Crocheting coming along

My crochet is coming along pretty well! Better than knitting ever did, sad to say. I picked up a couple of books to give me some ideas and some help.

That Austentatious Crochet book is a fun idea but "contemporary designs from the world of Jane Austen" is completely false. Unless people are still wearing muffs and I just haven't seen them. The Happy Hooker is super helpful for learning new stitches. I have the knitting book as well and it helped me immensely.

After a semi-rough start in which nothing I tried to make turned out, I decided to try something more simple and made some of the wash cloths from the spa collection by Lion Brand yarn.

They are not only beautiful but they gave me some skill and experience that I needed to be able to try some more difficult patterns. Enough so that I was able to make a couple pair of...

Thank you Ravelry members and your lovely free patterns. At first I only had the grey yarn and it was bulkier than the pattern called for so those gloves don't look as pretty and consequently I'm keeping those. :) The white ones, however, turned out just right! Let that be a lesson to always use the recommended yarn weight and hook size.

Mosaic Monday - frolicking felines

One kitty climbs the grape arbor while the other looks on. I like to take product photos in the grape arbor during winter and early spring because of great light filtration and the cats like to follow me everywhere I go so I suppose these antics were inevitable. :)

Be sure to visit Little Red House to see all the beautiful mosaics!

Mosaic Monday - dark skies

I started a new job two weeks ago and it is seriously cramping my photographer's lifestyle. You've no idea how much I cried and whined every morning when everything was frosted and gorgeous and foggy and amazing and I could do nothing about it except look and soak it in as I drove to work.
So here are some photos of the darkening skies that I took last month and a couple sunrise photos thrown in for good measure.

Be sure to visit Little Red House to see all the beautiful mosaics!

The ugliest key holder in the world

I may be giving in to my dramatic side. Take a look for yourself:

The face on this thing! What the heck?

I removed the hideous golf boy insert, removed all the hardware, painted the entire piece in an off-white and painted the hooks, hinges and clasp with oil-rubbed bronze.
What I planned to use it for was not related to golf, ugly man-children or keys, but jewelry.

It works great for holding my jewelry or it works great at displaying my jewelry for sale.

Either way, it's better than how it started.

Mosaic Monday - scenes of a frosty morn

(click to enlarge)

This frosty morning was especially icy with ice squeezed out of the earth like weird, frozen worms. And I stayed long enough to watch a pair of coyotes. Normally I'm not a fan of these creatures having lost my share of cats to them (why my cats now sleep indoors at night) but their jump and pounce while they hunt for mice is rather cute.

Be sure to visit Little Red House to see all the beautiful mosaics!