Day 2 - 3/28/15

I had a very creative Saturday.  Since I am obsessively working to learn the skills I need to make my little amigurumi goodies, I decided to master the "magic loop" technique in crocheting.

This is a way that you can make a tube and have the end be sealed.  If you make a 6-chain and use a slip stitch to join it, you will end up with a hole, and that's no good if you need to stuff your work.

You actually crochet the first row over a "tail" and when you're done with the row you just pull the tail and it closes up the chain.

Anyway, in the morning I worked on it and finally got the hang of it.

But, Patti and I wanted to make something.  Patti was going to use her chicken fried chicken recipe and I wanted some special potatoes.  I thought I wanted to make mashed potatoes but that sounded boring.  So I made up a potato recipe.

I quartered some redskins, put them in a mixing bag with salt, pepper, brown sugar (lots) and 3 strips of bacon cut up.

I mixed the mess up and then put it in foil.  I baked the stuff in the foil for 20 minutes to get it nice and squishy.  Then I put it in the pan and raised the oven temperature to 450, essentially baking the little buggers into submission.  The mixing and the cooking in foil really combined the flavors and made it into something greater than its parts.

And behold, when I took it out of the oven, I saw that it was good.

It turned out even better than I expected.  I would have loved to add some caramelized onions but I'll save that for next time.

After eating and all that I felt really good.  I grabbed one of the patterns from Creepy Cute Crochet (Creepy Cute Crochet).  And decided to try to do the head.  I mean, what they hey?  I've been knitting for years now so how hard could it be?

There's an aspect of crochet that I really like which is that it is a lot more flexible than knitting.  There's room to fix a problem or adjust a stitch and the piece still looks very good.  My experience with knitting is that it's very exacting.  I enjoy that aspect very much.  However it's nice to just kick back.

Anyway I did it.  I don't think I did the decreases correctly and I made quite a mess of the final row, but I did it!  This is filled with air and fuzz.

"Captain, I think the planet is mushy."

Filled with air, fuzz, and love

Very creative day!  Tomorrow I'm going to start my craftsy course on creating your own amigurumi (Craftsy Amigurumi Class).  I can't get into this class until I understand the basics of crochet.  And, drumroll please, I do!

Oh, I didn't make her, but she's really cute - my cat Trini (she's missing her right leg!).