Needles & Nilbogs

 Meant to get this out earlier today. I have a project I intended to share today but didn’t get it done in time. So here’s my Cavandoli lacework so far, in pictures because that’s all I have time for this week.  I’ll be better on getting something out next week — I had a bunch of stuff this week.  Orange is meant to be pumpkins, and is in progress. Purple is just a test of slits mixed with a four snowballs pattern, while the white/pink striped one is just a little sampler. Enjoy!

 It’s been kind of a long week, but I’m feeling much better than I did last week. I have a bunch of ideas for a project, and I’m working on a couple of other projects, but today I wanted to talk about something near and dear to my heart: lace. More specifically, knotted lace. This is a wide category that includes tatting and macrame, so even more specifically, I want to talk about a particular kind of non-lace knot work and adapting it to lace. Today, we’re talking about two interrelated things: Cavandoli work (both diagonal and horizontal), and friendship bracelets.  Pretty much every kid knows friendship bracelets — worked in embroidery floss or thread, using a series of double half hitches to make stripes or chevrons or other similar patterns.  These are pictures of a friendship bracelet I’m making with a simple chevron pattern. It’s pretty simple to do patterns of this sort; almost everyone I knew when I was younger had made at least one or two.  Cavandoli work i...

 The title says most of it. I’m down with what’s either a cold or (quite possibly) the flu — not COVID, I think, but I’ve got a crazy cough and a mild fever, and I’ve been out since Tuesday. This should tell you how bad I’m feeling: I haven’t crocheted more than half a round on the Current Shawl Project (no, you haven’t missed anything, I haven’t talked about it much) since I woke up Tuesday. That’s bad, for me.  So I’m just going to put random stuff here and not bother making anything coherent. Sorry, but I don’t feel well enough for anything else and if I did, I’d make up the work I’m not doing.  No pictures today. I haven’t taken anything for a while. No gaming stuff. I can’t be bothered to do anything right now. And no buffer to use to fill this week cause I used the last one a few weeks ago when I was swamped.  Here, have stuff I’m reading. I’m reading Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric, 14th edition (cause it ties into something I’m doing); City Spies (a middle gr...

Hi. I really haven’t written much the last few weeks, haven’t I? I’ve been a bit busy, and usually only get a post out by writing it Thursday morning between things I have to do. This isn’t much better, but I have pictures of a bunch of things I’ve been doing, including some vaguely rpg-related things and some yarn things. And I have a pattern — actually, two! I did some very pretty crocheted edgings on some mini-handkerchief-thingies (one tiny handkerchief, one triangle of fabric, and probably some more by the time I actually post this), and they turned out great, so I thought I’d share them. That means this is a nice long post, full of pretty pictures!

 So I was up late last night (we went to see the musical Hamilton [!!!], which is playing around here) and don’t have anything to talk about really, and I’m just going to dump a whole list of ideas I had a while ago for role playing games (both actual game-games and story ideas or campaigns, also characters), because I’m running on not enough sleep and I just don’t have the will to write anything more. If you want to use any of these game ideas, feel free to do whatever with them; I’d appreciate credit for them but honestly nobody really reads this anyways so I doubt anyone would use them and it really doesn’t matter. 

Today I have no plan for a blog entry, no sleep, and no time. So I’m just going to share an idea and a world I’ve developed — and (surprisingly for me) it’s not the Auri or their culture. It’s a setting I’ve probably mentioned before; it was intended for d&d, but it mostly ended up being used for Risus games and the infamous Elvish Flirting Law Incident. Because I started developing it in middle school and the gaming club met at lunch, that’s why. And then the past of that world showed up in my high school gaming group, set in the world during its version of a Cold War or world war.  The setting is called Neverron, because when I wrote it, I intended it to be Never Eberron, a world where the premise of Eberron was taken in other directions. However, I wrote it without any real knowledge of Eberron other than the basic “more magitech and politics, less high fantasy” concept, so it’s pretty different.  So. Neverron is a world of magitech and politics, with a lot of both prob...

I was going to do one more week of the course catalogue for the Auraic Academy , but I’m not really inspired to do something like that right now, so instead I present: Making fingerless (and palm-less) gloves in a tiny amount of time, for fun, if not profit!  This is a recipe more than a pattern, but I’ll share the pattern I used to fit my hands, which I’m calling the Blue Gloves, and you can modify as you see fit.  The reason for this is that I recently had to wear blue for whatever reason and I forgot about it until I’d almost left the house. So I grabbed two balls of blue yarn (one sport weight dark blue alpaca/silk, one light blue acrylic worsted weight) and a size J hook, and I made gloves in the car.  Okay, they weren’t great gloves. But they saved me from humiliation. And I embellished them later (see the flower).  Here’s the pattern. Gauge doesn’t matter — to fit your hand, add or remove a repeat. If you’re adjusting the pattern, then make sure that you add o...