Block Party Report #5 - Final Tallies

Sorry it took me so long to get this posted. We got all of the blankets for the Block Party shipped to Ukraine awhile ago, and this post is the final tallies of things we collected.

• Blankets - 8
• Scarves (made from left over squares) - 2
• Pairs of Slippers - 23
• Pairs of baby booties - 2
• Baby Sweaters - 4
• Crochet baby hats - 34
• Knit baby hats - 17
• Flannel Baby Blankets - 21
  

Total Number of Items made for Ukraine - 111!!!! And if you count all the squares instead of the blankets, and the individual slippers instead of the pairs you get 429 things made for Ukraine!!!!! That is amazing!!! But even though I put this all together, and organized it (with lots of help!) I do not deserve any of the praise. God does!!!! I pray that through this many people in Ukraine who are hurting will be blessed. THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE WHO HELPED MAKE THIS POSSIBLE!!!!!!!! Thank you for helping me set goals, and over achieve them!

One person who set goals is my Aunt Lori. You can see her squares here. She told me that every night she would set a goal of how many she was going to get done that night. She would say "I'm going to get 5 squares tonight!" And then the next thing she knew it was 1 or 2 am in the morning! (You can tell her mom doesn't live with her to tell her when to go to bed like my mom does!) Thank you so much Aunt Lori for all your time and squares! Thank you so much everyone who donated all your time and yarn to make this possible. I can't even estimate how many hours everyone put in all together, so thank you so much!

I have already received squares for next years Block Party. Thank you so much Geri and Valerie for those. I'll post picture of those when it gets closer to next years Block Party. We are planning on doing it at the end of February next year. Below are pictures of things we collected that I haven't posted pictures of yet.

All the slippers and baby booties

These hats were made by my friend Rachel with "her" pattern for baby hats. Thank you Rachel for these hats!!

"Little" Rachel (my little sister) ing one of the hats!

Here are the 21 flannel receiving blankets that my mom and I made

Here are the four different fabrics we made them out of.

Here are some baby hats that I made. Some have pom poms, and some don't because I really didn't feel like making a ton of pom poms. (That's why I need that pom pom maker!) :-)

Baseballs

Baseball Season has started! So I thought I would share an interesting thing I learned about baseballs. There is actually yarn in a baseball!! Thay are made with yarn in them - wool and a little bit of cotton. The picture below shows what the inside of a modern baseball looks like. I told my cousin this (he's crazy about baseball) and he's like "Yeah, I know." :-)

Garage Sale Finds!

I love garage sales! You can find the best deals at them! Like the deal I found yesterday! I found two giant bags of thread for only $2 each! Thats a really good deal if you compare it to the price of thread in the store. The lady at the sale said its great that I crochet, and that she would be using that thread to crochet, but its to hard on her eyes, so she is glad that I can put it to use. But, now that I have all this thread, I have to take time to get used to using thread and a tiny hook, and use it all up! :-)

Here is one of the bags of thread.

Here is the the other bag - can you tell that I had a very hard time getting the thread to stay stacked for the picture? :-) (Oh, and ignore the messy background :-) - they are my sisters Polly Pockets)

$2.00!!!! :-)

The two bags of thread

I got theses three magizines at garage sale about a year ago. I think they were 10 cents each, and they have alot of great patterns in them. I think one is from 1991, and one is 1993, and one is from 1987.

They do have some vintage (my mom says the 80's isn't vintage) patterns like the two above.

Bu there are also some really good patterns like this bag and the horse below

If you are a crocheter or knitter like I am, garage sales and thrift shops are great places to look for supplies and great deals!! Most of my crochet hooks are from the thrift store, and I have also gotten a lot of great yarn there, so I would recommend looking there and at garage sales for things instead of spending almost 3 times as much money if you were buying them at a craft store.

Aubrey's Projects

Awhile ago, I taught my friend Aubrey to crochet. Since then she has really taken off and she is doing REALLY well with her projects. I needed some new things to post about on my blog, so I asked her for pictures of things she's made. She sent them right away (it was like she had the email ready and she was just waiting for me to ask for them! :-)). Below are pictures of the things she's made.

This is her first project - a scarf

This is her second project - a hair scrunchie

This is her third project, a baby hat. She has also made a baby hat for her teacher's new baby.

This is a square that Aubrey made for the Block Party next year

This is a granny square that Aubrey made

And this is a granny square that Aubrey and her mom made while Aubrey was trying to teach her mom to make one :-)

Great Job Aubrey on all of your projects!! Keep up the good work!!!!

My Afghan!!!

I haven't posted in a while about what I have been making lately, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been crocheting. I have been doing plenty of crocheting. Fair is coming up soon - it's in August. Since I will be gone most of July on my trip (see previous post), and the week after that we have things going on, so there won't be much time in July for fair projects. So that leaves the rest of this month and June for fair projects. So I have been working on fair projects lately (I have a lot of them to do). One of the things that I had decided to make for fair was a afghan. So on the 7th (of May) I started it. I have been working on it a lot since then, and today I finished it!!! The pattern I used can be found here. I used a size N hook (very large) and Homespun yarn from Lion Brand. Even though the pattern called for Red Heart Light and Lofty, I used Homespun, because when we went to Joann Fabrics (that is my favorite yarn store - can you tell?) to get yarn for my afghan, the only colors they had in Light and Lofty were browns, blacks, and whites, and I didn't really want any of those colors for my afghan. So we picked out two Homespun colors - Colonial (blue) and Barrington (purple). We would have chosen two different colors, but it was hard to find six skeins of the same color with the same dye lot. It took me awhile to figure out the pattern when I first started, but now I could almost do it in my sleep. :-)

Me with my afghan

A close up of the pattern

My New Blog and Our Trip to Ukraine!

I recently made a new blog! Don't worry, I will still be posting on this one about crocheting and everything I have been posting about. But, on my new one, I will be posting about my upcoming trip to Ukraine! Yes, my dad and I are going to Ukraine in July on a short-term mission trip. You can visit my new blog here at (http://ukrainemissiontrip2010.blogspot.com/).

"Lampy"

Have you ever wondered what a creative way to recycle your yarn scarps is? Here is an idea. We love Veggie Tales here, and one movie that we have had forever is Larry Boy and the Angry Eyebrows. The other day, my sister Anna was playing with yarn scraps (because they are all over here), and she decided to to make a smiley face on on of our lamp shades. That reminded me of Lampy on Larry Boy and the Angry Eyebrows. If you haven't seen the movie before, you can watch the first part of it here on Youtube. You have to go 3:20 minutes into the video to get to the Lampy part. :-)