My blog hits the big time...

Well, not exactly :) But I'm honored that my humble blog was highlighted by Cam at A Woman's Place (one of my favorites, btw :) as being a favorite of hers, and worthy of the award cited above. I'm thrilled!

In passing on the tradition, the following are the blogs I would cite as my favorites, in addition to Cam's:

Blair at Blair's Blessings
Emmy at Journey of a Catholic Nerd Writer
Jennifer at Conversion Diary

I feel privileged to (a) have this blog as a creative outlet, and (b) to know that people actually care and read it! This is a good day.

In other news, I have more crochet pictures to post, so I'll take those and post them Monday. I finished Henry's crayon-hued mittens and scarf. I'll take a photo of him modeling them that will leave us all breathless with his sheer adorableness :) I want to also make him a matching hat, but my eyes needed a break from that yarn for a bit... I'm about to embark on a shawl for my friend Irena, in a lovely deep pink color. And I finished a hat for myself.

So, the hat...I think it's ok now. I fetched a pattern for a basic cloche from Crafty Beaver and set to work with a lovely deep green yarn. I crocheted away, and finished in only 2 nights. It's a quick pattern using a J hook and two strands of yarn at once. A few nights ago as I finished off and tucked in my end, I felt triumphant. Granted, the hat looked a tad large. But I was still optimistic, and raced to the bathroom mirror to pop it on my head.

The only way I can possibly describe how I looked is that my head looked like a giant green mushroom. Not the look I was going for. I moved it around a bit on my head (and believe me, there was a *lot* of room for movement) trying to get a better angle. I found that if I put my long hair forward on my shoulders, it looked passable, but I wasn't going for passable - I was going for super cute. And if a hat has rules for looking decent, well, that's just not a good hat.

Despite my husband's protestations that it looked great (he knows how to win brownie points) I tucked it away in the storage. That day, I thought to myself - why make another hat? The beauty of crochet is that you can rip stitches out wily nily with no repurcussions whatsoever. So that's what I did.

Mike took Henry up to bed, and I pulled the entire hat out save for the first few rounds. Mike came downstairs and it looked like some sort of vicious hat murder had just taken place. Yarn was strewn everywhere. But I stitched away, and, with an enormous pile of yarn still at my feet, I redid the hat in a smaller size. I mean, the leftover pile was HUGE. That tells you how big the hat used to be. *shudders* (oh, and I figured out one reason why it was so big before - I was crocheting into the slip stitch at the end of each round; oops :)

So, I hurry into the bathroom. I pop it on my head...ok, well, it wasn't so easy to "pop" it on my head this time. In fact, I had to downright squeeze. And Voila! It looks a bit ski cappish, but overall it's cute. It looks like a normal hat rather than something I clearly made myself and screwed up.

After all that, the bottom line is that I will take a picture over the weekend and post it on Monday. I started a pair of matching mittens a the knitting lunch today, and those didn't go so well. It's a shell pattern, and I had shells flying everywhere. By the end of round 3 the thing looked like an 80's hair scrunchy. I pulled it out. We'll start afresh with a cable pattern. All will be well, never fear, pretty green yarn!

Happy All Hallows Eve and Feast of all Saints everyone!