But I did have 400 yards of a delicious alpaca/wool yarn I bought in Colorado a few years ago when I did a book-tour stop at Shuttles, Spindles and Skeins in Boulder (that was the night I met Jill Wright and Marly Bird, which was a blast). With a 6mm hook, it was immediately apparent this scarf was meant to be. I’ve worn it pretty much every day since it dried after blocking, and I’m considering making another in some heavier yarn, too.

I named the scarf Celia because I was reading The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, the week I designed it. Celia is the protagonist of the book; she manages to grow into a confident, witty, passionate woman despite a harsh childhood. And she’s a magician. The kind with real magic. I feel like this scarf is magical – it transcends the simplest of stitches to be both casual and stylish, and damn practical.

The main stitch pattern is crumpled griddle stitch (hat tip to Jill for pointing me to the name) – alternating single crochets and double crochets to result in a texture a bit similar to knitted seed stitch. (But faster to make. Oh, so much faster.) There’s an off-centre panel of V-stitches to add both visual and crochet interest. And that’s it. The only for-whatever-reason-not-considered-basic technique I used is foundation double crochet for the first round, and I explain how to do that in the pattern.

It’s been very dark here since I finished the scarf, so I’ve had a tough time taking good photos of it (the yarn I used is actually grey!). But I couldn’t wait to release the pattern, for I love it very much. So my impatience is a bonus to you, because I’m compensating for inadequate photography by offering the pattern at half-price until I can take better photos. Tell your friends.

If you make one of these, let me know! I’m dying to see it in other colours.

Introducing the Celia Circle Scarf is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

I don’t much like designing craft patterns. My passion for craft manifests more as a desire to curate, to pontificate, to advocate. I usually either follow other people’s patterns or just wing it.

I decide a couple of weeks ago to do an experiment, though. The weather was getting colder, and I realized Owen’s going to need a bunch of hats. A few hours later, I’d made him one, and the experiment is that I decided to size it and write up the pattern – would it take me an unreasonable amount of time? Would I recoup the cost of my time?

We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.

For now, allow me to introduce to you the Virtual Planetoid Hat, inspired by my kid and his huge noggin. It’s like Sputnik.

It’s worked in worsted weight yarn in the round from the top down in extended half double crochet, with the ear flaps added after and worked in rows. Sized for baby, toddler and child, it’s quite possible you could keep your kid’s head warm for years – it’s a unisex design, too, so all your kids’ heads can be warm. (Owen’s wearing the child size here. Huge. Noggin.)

You’ll need 70-120 yards of worsted weight yarn, a 6.0mm hook, and a button.

Because I love you guys, here’s a code for a buck off. It’s good till the end of the month, so tell your friends, hey? Just enter FFlove11 during checkout.

Virtual Planetoid Hat: A New Pattern! is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

When I sewed the last felt spot onto Owen’s hat on Monday, I kinda sorta burst into tears. I’d made my kid’s first Halloween costume, dude. I felt like a god.

Granted, I had a lot of help.

Help #1: The pattern for the hat, by Michele Wilcox for Coats & Clark. (It’s intended to be a dragon, but I left off the tail and anyway, he’s a dinosaur, okay?) The pattern is written in one size, for a toddler. My kid has a very, very big head. More crochet details on Ravelry.

Help #2: My friend Samantha who was as excited for Owen’s first Halloween as I was. She offered to keep an eye out for a purple outfit that might go with the hat. (My original plan, see, was just to make the hat and leave it at that.) Last week she phoned me from a thrift store in another city and said, “There’s this purple velour suit,” and I barely let her finish the sentence before I was all, “Get it!” Little did either of us know that it would match the hat almost perfectly.

Help #3: Greg, who said, “Why don’t you just use felt for the spots instead of spending hours crocheting them all?” And though I wanted to crochet them so that the hat and suit would be washable, I admitted he was right. I never would have finished it all if I hadn’t been able to do all the spots in just an hour.

Help #4: My Mighty Ugly stash, which had within it some green felt in the perfect colour.

Et voilà. A comfortable, spotted purple dinosaur costume.

Isn’t he menacing, all reading and everything?

RAWR!

He’s going to wear this hat all season, too.

Attack of the Baby Dinosaur! is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

So I consider it a tremendous triumph that I’m writing this in my studio right now. Not at the desk, which is covered with crap. On the couch, which, I’ve decided, no workspace should ever be without.

My studio now must do double duty, you see, as my work- and crafts-space, and as the guest room. Hence the couch, which hides a bed.

I was going to wait to take photos until things are all organized and pretty, but I’m spurred to show some things off now because Interweave, publisher of two of my books, is having a show-your-stash event to coincide with their first annual Stashbuster sale*. And most of the work I’m doing on this room right now is managing my stash. Today: yarn.

Since Owen was wee, I’ve been saving formula canisters with the plan to follow Lee Meredith’s instructions to mount cans on the wall and use them for decorative yarn storage. As of last weekend, I had 38 large canisters. And a Greg who was eager to get my crap out of the living room and offered to put the canisters up himself. He didn’t follow Lee’s instructions, but the idea is all hers.

In the nine canisters we mounted just below my storage shelves are baby-friendly balls of yarn I’ve been collecting in fairly coordinated colours.

On the opposite wall is what I find myself referring to as the large array. I have it in mind to fill these in a colour spectrum. Someday. Soon, hopefully.

See, I have a lot of stash to organize.

—

* Interweave’s Stashbuster sale is on till the end of next week. Dude. Crochet Me is on sale for $8.78! And both the paper and ebook versions of Crocheted Gifts are on sale, too.

AND, Interweave’s having a contest. Here’s how they explain it over on their Flickr page:

Show us your stash! This September at Interweave we’re kicking off a Stash Bash celebration of the stash and encouraging crafters to upload their photos of their craft collections. All stashes apply: books, magazines, yarn, fabric, fiber, paper, beads, dyeing and paint supplies, brushes, glitter, stamps, you name it! We’d love to see some pretty close-ups of some of your collections too, or interesting photos of how you organize your space.

Plus, there’s a chance to win some very cool prizes! One winner selected at random from all the uploaded entries to this Flickr pool will win his/her choice of 5 NEW BOOKS from Interweave Books’ 2011 collections – choose from among 35+ new books published this year! Five additional winners selected at random will win copies of either INSIDE THE CREATIVE STUDIO: Inspiration and Ideas for Your Art and Craft Space by Cate Coulacos Prato (available in October) or THE CRAFTER’S GUIDE TO TAKING GREAT PHOTOS by Heidi Adnum (available in November). Winners will be selected on September 17, the day after our September Stash Busters Sale.

Stash Bash and a Studio Sneak Peek is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Lisa and I were so inspired by all that BFAS has accomplished, and by how they’ve worked with individuals and organizations all over the world to do it, that we left feeling like we absolutely had to continue to work for the animals in some way or another. And what better way to do that but to indulge our compulsive need to craft? And, really, it’s no fun unless we try to convince everyone we know to contribute, too.

So today we’re launching the For the Animals! campaign to raise handmade donations to animal shelters, and to encourage people to tell stories about how their lives have been touched by shelter animals. Go on over to the campaign’s page and read all about how you can participate. It’s simple! And fun.

So. I’ll tell you two stories, and I’ll try to be brief.

The first began over eight years ago, when Greg and I drove home from Kamloops, four hours away, with a tiny puppy at my feet in the wheel well of the car. Though Greg had grown up with purebred standard poodles, I’d never lived with a dog. I knew, though, that I was a dog person. And I had a dream of one day adopting a dog from a shelter, giving a home to an animal who desperately needed one. So we spent the first couple of years of our relationship arguing about the provenance of our future pet. I won.

We adopted Cleo as a puppy from the Kamloops SPCA. (It’s very rare to find a puppy at the Vancouver SPCA, and the compromise Greg and I had struck was that we’d adopt a puppy. A mutt puppy.) Cleo’s mother had only been a year old when she’d had her first litter, and she and the litter were left outside in December in the mountains. Half the litter froze to death before they were all found. The SPCA fostered the whole lot, and we brought Cleo home the day she was old enough to be adopted.

Cleo’s a member of our family. She’s funny, and she and Greg love each other. Any concerns Greg had had about mutts melted away with that wee puppy at my feet in the car. Even though Cleo sheds. Constantly.

Ok, that’s not really a story. But it’s Cleo. We love her. And we love watching people cringe when they come up to us on walks and ask what breed she is and we happily reply that she’s a mutt. Why people cringe is beyond us. But it makes us want to shout to the whole world how great mutts are, and how good it feels to give a home to a dog who otherwise might not find one.

Now. Story the second. This one began at Best Friends and will hopefully end happily, but it makes me sad right now. While volunteering with a group of dogs, I fell in love with one. It was sort of love-at-first-belly-rub. The year-old dog’s name is Braxon, and his one-ear-up-and-one-ear-down led me to convince Greg that, though we had never talked about adopting a second dog, we really should. From Utah. To Canada.

We made the arrangements. Because of our plans not to be home over the holidays and our desire to give Braxon some stability once he got here, we planned to receive him on January 7th. Then we got the call about adopting our son Owen, with a day’s notice just before New Year’s. Which meant that come January 7th, we’d have a two-week-old at home.

We were committed to Braxon. We were going to make it work with a new dog and a new baby. Until the adoption coordinator at Best Friends made gentle sense of it all. There was no way we could do it. Braxon, though sweet and loving, was still going to need a lot of attention, especially for the first few months of his living with us. He’d need supervision out in the yard, and he’d need help adjusting to Cleo – and Cleo to him – and we’d need to learn if he had any special needs we’d need to attend to. It simply wasn’t in the dog’s best interest to join our family right then. And so we backed out.

I miss Braxon. I wish we could be his forever home. But I also hope that by the time we are ready to bring a second dog home, he’ll be settled into his own forever home. He’s still at Best Friends, and he’s a sweetheart (nudge nudge).

So those are the two shelter dogs who inhabit my heart.

A few days ago I boxed up some mats and blankets Lisa and I made, and I sent them to Best Friends with a note explaining how inspired we were when we were there, and mentioning this campaign.

See the reddish one, second from the top? I designed that one, and I’ve made the pattern available for free. For now it’s over at Ravelry, but it’ll soon go up at CrochetMe.com, too. Grab a copy and your hook and get crackin’!

Want to design a pet-related pattern to encourage folks to make items to donate to shelters? You should! When you’re ready, let me know and I’ll add a link to your pattern over on the campaign’s page. Same goes if you want to run some sort of promotion to encourage people to participate.

If there’s one lesson I learned at Best Friends, it’s that every action counts. And action is more fun, and often more satisfying, when taken with friends.

Craft for the Animals Campaign and Free Crochet Pet Mat Pattern is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Hank Vest, from Robyn Chachula's book Baby Blueprint Crochet

I finally made Owen some clothing. It was killing me not to have made him clothing. So now I won’t keel over!

I blogged about the project over at CrochetMe.com, so I’ll just nudge you on over there.

Hank Vest, Finished! is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

This Thursday I’ll be the speaker at the monthly meeting of the Vancouver Guild of Fibre Arts – 7:30PM at the Aberthau Community Centre here in Vancouver.

I’ll talk a bit about the history of crochet and about contemporary practice and fashion. I’ll also tell the story of CrochetMe.com (which will celebrate its 7th anniversary at the end of the month!), and I’ll talk about how the internet has affected the practice and evolution of crochet and other fibre arts. Mostly, I’ll encourage a lot of discussion and questions/answers.

Won’t you come?

Vancouver Guild of Fibre Arts Event This Thursday is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

(You can subscribe to the videoblog in iTunes just like a podcast. Shiny! Need no-Flash? Watch it on Vimeo.)

Things I mention in the video:

• Urban Craft Uprising in Seattle (it’s December 4-5th this year)
• Yummy Yarn

Something I failed to mention in the video that you might find interesting: For the scarf, I worked the stitches between the stitches from the previous row, instead of into the top.

[x-posted at CrochetMe.com]

Videoblog #3: How to Make Extended Crochet Stitches is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

First up, I embroidered. Yes I did. A friend of ours is due to have a baby in a month or so, and she asked her friends to contribute a quilt square. The theme: pirates. I used a pattern from SummerSweetStudio.

Greg also made a square. He was far more ambitious in his rendering of a mariner’s compass. Pretty impressive from someone who swears he hates sewing, eh?

I made these earrings when we were in Whistler, and I wore them pretty much every day till the end of the Olympics. The red beads are vintage glass, and I love the subtle texture on them:

WARNING: Yellow ahead.**

Remember Scout’s Swag’s Olympic Medal Yarn? Well, once mine arrived I couldn’t let it sit untouched. The day after it came I cast on Amy Swenson‘s Karen Shawl. The provisional cast on bit nearly killed me, but I made it through. And I’m glad, because it would seem I’m in a simple-shawl-making mood, and I’m sure that cast-on method will come in handy.

The yarn’s totally soft and squishy, too. I’m thoroughly enjoying this project.

Finally, in a fit of uncontrollable impulse last week, I ordered yarn to make a hat like the ones the Swedish Olympic team wore. I was so impulsive that I didn’t even check with my local yarn store to see if they had the yarn right here in town (they do carry it, so if you’re in Vancouver, go to Urban Yarns!).

I’m not following any of the patterns people have posted, preferring to just wing it. I’m not convinced I’m nailing it, but whatever. I’m using Garnstudio Eskimo yarn and a 7.0mm hook for fairly tight stitches.

It seems I’m back into the swing of making stuff. And it’s making me happy.

* The Paralympics are coming!

** I usually hate yellow. It’s my least favourite colour and always has been. I do love how cheery it can make things look. I appreciate yellow. I just don’t often use it. So this is like a giant yellowfest for me.

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Making Stuff is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Though it’s not going as fast as I’d anticipated, I’m still obsessed with working on the scarf. I suppose I’m about a third of the way done. For now, I derive great satisfaction from accurately capturing the colours in a photo. Yum yum. I’ve entered it on Ravelry (for I am a woman obsessed).

Keeping with my sudden adoration of red, as it would seem, here’s my still-unchipped manicure as of this morning. Given that I put a massive kink in my neck around 3am as I executed some sort of violent turning-over in my sleep, and that it’s raining, and that it’s Friday, I’ve developed a great sense of foreboding regarding the persistence of my manicure’s unchippedness. Continue to stay tuned, won’t you?

Model Citizen Scarf (and Fingernails) is a post from Kim Werker's blog.