In early October, feeling
pretty self assured thanks to a
bitchin' new hairstyle, I sent what I thought was a clever plea for a t-shirt to a local gent who has a pretty rad podcast called
Dead in 60 Years.
Really, I just thought he was cute.
Anyway, I got my Di60Y shirt, which I
pimped out with some badass embroidery, and now Greg is my awesome bandmate and we have a
freakin fabulous youtube show
Kim&Greg and I'm pretty sure I have a friend for life in him. He's always so good at easing my insecurities and encouraging my best bad behavior- hey we're in a band, that's what bandmates do! When everyone else is telling me to tone down the silliness Greg is usually egging me on to take my antics to new levels of absurdity. So I wanted to make him something special. It's been a long time since I've had a good, like,
really good creative outlet.
The Pattern:
None. Well, I made it up. So I guess it's not none. I printed out Di60Y, their little skull guy logo, and a bunch of other crap, made patterns for everything on graph paper, started and frogged the motheruffcker about 4 times and then settled on large block letters because I just couldn't get the level of detail I wanted in the skull in a grid as small as a scarf. Their logo would look awesome on an afghan. Too bad I just don't like him enough for that.
Anyway, Tapestry Crochet is really fun and it's super easy to convert logos and basic images into a crochet pattern. It's how I taught myself to crochet- Check out my
Pirate Afghan that I made as my first project. All it took was print outs of historical pirate flags and some graph paper. Point is, this is easy and fun and looks pretty cool. It just sometimes takes a few tries to get just right.
The Yarn:
Because Greg is kind of a big deal in Fresno (Just, you know, never as big a deal as me. Duh.) I wanted to crochet as locally as possible. I shopped at
Knit Addiction in Clovis and picked up some
Geek Chic Minion Sock in the colorway
Neville Longbottom, a yarn that is hand dyed locally in Sanger. This 80% superwash wool, 20% nylon yarn is absolutely gorgeous, super soft and has the added bonus of being perfect in a scarf for a Harry Potter enthusiast. This was the main color for the scarf, and it developed this amazing almost velvety texture as it crocheted up with the way the variegated browns and teals played together. Everytime I was out and about crocheting I had people approaching me telling me how beautiful the yarn was. Uh, duh.
For the contrast in the lettering I went with
Anzula's Sebastian in Au Natural. Anzula is another local hand dyed yarn company, and I've been in love with this lovely 70% Merino, 30% sea cell fingering weight yarn since the first time my fingers brushed against it. Soft, silky and a wonderful twist, Sebastian was everything I'd dreamed it would be!
Since I hadn't been able to use the skull in the crochet pattern I decided to do one final embellishment, a shrinky-dink button. I traced the reveresed image and colored it in with a blue colored pencil, punched holes in it and popped that sucker in the oven. Done and done!
Thanks Greg for being an awesome friend! Hope now you're a cozier and warmer awesome friend!
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