I’m going to Ethiopia!

…and I need a lot of money! In effort to get a few steps closer to my $3,700 goal, I’m making and selling bracelets with the Ethiopian flag colors.

Even before I started this project I was sure that it would be more tedious and time consuming than it was worth, but I decided to go for it anyway. Despite having never been in girl scouts, I have been well trained in the art of friendship bracelet making in my college years. My lovely and helpful roommates made some bracelets with me, and I get a whole lot done when I’m listening to class lectures. So since the supplies are so cheap and I’ve been able to multitask while making the bracelets, the cost/benefit analysis has proven to come out in my favor!

I’ve been carrying around THIS (<---) ziplock bag to class and work and everywhere else. I'm asking people to just give whatever they are able/want to give and I made a profit after selling 2 bracelets by just having the bag hang out on my desk. I should probably be more forward about it but I don’t want to be obnoxious. BUY MY BRACELETS! (tell me if I’m obnoxious, guys. srsly)

Apparently the kids we’ll be working with in Ethiopia love making these bracelets, so I’m probably going to be ridiculously sick of it by the time I get back. That means that what I make now will soon be a collectors item, so you should get ‘em while you can if you want to be cool.

Let me attempt to address all of your possible excuses for not buying a bracelet.

“I’m a boy.” ...Do not be deterred based on gender - boys can totally rock this bracelet. Have you seen Zach? (--->)Look at that beard! Look at that savage roar! Look at those bracelets! Conclusion: handmade Ethiopian bracelets make you a man.

“I live X miles away from you.” (X=distance farther than walking across a classroom) ...I’ll totally mail/hand deliver you a bracelet.

“I don’t have any cash.” ...You can still support me by going here and selecting “Support a Missions Trip”, then team “Ethiopia”, and type my name in the “Missions Trip Team Member Name” field. I’ll give you a bracelet.

What else could be stopping you? I’ll try to think of an excuse for that too.

Ok but seriously, if you actually want more info about what we’ll be doing in Ethiopia, who “we” is, or anything else, let me know and we’ll talk. Spread the word!

baby blanket bloopers

IT IS TIME to reveal to you my summer accomplishment…now that it’s almost summer again…

SO when I found out that my friend was pregnant, I immediately started thinking about what I could make for her kid…I’ve never knitted much more than scarves and the like, but I decided to make it (yet ungendered) a blanket. I used some graph paper to make a pattern for the blanket, scaling it down to 2” for every square.

Here is where I had a problem: I was just using spare skeins of yarn that I had been given over the years and I didn’t anticipate such a dramatic disparity between the gauges of the skeins. A 4”x4” square was not going to be 20 stitches across for every type of yarn. This is obvious in retrospect. Because I’m still a noob and also didn’t want to backtrack and make gauge swatches for every skein I was using, I decided to pretend that they were all the same and measure by stitch instead of actual size.

Clearly, this didn’t work. When I had all the pieces done (months and months later), they didn’t fit together like puzzle pieces as the graph paper would suggest. I had to fix this.

I sewed the pieces together the way they SHOULD look, which made it look normal from the front and terrible from the back – the extra tops and sides of too-big squares flopped over with nowhere to go. To fix this new problem, I bought the softest fabric (well, the cheapest soft stuff) that I could find and sewed that onto the back. Now it’s super warm! That was totally intentional!

So anyway…IT’S a girl! Which is good because the blanket features a pink heart. I think it was a successful first attempt, but there are a lot of things I would change if (when) I do this again.

Moral of the story: don’t be dumb. There’s a reason you’re supposed to measure these things.

2^nd moral of the story: if you’re clever enough you don’t have to measure! (just kidding, it’s not worth the hassle)

In the future I’m gonna take progress pictures instead of just a final product, that might be fun. But in the meantime, here’s the final product, also featuring baby Victoria!

Front:

Back:

V for Victoria:

SQUEEEE!