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.

Owen is teething, poor guy. Happy ending: He's got one tooth! Tragic ending: He's got another on the way. It's HARD to be seven months old.

Last week we went camping right near here. Owen started teething before we left, stopped when we got there, and started again four hours after we returned home. We all appreciate this, and are further convinced he's the most awesome kid in the world. Also, camping was a blast.

The End

Toothiness is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

To sum up, Maker Faire blew my mind. It was the most fun I’ve had in a very long time, and I generally have a lot of fun. The vibe of creativity and community was nearly palpable. There was an utter lack of pretentiousness – no matter a maker’s passion, ideas were shared and lessons taught. It was like a creative, educational UTOPIA. I’m not even kidding.

More thoughts in upcoming posts. For now, photos!

A member of the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild* made a the QR code of the guild's URL.

The Guild had a design wall set up where people could mess around with quilt squares. (That's my dad with Guild president Kalin Whyte.)

Paper lanterns in the form of a Dalek and Mr. Spock!

The famed Mondo Spider made regular tours of the grounds.

Disaster Area had this wicked array of torches that was controlled by a kid's piano toy.

Members of the Fraser Valley Knitting Guild taught countless people how to knit (and not only women!).

The place was PACKED.

And of course I was there as a maker! That's what my next post in the series will be about.

People of all ages, boys and girls, men and women, made a lot of ugly creatures. It was AMAZING.

*I’ve told you I joined the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild? I’m very excited about this, even though I can’t attend my first meeting as a member. Still. This is a group with some serious creative energy.

Vancouver Mini Maker Faire is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

May is for red and orange, and though I still don’t have much time for crafting, I’m finding that this colour focus is making me feel more creative, even without much time. It’s the constraint. Sometimes limiting the focus of your work, or even of your perspective, can be downright liberating.

I’ve done two Project Spectrum-related projects this month, and here’s the first. A couple of weeks ago, on a rare sunny day, I looked out for red things when I took a walk. Then I took photos with my iPhone. That’s it. It wasn’t, like, a creative revelation or anything, but it was a fun addition to my walk and I enjoyed it immensely.

Stay tuned for that second project, which is decidedly craftier.

Finding Creative Satisfaction in Constraint: Project Spectrum 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.

We (where by “we” I mean Greg and some volunteer and professional friends) have been feverishly working on the basement since the middle of January. We hope to be ready to start moving furniture back down there in the next week. Yippee!

Here’s a sneak peek of one of the basement rooms (soon to be our bedroom). Before is on the bottom (well, before the remodel but after we took all the furniture out) and after is on top (well, after but still requiring the window trim, some baseboards, quarter rounds and other details). I’ll write more about the remodel when it’s actually finished.

Basement Remodel Sneak Peek & Newspaper Story is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

While we do that, and I master the art of blogging one-handed and praise the Kobo app on my iPhone that provides effortless one-handed reading, I thought I’d show off three yarn projects I’ve completed in the last few weeks. And I’ll sneak in a photo of the baby, whose cheeks are fattening up daily. I’m very lucky to be able to poke and kiss them whenever I want.

Project the First: Crocheted Lace Shawl

This is the shawl I started making for my new sister-in-law over the summer and watched, like, three straight (heh) seasons of The L Word in December to finish. More details over at CrochetMe.com and on Ravelry.

Project the Second: Giant Wool Granny Square Throw

I started this in the fall of 2009 and finished it fairly quickly, save for weaving in the ends. Now it lives on my in-laws’ sofa. More details at CrochetMe.com and on Ravelry.

Project the Third: Wee Knitted Baby Blanket

This is the project I started back when we were going through our adoption application last spring, then I put it down with only around twenty rows left to go. I picked it up when Owen came along, and it took me two weeks to knit those rows. About which I feel triumphant, thankyouverymuch. More on Ravelry.

This is what I like to call his "puh-puh-puh-pucker face, puh-puh-pucker face".

Oh look, crafts! is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Last Thursday afternoon we learned we’d been chosen to adopt a baby the next day. I’m sure you can imagine the frenzy of the following twenty hours. I’ll tell you all about it another time; it’s a pretty dramatic tale as your imagination has certainly already concluded.

So last Friday at around noon we met our six-day-old healthy baby boy. Yes, your math is right – the Jewish couple is adopting a Christmas baby. And we brought him home on New Year’s Day to a house full of family and friends who fell in love with him as quickly and fully as we have.

Meet Owen William Piper Werker. He’s a chill, expressive little dude who likes neck nuzzles and Simon & Garfunkel.

We’re going to lay low for the next couple of weeks during the 30-day revocation period during which the birth mom can change her mind. After that, I’ll tell you loads more, and will by then be a little more used to our new sleep schedule, which will render me more capable of coherent blogging and discussion. For now, if this is the first you’ve heard about adoption from me, you can read what I’ve written about it over the last year.

Now it’s now about time I finish the little baby blanket I started knitting months ago. Thankfully I have only a few more rows to go. I figure it’ll take me a week, at this rate.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Baby Year is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

His name is Braxon and we’re adopting him. Because of our plans for the holidays we won’t be able to welcome him home till the new year. January 7th, to be exact. That’s when Best Friends Animal Sanctuary will fly him up. I wish we didn’t have to wait so long, but it’s the best for him this way.

So, you know. Be warned. I’ve got shelter dogs on the brain, and you’ll be hearing about ‘em.

I fell in love with this guy. is a post from Kim Werker's blog.