amigurumi and friends

a friend of mine was SO ESSITED by the prospect of creating an adorable creature out of yarn that she requested lessons. this knittenninja, of course, was willing to help out with such a thing. provided, of course, that there was a bottle of wine and a really bad movie. in this case, step up 2.

i have no idea what happened in the movie. NONE. however at the end of several hours of mind numbing music and entanglement in yarn, we came up with these little guys.

apparently they were inspired by the movie and got a litte rough. first my friend's pig stepped up.



then my one armed tree swung into action.



the movie was probably more exciting, but i had more fun with the yarn.

Afghan

i've always irrationally disliked the word afghan. there is no particular reason for this, other than the fact that it refers to something that is clearly a blanket.



i found myself overcoming this prejudice because of some awesome yarn that i found at a dollar store. so i bought all i could carry and brought it home to figure out a pattern.

i wound up using:

row 1: k all
row 2: p all
row 3: * k2tog 3 times, * k1 yo six times, * k2tog 3 times, repeat to end of row
row 4: k all



essentially, this pattern involves one row of effort out of every four. and in that row, you make everything smaller 6 times, make it wider 6 times, later, rinse, and repeat until you run out of room. i would HIGHLY recomment using stitch markers to keep your sanity. my blanket involved casting on 144 stitches. so i placed a marker every 24 stitches, or every 4 groups of 6. this helps to catch mistakes early on.

it was super easy to do, but took forever. i left all the supplies at someone else's place and made it whenever we watched a movie together. a great long term project for when you're looking for something to keep your hands busy that you are in no rush to finish. now ok one last closeup.



now. . . for the ratings:

DIFFICULTY:
AWESOMENESS: