch Ravthletes.

I will proudly display this honor in this post for all to see. Here it is along with the proper discription of award ceremony festivities.

"Cheers and applause shook the stadium as the gold medalists walked proudly to the stadium. Streamers of yarn and knitted flowers and amigurumi toys flew as tribute and homage to their feet.
Now please stand to honor our Ravthlete medalists as they receive the glory due to their olympican effort in reaching the finish line!"