Red Bobble Hat

I’m hooked on crocheting! I found these skeins of yarn in a secondhand shop for ¥200 for two of them. The label says that it was wool made in Marabá, Brazil. This hat used up about 1.5 skeins of the yarn. The finished hat is not as slouchy as I want it to be, but I guess it still looks cute. I really like those little puffs. Pattern is Bobble Beauty by Dot Matthews, found from Ravelry .

Navy suit and white shirt

Sidra needed a navy knee-length pants and a white shirt for the school concert, so I thought I’d just made them myself instead of buying some. The shirt fabric is white cotton with some interesting thin pintucks on it. The pants fabric is navy thick cotton, and I also made a matching jacket to the pants. For added warmth, I lined the jacket with blue flannel that I cut out of an Ikea blanket. I made the pattern for the pants myself by tracing one of Sidra’s pants, and then adding pocket details and turned-up hem. The shirt pattern is […]

Japanese knitting needles and a new project

Yesterday I just found out the reason why Sidra’s hat is too small (and why my fingers hurt when I’m knitting). The reason is: I didn’t know that Japanese knitting needles sizes are different than US sizes! D’oh. It means that all this time I’ve been struggling to knit with needles that are 2 sizes too small. No wonder that my fingers hurt! I was just beginning to wonder that I really had no talent for knitting, it was so hard knitting those yarns. Then I found this site that says: “Japanese needle sizes are different from another countries. We […]

Easy crochet headband (or my first crochet!)

When I started to try knitting, I joined Ravelry, a community for knitters and crocheters, to learn about knitting and have a look at all those patterns and projects. Naturally I’d bump into some crocheted projects too, and then I started to get curious. I chose this easy crochet headband from creativeyarn because it is, well, easy. The book I bought the other day about knitting has some crocheting lesson too, so I learn the basic from there. It only took me a few minutes to finish this! I’m very happy with the result because actually I use a bigger […]

Yellow hat

I finally finished it in about three days, and it turned out to be, uh, a bit too small for Sidra. Darn it. But as usual, he’s very excited about the new hat. I added a pompom on top of the hat and another one of those bug button on the hat. This time, the button is a blue kuwagata-mushi (another kind of helmet beetle). Because it’s too small, the hat doesn’t serve any other purpose than being cute. It can’t be pulled down to cover the ears or forehead. However, for serving the purpose of being cute, I think […]

more knitting

Yes, that’s the yellow yarn again. I call them my learning yarn. After I finished my first knitting project, I still have 4 skeins of them that I use for trying out stitches. Yoshimi has so kindly sent me a pack of JP10 double-pointed needles, so I am now learning to knit in the round. At first, it seemed so scary,tth there are needles everywhere! The few initial stitches are still wobbly, but I think the rest of it is okay. When it reaches a certain height, I will begin to learn knitting decrease stitches. Anyway, I’ve also finished sewing […]

Lazy chocolate cake

Sidra asked for keeki (cake) for breakfast this morning. I didn’t have an oven nor any cake ingredients, so I whipped this one from things already in the kitchen. With a microwave, it only took five minutes from preparation to serving, perfect for a hungry, demanding kindergarten kid. Ingredients: 4 tbs pancake mix flour 2 tbs milk cocoa powder 2 tbs sugar 1 egg 3 tbs oil 3 tbs water/milk 2 chocochips cookies, crumbled raisins Directions: Mix pancake mix flour, milk cocoa powder, and sugar in a microwave-safe container Pour in egg, oil, water/milk, blend together Add chocochips cookies crumbles […]

Girl Boxers

Sorry for putting my underwear on display here, but I’m kinda proud of them. I believe this type of underwear is called girl boxer, and I find them very comfortable to wear. But I rarely find one that fit, and two of my girl boxers were stolen when they were hung to dry. Perverts. So I think I’d make them myself. I traced the pattern from a Uniqlo girl boxer that I have, and the fabrics are jersey scraps from another project. Instead of elastic, the waistband are made from long strips of the same fabrics. It can’t be seen […]

Denim dress

This dress uses the same denim as Sidra’s denim pants. I have about 3 meters of this denim, and even after the pants and this dress, there’s still about half a meter left. I use JJ Bodice block from Burdastyle size 34 to make the upper part. The sleeves was drafted from an old book called Pattern Drafting vol. II, published by Kamakura-Shobo Publishing in 1970. I bought the book very cheap a couple of years ago in a secondhand bookshop. The lower parts were drawn on the fabrics without pattern. As I always like the selvedge part of a fabric, […]