I did put together a lot of the little granny squares and made a lapghan or maybe a colorful baby afghan, mostly in pinks. Right now I don't have any idea of what to do with it, so PussyFoot (our only female cat) has decided it belongs to her. I am a little surprised - she generally prefers to sleep on items made out of more expensive yarn.
One item I made was a kimono style jacket from Lion Brand yarn -
http://cache.lionbrand.com/content-crochetPatternIndex.html
but of course I decided to change the type of yarn used, as well as other fundamental parts of the jacket. I had constructed it so I could wear it thru the relatively mild winters we have in the Maryland area. (I'm thinking mild as compared to Colorado, not mild as compared to Florida - plus I was having my own personal sauna going on at the time.)
Well....it was _too_ heavy to wear comfortably and it actually wasn't as warm as I had thought. I hadn't calculated the wind chill aspect and it didn't work out as well as I had thought. It was great when the wind wasn't blowing (if you skip the heavy part) but not otherwise.
For quite some time. PussyFoot or my younger son slept with this jacket - sometimes both of them at once;) I decided to put it away to deconstruct it at a later point. Much too heavy and much too expensive for a cat blanket.
Now who do I get to blame for my mistake? Lion Brand, for writing the pattern - I did (sort of) follow their pattern. Well, _no_ not Lion Brand. It's like making a cake, but instead of using butter, you using cooking oil, instead of flour, you use corn meal and instead of granulated sugar, you use confectioner's sugar. You don't get a wonderful pound cake, you get a huge mess. This is because you didn't think the project all the way to the end. And that was my fault with the jacket. I loved playing with the different yarns, and I did like the way it looks, but it wasn't going to turn out to be quite what I was trying to create.
I'm not saying you should never try different yarns or styles. Just think about it a little longer than I did. I spent a lot of time making it, but very little time actually wearing it. I used _double_ the yarn to make the jacket warmer, but all it did was make it too heavy to wear comfortably. And while it looked good to me, I made the mistake of mixing fibers that could not be cleaned in the same way. So now I got a heavy jacket that has to be hand washed and laid flat to dry. Where that flat surface in my house is, I don't know (the ceilings?).
I should have made a scarf first, just to see if the fabric I created would perform the way I wanted it to perform. PussyFoot would have still slept on it, but I wouldn't be thinking about the investment of time I made. But I learned to make a smaller project first, just to test out the pattern and fabric, so that was something cool. And I learned PussyFoot and my younger son have French champagne tastes on a generic near-beer budget. (Like mother, like son).
And I also have a project to unravel at some point in the future. Sometimes that's a therapeutic project for me. So I'll hold off on it until I feel I need that type of therapy.
later
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