A day in the flower park

Ryan and I were able to spend a beautiful Friday strolling through the Mito plum blossom flower park. It was glorious. Here is a small glimpse of what we enjoyed:

"The Earth laughs in flowers."

-Emerson

Have a joyous weekend!

Knit this, crochet that

There's something about cold weather that makes me itch to knit. I have a lot of odds and ends of yarn, half a skein of this and half a skein of that. So I decided to use it up! I'm making a scarf knitted the long way on circular needles, you only need a little amount of yarn. It's a great project to do when you have 10 or 20 minutes without any plans.

And...I finally did it, I taught myself to crochet! You can learn just about anything online. The world wide web is pretty amazing in that regard. I can only single and double crochet, but it's a start.

I clearly had some trouble in the beginning as you can see. It's way harder to control the tension when you crochet than it is when you knit. I'm still working on that. But after a while I started to get the hang of it and switched back and forth between single and double crochet.

It's coming along but I still have a long way to go! I was amazed at how quick crocheting is. I mean, it takes days if not weeks to knit a scarf, but you could crochet a scarf in a few hours! Crazy.

My goal is to be able to crochet Scandinavian heart ornaments for next Christmas.

source

This requires having way more crochet skills than I currently have so it will take a lot of practice before I can accomplish that, but it's exciting to learn something new!

A cute jumper for a cute niece

This is my 2nd project (1st one here) from the One Yard Wonders craft book I got for Christmas. It's a playful jumper/dress for my niece! Unfortunately, I can't take any pictures of her in it because I won't see her until I'm home from Japan (in less than 2 months, woah!).

This was a very straightforward project and the directions were fairly simple. It didn't take very long either, it could easily be finished in a day. The measurements for the elastic were a little big so I took off about 2 inches to get the jumper to the size I needed.

I've really been enjoying the One Yard Wonders book, it has lots of quick and simple projects. Not to mention it helps me think of ways to decrease my ever-growing stash of fabric. If you're into craft books, be sure to check out Rachel's month-long series over at her blog, Nest Full of Eggs, she's reviewing a different 2010 craft book everyday!