Crocheted hat pattern!

After trying to make the Swedish Olympic hat a few times, I gave up and made up a pattern of my own instead, and HERE it is. I hope you like it :)

The hat is meant to be lady size, but it's both tight and very stretchable, so I'm pretty sure the hat will fit almost anyone :) I have also made the hat in two different styles, but it's the same basic pattern. Here is the bigger, beanie-type hat:

Spring cleaning on the blog

As you may have noticed by now I have got a new template for my blog :) I finally realized I needed a template with two sidebars to make it look less messy, and I think I've achieved that. I wanted a black background for the text so I wouldn't have to go through all my previous posts to edit the font colors, and this is one of the few I could find. I really like the blue background color, it didn't turn out as crazy as I feared :) There are two things, though.. One is that the column with posts is very narrow, which makes my posts very long (as if they weren't already!), and the other is that I had to remove the header picture of Bollan:

I have also added a box called 'Categories' in the right sidebar, in the hope that it will make it easier to find stuff on my blog. The tag cloud at the bottom is now mostly for my own sake, I have way too many tags for anyone to find anything. So, if you are totally uninterested in my personal life and only want to see the things I make, just click on the category 'crafting'. I know that some posts contain a lot of different stuff, so no category is completely 'pure', I hope you can bear with me, it's a little late to edit them now... I'll  just try to separate my posts a little better from now on :)

Weekend visit & shopping

This weekend we've had a visit by my boyfriend's parents. They brought LOTS of chicken/turkey hot dogs and chicken filets, our freezer is now completely full :) The mother's birthday was just a few days ago, so I made a cake, and I finally got to use my dinosaur sprinkles!

We went out shopping one of the days, the mother was looking for an 8mm crochet hook to make the Olympic hat, and we ended up getting new yarn for me to make more hats :) 

After I tried my first Olympic hat I fell in love with the yarn (DROPS Eskimo) and the spimplicity of the hat pattern, and I wanted to make lots of them to sell. I have now developed a pattern of my own that I'm happy with, and I'll add it to my pattern blog later :)

I also got the biggest Easter egg I've ever had, it has room for both Bollan and all my candy!

The Olympic hat...

It seems that everyone makes them these days, and everyone has their own version. There are several patterns out there, I'm not even sure which one I've used. I think I did my own version, too... I guess I shouldn't have, because I'm not too happy with the result. When the hat was big enough to try on I realized it was too small, so I did one more round of increase and just kept going. This resulted in a very long hat with a somewhat pointy top. If I push it forward it looks a bit like a Phrygian hat... *sigh*

I wanted it to be floppy, like the one I've been wearing lately (knitted by my mother from this pattern - sorry, only in Norwegian), but it looks a little flat and weird... I think the hat is just too small for me, so I guess I'll sell it on the market this summer. 

The problem might be that I crocheted the whole thing in single crochet, which makes it tight and not very stretchy... So that's why I decided to try again, this time doing the whole hat in half-double crochet. That saved me a lot of rounds :) It came out a little big, but I don't think it'll fall off my head, so I'm happy with it :)

Here is a picture of the two hats for comparison...

Summer guests :)

Today my mother called me to say that our summer guests have arrived :) Larus and his wife have returned from winter migration to lay eggs and raise babies, and as usual they come to my grandmother's house where they sit on the lawn and beg for food and attention. We call the male Larus because that's the Latin name for the Herring Gull, Larus Argentatus, but the female doesn't really have a name. We just call her the female :) This is a picture of the pair from last year, eating scraps of dinner from a plate:

They are actually tame enough to eat from our hands! They are a little sceptical the first couple of days, but after that they will hang around every time food is brought outside. Larus has tried to land on the barbecue grill to get the hot dogs more than once, and he's even been inside the house a few times when we've left the door open :)

I can remember Larus from when I was little, I suspect he's even older than I am! He's been around for a long time, but it's only in the later years he has brought his mate with him to the house. The first year or two she was very shy, but now she's as tame as he is :) When their chicks are grown enough they usually follow their parents down to the house, but they have never become tame like them.

A few years ago we thought that Larus and his mate were about to get competition for the food, when a Great Black-backed Gull showed up and was almost as tame as they are. He took food from our hands and sat outside the house all the time, but unfortunately he chased Larus and his mate away... 

We named him Ramses Larus Martinus, but he was only there for a year, the next summer he was around, but never came close again. We suspect he was sick and had a hard time finding food for himself. Thankfully he seems to have recovered, and has probably raised many babies of his own. I look forward to going home for the summer and seeing them all :)

Happy Paddy's Day :)

Not a holiday I normally celebrate, since I'm neither Irish nor Catholic, but I take it as a good reason (or excuse, if you will) to drink lots of beer and make green stuff :) Not that I actually drink beer, I leave that to some other creatures in this house... By the way, dyeing beer green with food coloring makes the beer flat and according to my boyfriend also makes it taste funny :/

I've crocheted a leafy scarf for Piggen, and a Leprechaun top hat for Iggy.  Pattern for the hat is here, and the leafy scarf pattern will be posted later :)

The hat turned out to be a bit floppy, so I felted it.

The scarf was originally intended for Bollan, but it looked more like hair than a scarf, so I gave it to Piggen instead :) It can also be used as a really big bracelet :p

I have even made cupcakes for this occasion! Like the rest of my baking, they're not pretty, but they are at least tasty :) And green! Pistachio and yoghurt cupcakes with green sugar frosting. Well, almost green.. Almost half a bottle of food coloring and all I got was this horrible minty green :/

The weird shape is because I crammed too many cakes onto one tray, and then I overfilled the cups because I wanted to use all the batter instead of making a second tray... I never pays off to be lazy :/ Anyway, in the oven the batter of course rose over the cups, and when finished they looked like this:

Yay, am I a baker or what...

Crap!

Utter crap, I tell you! Failed my exam agian :( That course is going to be the death of me, I swear...I'm not even sure what the point of the course is, we have just read a lot of useless linguistic theory,  Leonard Bloomfield was an idiot and Noam Chomsky is a pompous ass! There, just had to get that out... 

So now I just have to get through this semester, for which all motivation vanished about five minutes ago when I got my exam result... This means I won't be finishing my Bachelor degree this semester, and I'll have to postpone my Master by a whole year, unless I get lucky and can start with the spring semester... Shite and crap again. It's not an entirely hopeless situation, though, because I already have a Bachelor in Arabic, so I could always apply for a Master in that. I can still use my linguistics courses for something, I guess... Ugh!

Weee-kend :)

Today was the final test in the indroduction course in Latin. I think it went well, but I'm not sure since it was a pretty easy or short test, so everything has to be 100 % right for a top grade.. The last few days I've done nothing but study (except for finishing up the Celtic squares during the Latin classes, but I haven't photographed them yet, so I'll post more later), so now I'm taking a well-deserved break to finish off some projects :) Wee!

A while ago I bought a new crochet book, 50 Sensational Afghans and Throws, solely because of the afghan pattern that's featured on the cover. 

It's a beautiful afghan, but the pattern is unfortunately somewhat of a challenge. Not because  the pattern is particularly difficult, but it's poorly written at times, and with a few mistakes. I fortunately found someone on Ravelry who has made this afghan before, so I've had help and support through my first square :) My first try came out a little small, and I made so many mistakes I didn't want to use it (and I didn't want to unravel it), so a started a new one, using green instead of blue:

I decided not to make all 12 squares needed for the afghan, but only 4 to make a pillow. So far the first square is almost finished, and the other three are almost half done. But then I ran out of black yarn... Today I finally got around to go to the store for more, but they were out of black, too :( I guess the squares aren't meant to be finished yet... There are just two rounds left with black on that first square, and I had hoped I'd see it finished this weekend :/

As you can see the corner motifs are a challenge for my patience:

But, since I've been out of black for quite a while, and I really love these squares, I have started a new set in new colors! It looks kind of Easter-y with the yellow and purple :)

Guess what!

I have taken up bead weaving :D Heh... As if I really need another hobby! Actually I do, I have to try something new every now and then, when I get tired of whatever I'm doing. All my crafting interests come and go in cycles, and some things I try once and give up very quickly. Knitting, crocheting and beading are hobbies I think will stay interesting as long as I can make cute critters :)

Anyway, the other day I went out to pick up the package from my mother at the post office, and unfortunately for my wallet the craft store is in the same building.. So I went in an bought a loom, beading needles and some nylon string, and went home and got to work :) The loom is a pretty cheap wooden construction, but it works well enough, it's just a little small.

Sadly the craft store only had black and white string, but I've been experimenting with embroidery floss as warp threads, and that works, too. I stretches a little, so I have to tighten it a few times, but it doesn't break, and I have more colors to choose from :) For the weaving I use ordinary sewing thread. I worry that it will break with use, so I weave it through the work a few extra times to be sure.

First I tried a pattern from my new book, Lovable Beaded Creatures, for a keychain with a lizard motif. The choice of background color wasn't the best, so the lizard is pretty hard to see. Next I made another thing from this pattern, but I'm not sure what to do with it. It's a little big for a key chain. The patterns for the bracelets are my own, and I'll be adding them to my pattern blog when I've finished them and drawn up the charts :)

Together with my beads there was another thing in the package, a surprise from my mother. It's a door sign! Of course Bollan's name is put first, she rules us all :) The sign is hand painted by my mother, and the flowers are glued on. It's very pretty, Bollan is very pleased that it's going on our door so "everyone" can see where she lives :)

A much needed break...

Just ten days until the final test in Latin, woohoo... I had my linguistics exam today, the one I failed before Christmas. I think I did allright this time, though I know I would have done better if I'd read more. But time flew past and motivation failed me, so all I could do was hope the questions would be more understandable than last time. Now it's all done, and I treated myself to a new book (again, haha) of beaded animals :D My first beading book in English!

Lovable Beaded Creatures by Anja Freese. It's a pretty book, though the animals are a little different than the ones I'm used to. This is the only book I have by this author. It has patterns both for beaded animals and woven bracelets, but the animal section is by far the biggest. I need to get myself a beading loom, there are many great patterns I want to try out :) Hopefully I'll get my missing beads in the mail tomorrow, so I can make a little critter from my new book before moving on to verb conjugation and noun declensions in Latin  :p

I have also started this month's squares for the Ravelry Block-a-Month CAL. The pattern is called Celtic Granny. I skipped the 5th round and improvised the sc edge to make the square 4 inches instead of 6. Tonight I managed to make these three: