Idle Hands

As the weather turns to this:

 (Yep, we've had our first snow...)

The battle against cabin fever begins...

It's not quite ski season yet, and there are no visitors until the end of July.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I've resorted to crafting... That's right. I said it. It's been years since I've had enough free time to even really think about hobbies, so one of my goals for this year was to just explore a bunch of hobbies to see what I'm interested in. And the time has come to try out a few new tricks.

First up, custom wallet!

After a sewing machine orientation from Rebecca, it was time to start in on my awesome wallet.

Cookies and an already-functioning wallet were essential to make this project a success.

At this point, I was actually hand-sewing the trim on my wallet because it was too narrow for the machine to do... that was not part of the plan.

but where there's a will, there's a way. And then there's a wallet:

Boo Yah.

Fully Functional.

Don't judge me for having a hot chocolate punch card as one of my four necessary cards in my wallet. It's all about priorities.  ID, credit card, debit card, hot chocolate.

Since the wallet project was such a huge success, I rolled on into my next project: Crochet.

I was actually taught to crochet in 3rd grade in the hallway before school by a classmate. We always got dropped off at school early, and she was crocheting something at some point, so she taught me how to do it. I immediately forgot how to do it.

Rebecca gave me another crash course one day about 6 weeks ago. I made a strip about the size of a bookmark, so after my 6-week break, I felt totally prepared to tackle my first official crochet project: a hat.  Probably not the easiest thing to start with, but armed with some NZ wool yarn, a crochet hook, and a youtube tutorial video, I jumped in head-first, and dove right into my hat!

Here goes....

You may recognize the classic half double crochet stitch... right.  That just happened to be the stitch they used in the video. It's now the only stitch I know. and I'm sticking to it.

Ta-Daaaaaaaaa!!!!!

And since that was such a success, I've decided to keep rolling and start on a scarf too! 

It may take a while to get to the end of this thing. Don't worry, I have another ball of the same yarn and two call weekends in a row coming up soon. With that kind of time, I'm sure I'll be making sweaters for everyone in no time.