April showers bring Mud Monsters!
He’s a sloppy little guy, inspired by frogs and mudskippers — not to mention mud season. The pattern page has more about what’s required to make your own; here I just thought I’d show you an adventure we had. Just to warn you, there are a lot of photos past the cut in this post.
We got a good bit of rain this weekend, so it was perfectly wet. Down by the river, Muddy made a sand castle amid the pawprints and then posed with it.
I had never taken part in a crochet-a-long until this month, when I saw NeedleNoodles post that she would be running two: a standard CAL with some of her spring patterns (and an accompanying discount), and a mystery CAL in the Ravelry group Hooked for Life! While one of her spring patterns was very appealing (a hen and chicks, including an egg with feet), I couldn’t resist the lure of the MCAL.
I wasn’t able to start stitching until this past weekend, though the daily clues were posted from the 1st to the 16th. Here’s what we had.
Clues 1-3: two microphones.
Clues 4-6: two clubs.
Clues 7-10: a strawberry in a tutu.
Clues 11-13: A head!
Clues 14-16: Two deflated balloons.
If this sort of thing sounds like fun to you, follow the ReveDreams Facebook page. Any future mystery crochet-a-longs that cross my desk will be posted there.
On my local fibercraft blog we’re having a craft challenge a la Iron Chef: craft something inspired by or about fiddleheads, the young fern coils that New Englanders like to eat around this time of year. More details and where you should comment with your project are here, and I would love it if you wanted to participate — whether or not you’re local and whether or not you would be working in fiber, in fact. It would actually be a big favor, helping populate this challenge.
I started working on fiddlehead-themed crochet last night, and I must say, my blogging partner picked a tricky challenge theme. With all sorts of spirals on my mind, my first attempt was a two-strand spiral beginning with single crochet into a magic ring (with strand A, let’s say) and then alternating between slip stitch into back loop only with strand B and single crochet with strand A into the front loops of the slip stitches. The single crochet gradually grew to half double and then double. The result, which looks more like a seashell than a fiddlehead, is the first picture below.
The second picture above is my second attempt, a strip of foundation sc (then fhdc, then fdc) that I then coiled up and sewed into a spiral. To me, this one evokes seashells even more than the previous one.
The commas below are my third attempt. Chain 2 and make 6 sc into the second chain from the hook. Increase around in back loops only, except the last (12th) stitch of this round was an extended sc that led into about a dozen foundation sc. Here and in the second coil I made sure *not* to pull the linking loop of the fsc out very far, so the strip would naturally curl toward the bases of the stitches.
The last picture is of a mess. I chained for a while, then I slip stitched into a chain a little ways from the hook, and alternated ch 2 and sl st into somewhere further around the ring for a while. When I was only a few chain-lengths away from the previous linkage to the starting chain I slip stitched into it again, and went back into the ch-2/sl st pattern. Ultimately I think this is best described as a coil of ch-2/sl st going counter-clockwise on top, and a coil of a periodically-secured starting chain going clockwise on the bottom. It was an experiment.
The challenge goes until the end of the month and this won’t be my last attempt, but I’m going to change media for my next effort.