Monday, December 15, 2008

Flying in the Face of Reality

(mmmmmmm......lamp+couch=nap...mmmm)
Here follows a lesson about what happens when you have too much self confidence.
Let me start this with a bit of a preface. I finished the shawl for Mom. (Hopefully she is still unaware of it's existence.) It's safely tucked away in the closet where a certain furry kitty can't claim it for her own. When I set the goal of knitting it for Christmas, I gave myself the back up date of her birthday, just in case. That bought me another month to finish it and surprisingly I didn't need it. I completed it, I blocked it, I stashed it. All done, finito. No problem.
Where the problem starts is in the next project I decided to do. Our guild is having our annual holiday party this month with a pot luck dinner and a round robin gift exchange. I've participated in the past few years and it's lots of fun. This time I thought I'd take in a hand made item to put in the gift pile. After knitting the shawl, crochet sounded like a great change as I haven't done any in awhile and I decided to make a set of snowflake ornaments.

I've been wanting to make some of these for years and just never got around to it. I was even feeling confident when I had completed a set of six various sizes a week before the party. (I should have know there was going to be a problem right there.) I followed all the written instructions about making copies of the blocking pattern, covering it with plastic wrap, soaking the snowflakes in a zip lock bag overnight, etc. I even stayed up late one night pinning the darling things out until my fingers hurt just so they would have plenty of time to dry. When I awoke in the morning, after grabbing a cup of coffee, I went in to the craft area to check on them and wanted to cry. (Instead I swore like a sailor. Trust me, I was crying on the inside.)

See them in their glory? Not bad handwork, if I do say so myself. Too bad I didn't check and make sure that the pins I was using to block them were correct for this type of work. The two smallest ones (not pictured here) were fine. I used nice new blocking pins for those. Unfortunately I decided after doing those two that I wouldn't have enough pins and therefore dug out some older pins I had in my sewing supplies. All five of these have rust stains on them. Yep. Rust. Stains. (Still makes me want to swear!) I've spent several evenings using Iron Out in a crazy high concentration to get them clean. I had to admit defeat on four of these five and have since shelved them to be salvaged later, remembering that the goal is to have a hand crafted gift for Tuesday night.

Sunday found me crocheting four small snowflakes to make a set of 6 ornaments. It's not what I originally planned, but hey, at least it's handmade. (sorry for the crappy picture. I can't take a pic today to save my life.) So now I'm off to attach monofil for a hanger and plop them in a gift box. Hopefully guild won't be canceled tomorrow due to bad weather. (grin)

1 comment:

Cindy said...

I'm sorry about the fiasco. The ornaments are lovely.