Crochet Lesson #2: The Single-Crochet Stitch and Project

April 13, 2015February 14, 2016 | Allison

***Update: This is going to be my last crochet lesson post. I’ve decided that there are many better tutorials out there that teach crochet, and, since it takes a lot of work to put these together, I will not be continuing this series. But feel free to read these two “introductory lessons!”***

Finally! Here is the next part of the learn-how-to-crochet series! (You can read the first one here.)

Unlike the foundation stitch, with single-crochet you can actually make things! Exciting, right?

To begin you have to make a foundation chain (I showed you how to make that in the first lesson). I think it works well to crochet about 10 stitches for practicing. One thing you must remember is that you always need to crochet one extra stitch at the end (or beginning) of each row so that the rows turn out nice and even. So actually if you want to crochet something 10 stitches long, you need to start with 11 foundation stitches, and if you wanted to crochet something 23 stitches long, you need to start with (can you guess?) 24 stitches.

Since we’re making a practice sample 10 stitches wide, crochet 11 stitches for the foundation chain.

You are going to insert your needle not into the stitch that the loop on your needle is coming from, but the one behind it. Push the hook under the first strand of the stitch, go over the next strand, and push under the last strand. That’s probably confusing, so just look at the picture. =) This is why you always have to make an extra stich at the end of rows – because that extra stitch helps you turn around without making the total stitch-length of your project less.

Now you have three loops on your crochet hook.

Wrap the yarn from the back of the hook to the front.

Pull the hook down, taking with it the strand of yarn that you just wrapped around the hook. Pull that strand through the next two loops but don’t pull it through the last loop. Now you have two loops on the hook.

Wrap the yarn from back to front again…

And again, pull through two loops. This time, since there are only two loops instead of three on your hook, you will pull through all of the loops. Now you have only one loop on your hook.

Hooray for you! You have just completed one single-crochet stitch! That probably seemed very tedious and long, but believe me, after you practice a few more stitches it will only take a few seconds. I just want to make sure you get this.

Ok, now repeat the process: insert your hook into the next stitch (three stitches on hook), wrap yarn from front to back, pull hook through two loops (two loops on hook), wrap yarn from front to back, pull through last two loops (one loop on hook.) Keep going until you come to the end of the row and there are no more stitches. (This row looks kind of weird because part of it is turned on its side and part of it is standing up.)

Here is where you make that extra stitch so the edges look even. Wrap yarn from front to back…

And pull through the loop on your hook. You should still only have one loop on your hook.

Again, push your hook through the two sides of the “v”. Don’t insert your hook in the stitch that the loop on your hook is directly connected to, because that is the turning stitch. Insert your hook into what looks like the second “v” over from the loop on your hook.

Now continue crocheting (wrap yarn around, pull through two loops, wrap yarn around, pull through last two loops, end of stitch, insert hook, wrap yarn around, pull through two loops, etc.)

This is what it looks like when you’ve done a couple of rows.

To finish a piece of crochet, take your hook out of the loop on it, and cut the yarn connecting the piece of crochet to the yarn ball. Don’t cut the yarn too close – leave a tail.

Pull the tail through the loop and keep pulling until it tightens into a knot.

Thread a yarn needle with the tail and weave the tail into the crochet piece.

And there you go! You now know how to single crochet!

After you practice a while and get the hang of it, why not make something? I decided to make a little bag to hold the tiles for Upwords (a really fun word game that we have), but you can use this bag for whatever you want. It’s pretty simple to make if you’ve practiced single-crochet.

1. Crochet a foundation chain of 51 stitches. The actual width of the bag will be 50 stitches, but remember that you always have to crochet an extra stitch for your project to turn out even.

2. Single-crochet until you have a piece of cloth that, when you fold it in half from end to end, is the size you want your bag to be.

3. Fold the piece in half and use a yarn needle to sew together the bottom edges and the side edges. Leave the top edges unsewn.

4. If you want to make a draw-string bag, use your yarn needle to thread a piece of yarn all around the top of the bag. Don’t pull the yarn all the way through the cloth – leave a tail sticking out. Make sure not to sew the edges together! When you come to where you inserted the needle at first, unthread the needle and tie the tails together in a bow. Now when you pull both tails at the same time, the bag will close.

Happy crocheting!

***Allison***

Fried Bananas & Chocolate Pudding – Yum!

April 5, 2015April 5, 2015 | Allison

I know it may sound a little weird, but you can actually fry bananas! (And yes, they are delicious.) You can find the recipe here, but here are a few things I did differently:

1. I used a griddle instead of a skillet which makes the bananas easier to flip. (That was actually my mom’s idea!)

2. I used coconut oil instead of pan spray.

3. I served them with homemade chocolate pudding! (recipe here) This pudding recipe is also delicious. It says to make it in the microwave, but I have also made it on the stove and it worked just fine.

Happy cooking!

***Allison***

Making Maple Syrup

March 16, 2015March 10, 2016 | Allison

Yes, we made maple syrup – almost three gallons of it, in fact! That’s one good thing about winter – it’s the time to make maple syrup! You have to have below freezing nights and above freezing days to get the sap running. Another reason you can’t make it in spring is because the tree buds make the syrup taste weird — believe me, we’ve tried it.

This year we made two batches in February and one in March, and I am proud to say we didn’t burn any of it! (We weren’t that lucky last year.)

If you’re wondering what it’s like to make maple syrup, read on!

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Maple syrup starts as sap inside maple trees. The sap tastes like water, only faintly sweet. It’s hard to imagine how thick and sweet the sap will get when you taste it in the beginning! Even though it basically tastes like water, it’s still really good and it is quite refreshing. My sister Megan agrees:

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To get the sap out of the tree, you drill a hole into the wood so the sap can run out.

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Since you can’t attach buckets to a hole, you use either a really-truly-genuine maple syrup spout or make your own. We did both. The spout that Megan is drinking out of in the first picture is store bought, and the one in the picture below is a copper tube spout my dad made.

Hammer the spout into the hole you just drilled.

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Attach the bucket quickly, before the sap runs out the spout!

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Now just repeat the process about fifteen more times! We used seventeen buckets and tapped seven trees (you can put more than one bucket per tree depending on the size of the tree). After you have tapped all the trees, you wait. And wait… until… Yes! Finally the buckets are full! You drag out a couple five-gallon buckets for the sap. Put a cloth over a bucket to strain the dirt out, and pour in the sap. Even though the sap doesn’t taste very sweet, it sure makes the buckets sticky! Now is the time to pull out that old, 40-gallon copper kettle and clean it up. Hang it between two barrels and build a fire under it. Be sure to put a fire ring or a ring of metal around the kettle to hold the heat in and help the fire reach the sides of the kettle.

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Pour in the sap and let her cook!

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By cooking the sap you are making the plain ‘ol water evaporate and leaving the sweet stuff behind. It will take several hours for the stuff to cook down (*yawn*), so bring a book or two. You can’t just go off and mind your own business though, no sirree, you have to stay by that fire and feed it, oh, maybe every 5 minutes. The fire is awfully hungry, so you have to cut up a bunch of old pallets to help the fire grow and become strong and healthy – and capable of boiling down that sap as fast as possible.

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On one of the wood trips, you notice that the sap is getting lower and that some of it has splattered on the side of the kettle and made sparkly, shiny spots.

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The sap is almost gone from the kettle. There is just a little bit left in the bottom, and it starts foaming.

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This is the scary part: if you leave the kettle on too long, the maple syrup will burn, and all your hard work will be completely wasted; but if you take it off too soon, you will have to boil it down for an extra long, long, time inside on the stove. Decisions, decisions! When you decide to take it off, there is barely anything left. (40 gallons of sap boil down to just one gallon of syrup! *collective gasp* So we actually harvested about 120 gallons of sap from just seven trees!)

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Carefully pour the sap (it’s practically syrup now!) into a big kitchen pan. Even though it looks like there is barely any sap left, it turns out there is about two gallons – more than it looks! You’re almost done! Put a candy thermometer on the pan and watch for the temperature to get to five degrees above the boiling point where you live – in our case, 218-220 degrees Fahrenheit.

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The syrup will be boiling and foaming when it’s done. You can’t eat it just yet, unless you don’t mind eating ash flakes, dirt, and sediment with your syrup. You have to strain the syrup to get out all that yucky stuff. At first we tried using paper towels, coffee filters, and other such things to strain it, but it didn’t go too well, so we got real filters, especially made for filtering maple syrup. First you put the filter holder on the pan you’re going to strain the syrup into, then you put a thick filter in it, then a thinner one inside of that, and then you pour the maple syrup in.

Once the maple syrup is strained, you put it in jars and can it, but first – have a taste! Ah! Sweet and syrupy delight! Pancakes, anyone?

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I hope you enjoyed “making maple syrup” Too bad I can’t send you a sample through words… Maybe you’ll have to try making maple syrup yourself next year!

***Allison***

Crochet Lesson #1: Crochet Basics and the Foundation Stitch

March 4, 2015December 14, 2015 | Allison

Hello, folks! I have decided to do a series on how to crochet. I like to crochet myself, and I hope you will have fun learning! I am not a professional crocheter or anything, and I definitely still have a lot to learn, but hopefully I can teach you what I know.

So here’s how I am hoping to do this: in each lesson, I will show you one kind of stitch or skill, and then at the end of the post I will show you a project you can make to practice the skill you just learned. Here we go!

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The great thing about crochet is you only need to manage one thing, unlike in knitting when you use two needles. The only things you really need to crochet are a crochet hook and yarn.

There are several different sizes of yarn, as you can see. There are also several different sizes of crochet hooks. You need to have the crochet hook proportional to your yarn. (For instance, it doesn’t work very well to use a huge hook with really thin yarn.) For starters it’s a good idea to use a medium size hook and medium size yarn. On the crochet hook it says the size.

The crochet hook I’m going to use is size 10, or in letter-size, size J.

To start your foundation chain (basically the first row of your project), you need to make a slip knot. If you already know how to make a slip-knot, you can skip ahead, otherwise, read on!

First, cross the end of the yarn over itself to form a loop.

Take the end of the yarn and put it under the loop.

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Pull the part of the yarn that is under the loop up and out of the loop.

Keep pulling, but pinch the strands of yarn coming out of the loop or you will just make a normal knot.

Keep pinching those strands and pulling the loop until it is tight.

You have made a slip knot! If you pull both ends of the slip knot at once, it will get smaller. Be careful not to pull too hard or the slip knot will unravel!

Pull the ends until the loop is a little bit bigger than your crochet hook, then insert your hook into the loop.

Now, weave long end of the yarn through your fingers like this. This helps to keep your yarn from getting too loose while you crochet.

I’m right-handed, so I weave the yarn through my left fingers and hold the crochet hook with my right hand. If you’re left-handed, do it the opposite way. Use your non-dominant hand to hold the base of where your crocheting. (See in the picture below how I’m holding the base of the loop where I’ll start crocheting.)Now, hold the hook in your right hand (or left hand if your left-handed) and wrap the hook around the yarn so that the yarn is looped from right to left.

Pull the hook down through the slip-knot loop further down the loop, making sure that you catch the yarn you just wrapped around the hook on the way down. Once the hook is through the loop, pull it up again to its former position.

You have completed one stitch! Now, to make another stitch, just do it again: wrap the hook around the yarn and pull it through the other loop on the hook.

Just keep repeating those steps until you have made all the stitches you need.

Do you see how the stiches kind of look like interlocking v’s? You can count how many stitches by counting those v’s.

To end your chain, cut off the yarn strand that is connecting it to the yarn ball, and take your crochet hook out.

Pull the end of the yarn through the loop, and keep pulling it as hard as you can until it tightens into a knot. You’re finished!

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Phew! I know that was a super long lesson, but I wanted to make sure that you got this. Unfortunately, there isn’t really any project to do with just the foundation stitch, although you can use it instead of yarn to tie bows on gifts, etc. The good news is that you can’t really crochet without knowing this stitch, so you didn’t learn this for nothing!

Have fun practicing!

***Allison***

A Fairy House – or Not…

February 28, 2015January 3, 2016 | Allison

A couple weeks ago I had this great idea to put a fairy house in my flower bed. Well, I made the fairy house, it turned out great, and I was happy. Unfortunately, Maggie, our dog, thought that a fairy house would be a good snack, so she ate off the top of the fairy house! 😦 Any suggestions for how to fix that? I can’t find the piece that she broke off, so I can’t just glue the top back on…

Anyway, at least I took some pictures in case of an emergency! (Good thing I did!) They were taken in the evening, so some of them aren’t the best quality, but at least you can see what it generally looked like.

I got all of the plants and moss from around our farm, and the fairy house and bridge are from Hobby Lobby.

One other thing: I might start a series on how to crochet. I am definitely not a professional or anything, but I like to crochet and I wondered if any of you would be interested in learning. You can just say something in the comments if you want me to do the series.

Well, bye for now!

***Allison***

Square Doodles

January 17, 2015November 12, 2018 | Allison

This is really fun to do because you can use a bunch of different kinds of doodles and they all come together to make a really nice piece of wall art. You could do a color scheme like I did, or make a colorful, rainbow square-doodle paper. I colored this with purple, blue, and green gel pens. I got some doodle ideas and I think even the whole square-doodle paper idea from this doodling blog: https://doodleaddicted.wordpress.com/

The hardest part about making this is making the squares to put the doodles in. You might be able to print off a template for this somewhere, but I just did it by hand by measuring it off.

You could also do this in random circles across the page or put the doodles in outlines of hearts or whatever you want.

(Sorry, some of these pictures aren’t as good as they could be because I took them in my room in the evening.)

Happy doodling!

***Allison***

Clementine Butterflies

January 10, 2015June 5, 2015 | Allison

If you need to bring a little bit of spring into these cold winter days, these little cuties should help you do it. All you need to make them are clementines and celery sticks.

Sorry, I don’t have any pictures on how to make them :(, I’ll just have to try and tell you.

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1. Peel a clementine and pry it apart into two halves.

2. Take two clementine sections from one of the halves, and partially pull them open starting from the side that faces towards the middle of the clementine. This is very important, if open the sections the wrong way it won’t look like a butterfly. Make sure not to pull the sections apart all the way.

3. Cut up a celery stick into smaller pieces and put one piece each in the middle of the partially opened sections for the butterfly’s body.

5. Repeat to make as many butterflies as you want.

4. Serve on a pretty platter. You could have them hovering around fruit cut to look like flowers, do what I did and perch a few on orange slices, or think up your own arrangement. Have fun making it pretty!

5. Enjoy!

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I hope you have fun making and eating these delicious butterflies!

***Allison***

Tidbits

December 19, 2014April 20, 2016 | Allison

I have lots of little things to post about, so I thought I’d just post them all together. Here goes!

************************************************************* Sunset

Several days ago we saw this GORGEOUS sunset. I seriously think this was the prettiest sunset I have ever seen. The colors were so bright, and the clouds were all swirly.

Isn’t it gorgeous?!

Scents

If you haven’t tried this, you should! Put orange or clementine peels in a small pot. Put some water in the pot, and add some cinnamon and whole cloves. This makes your house smell amazing! Surprise!

This is a gross but true story: We got our Christmas tree a couple of days ago, and the kids insisted that we move the furniture so we could put the Christmas tree in its customary spot by the window. Since we moved the couch, we had to sweep all the dust up. My brother was trying to vacuum up a dust bunny, but it wasn’t going too well. You’ll never guess why. Do you give up? Ok: it didn’t sweep up well because it wasn’t dust at all – it was a dead frog!! Yep, a really-truly dead frog. Actually, it was more like a petrified frog chip, it was so dry and hard. Why this is so funny is because that frog was the one that had hopped out of its cage months before, and we never knew what happened to it. We thought maybe the cat got it, but nope! My mom said that maybe the dead frog was what we had been smelling a while ago. Gross!!

Oh, and one other little thing: Complete-the-Set game

This is just a little game I made up that’s fun to play while traveling or waiting for something.

1. Choose one person to be “it” for the first round.

2. The “it” person thinks of a set (primary colors, initials, etc.)

3. “It” tells the other players all but one of the items in that set. (For example, if the set was “primary colors”, the “it” person could say “blue, red, and…”, or “red, yellow, and…”, but they couldn’t say “blue, red, yellow,” because there wouldn’t be any part of the set left to complete!)

4. The other players take turns trying to complete the set.

5. Whoever guesses correctly first gets to be the new “it”.

Have fun!

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Happy Holidays!

***Allison***

Room Switcheroo

December 7, 2014November 12, 2018 | Allison

My sister Megan and I switched room’s with my younger sister Carmen. We got a bigger room and… we got to decorate it! We might paint the room later, but for now we have flowered wallpaper.

This is my little corner:

Megan and I both made stars to hang near our beds.

I also made this little circle-doodley thing, because I love to doodle. I think I’ve seen something like it on Pinterest, but I didn’t pin it.

I hung my arm-knit scarves on my bed post. They are color coordinated, of course, because I just LOVE it when everything is color coordinated. ☺ And I did pin this to my Pinterest board here. You should seriously make one of these.