Crocheting can be very diverse!

So, a did a couple of crochet projects recently and they are TOTALLY different! Not much in common at all!

The first thing I made was a little cupcake to put in my daughter's room. It is 3d and stuffed and just too adorable for words! I adore cupcakes! Soon I'd like to hand paint some wall plaques with cupcakes for her room as well! It's in a pink and brown theme, not totally done yet, but put together and looking basically good, it's just needs special finishing touches from Mommy! I'll be sure to share pics as I do more to it!

The second thing I made was practically totally opposite. It is a flat piece, with a plain shape and a design created with contrasting yarn colors. It is also a lot more morbid! It's a skull I made for my husband. The backside looked terrible, so I crocheted another piece all in black and sewed them together. It gives it some thickness and makes it more stiff, which is actually kind of good in this case. I used a small piece of yarn to create a way to hang it and he is planning on taking it to work with him. I had a really hard time finding something I wanted to crochet him! He doesn't wear scarves or hats, and it seems like crocheted things are often somewhat feminine in nature. Luckily I found this in my book The Happy Hooker.

So, obviously there's a lot of very different projects I can crochet, and that really excites me! I am very new to it. So far I have really enjoyed learning. I have found it to be very theraputic, and my projects have been pretty cheap too, which is always a plus!

Childs Play!

My husband and I were not having the best of days yesterday. The baby didn't sleep, so of course we didn't sleep, the day just got off to a bad start and we were both feeling frustrated and in a poor mood. Things were not looking up when we drug ourselves out to the store and it was a nightmare. They were out of the products we went there to buy, and we ended up spending more than we planned.

Yet, the day had a saving grace that made it wonderful and created fabulous memories for us! Right by the check out line I grabbed one of those egg dying kits. The cheap, horrible ones with flimsy wires that do squat to hold the eggs, and weak color dye tablets that fizz in vinegar. Cheap stickers, and unbearably horrible glue. I grabbed this on impulse, thinking it would be fun. So what if our 10 month old can't do this yet, WE CAN!

It was SUCH a fun experience! We laughed and smiled from ear to ear recalling the memories of doing this as children! The kits haven't changed much. Really, the supplies are horrible and we had several small disasters of results. The glue ran everywhere, the colored foil wrap was an ugly joke of an idea, etc! That almost made it MORE fun because we couldn't take it, or ourselves too seriously, these were not going to be designer pieces worthy of a lifetime of display, these were purely for fun, and play.


We found ourselves looking forward to next year when our little girl can clumsily drop the eggs in the dye, stick stickers on them, etc. They will be the most beautiful eggs we have ever seen! We also decided that for fun we would actually like to make some really good looking egg decorations next year on ceramic eggs or something, with good paints and tools. We had never really done anything creative together before, and the joy it brought us inspired us to do it again. It was so fun to get my husband involved in my obsession with creating!!! At the end my husband dumped all the colors together and soaked an egg for awhile. It came out a blackish brown with weird texture and we decided it was our "dinosaur egg" how fun is that?!

This experience reminded me of the true, pure joys of creativity! It's not always about creating a masterpiece!!! The finished result doesn't even have to be the reward. It can just be fun for the sake of fun, plain and simple. Letting your imagination run wild and just plain playing!

Being such a perfectionist about many of my projects it is easy to forget this simple joy when I am bound and determined to make each stitch a work of art! So, this was real therapy for me! I felt such freedom! So, I encourage all of you other crafters out there to do something childish! Paint a suncatcher, do a paint by number, dye some eggs, whatever. Just do something fun and affordable and don't worry about it being a piece worthy of showing off afterwards! Even better if you can get someone else involved in the fun! A friend, a spouse, a child, etc. Enjoy the simple things in life and just let your expectations go for awhile! You'll be glad you did!