Monday, March 30, 2009

Divination .... the end


Well, term time has about run out. So since I've been waiting and waiting and *waiting* for weeks and weeks and just *weeks* to be able to post these ..... I decided to just do it.

Back when we first started Divination I just knew that at some point we'd need to actually 'read' our tea leaves. So I also knew that we'd get an assignment to craft something to do with reading the leaves. Well .... you really do need a pair of eyeballs to see the leaves so you can read them, right? ::grins::

Friday, March 13, 2009

Tea Time!



Here's the picture of my original cup of tea. I think I used too much loose tea due to inexperience with making tea in this fashion. However, in spite of the chaos in the cup, there does appear to be a squarish clump of leaves towards the top. If the tea cup were oriented properly, this shape would be close to the 6 months in the future area.

Our latest assignment for Divination reads: knit, crochet, or craft any sort of item in any medium that has to do with the placement of the symbols in your cup, when will things happen in other words.

So .... it's Tea Time, Professor Pren! ::grins:: Based (loosely) on the clock Mrs. Weasley uses to keep track of her family, my clock is used for deciding where in the lifeline the actions/situations take place.

The clock was crafted with play clay that I made myself this morning. I had some fun creating the 'vine' that winds around the outer edge ... the play clay didn't want to stay together. Then I needed to persuade it to stay together in even smaller 'snakes' to create the lettering. I finally figured out what to do, tho ... I just threatened to send it to my Professor. ::chortles::

You'll notice that, since the assignment is due in the present (or extremely near future, in just over 24 hours), the leaf pointer in the center is pointing to NOW. Or perhaps it is referring to the fact that I am posting this now ....

Gee, I'll have to study that cup a bit closer, I guess .........

:::wandering off to find my tea-leaf reading glasses:::

New sock yarn!


This is some of the prettiest hand-painted yarn for a Gryffindor that I've seen. When the first ball came in, my husband watched me fondling and drooling over it (it was ordered for HSS 5) and he went and ordered the other ball of it for me!!

My daughter's first comment when she saw it? "Mom, it looks like a Phoenix! The black is the ash, the rest is the bird." Can we say "Hello, Fawkes"?

The yarn is from Sheepish, on Etsy. If you haven't yet checked out Etsy, you really should. The place is an online bazaar of nearly anything you can think of that can be hand-crafted. I'll be opening my own Etsy store soon. Among other things, I'll be selling my own hand-crafted stitch markers, including some crafted in the Hogwarts House colors, and House Nutz in each House's accent color.

Some recent knitting .....



The black and white pair is for a child and will be donated, along with some bootees and baby sets, to various charities. I've got the yarn to make quite a few more pairs as well. I'll try to post pictures as I finish a few pairs.

I took a picture of the bootees I still have here, and it came out so badly you can't make out the bootees. I'll have to try again.

The Rainbow socks were done for my sister. They are (finally!!) done. The pattern is a free Ravelry download. If you don't belong to Ravelry, and you knit or crochet, you should really check it out. The library of patterns alone is well worth the time it takes to join.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Thistle Shawl


This shawl was actually knitted several years ago .... back in the dark ages when there wasn't such a thing as blogs on every corner ::grins::

I'll try to clean up the photo and get just the patterned area. If I can, I'll edit this post and include the new image.

The pattern came from a knitting book (hardcover, but please don't ask me the name of it ... I can no longer remember) that I was browsing in a library. The pattern was for a coat, and the stylized thistle pattern was repeated several times on the body of the coat, done in stranded color work. I chose to knit a triangular shawl and use the pattern just once using duplicate stitch. The shawl was done in worsted weight acrylic yarn and the pattern was done in leftover colors from other projects.

Monday, March 2, 2009

SeaFan


Our newest assignment for Madam Jak's Flying class is to create a bookmark in the colors used for the uniforms in our Fantasy Quidditch Team assignment a few weeks ago.

My team, Flight of Dragons, had two sets of uniforms. The home set was jewel tones, and each player would choose their own jewel color. The away set was sea tones. This bookmark, done in a fan pattern in sea tones, is a SeaFan bookmark. The colors in this scan are not true. It's actually in tones of sea green, aqua, pale lilac and sea blue.

The pattern for this bookmark can be found here: http://crochetroo.blogspot.com/2006/05/fan-bookmark.html