True Beauty Lies within the Yarn!

I can truly never say enough wonderful things about this yarn.  Lyons Brand Homespun is the ultimate when it comes to luxury and softness!  Over and over again I have my friends tell me that these hats are the softest they have ever felt.  I have heard from others who have used it in their projects that it is extremely difficult and they don't like using it because of how hard it is, but I have found that it is NOT difficult to use if you have a little EXTRA patience.  In my life I have to have a lot of patience in order to get most things to work out the way I want them so this was an easy task for me.  I also find that when using a larger crochet hook, it works best because the smaller you go the harder it is to get a hold of the whole piece of yarn.

I got started using this yarn because my mom had bought two skeins of a color that I would have NEVER bought but she wanted me to make her a pair of my fingerless gloves for her birthday.  She had originally bought it because she wanted to make a scarf out of it, but she said that she couldn't figure out how to work with the yarn.  I am never intimidated by yarn, it is my passion and my obsession so to me it was a challenge and one I wanted to conquer.  It was really surprising to me that the yarn was not as difficult to use as she had  made it seem.

Now it has become my favorite to use whenever I want to make a new hat or anything really because you can get it in pretty much any solid color you want and then they have these mixed colors that are simply spectacular.  I love going into the store and looking at them because I never really know what I'm going to end up with.  They are so amazing with the finished product.  I remember my husband came home on Christmas Eve and I needed to make two sets of my hats and fingerless gloves for his Aunt Stephanie and his Cousin Ashely who were going to be over in like 4 hours.  I was super stressed because I had no idea what colors they would want so I sent my wonderful husband to the yarn store.

I trust his judgement completely because he is WAY more fashionable than I am, which is sad, I know.  He grew up with his mother being an AT HOME hair dresser with her very own salon downstairs.  Needless to say he has always known his way around fashion.  So, long story short, he comes home with two skeins of these colors that I am thinking, NO WAY!!!  One is super BRIGHT pink, and I mean NEON!!  And the other is this funky looking purple brown color that was really strange looking and not pretty.  Two colors I would NEVER have bought at the store myself, but whatever, I didn't have time to go back and get different ones, and he knows his aunt and cousin, which I don't very well.

The bright pink was for Ashley, and it didn't turn out as bright as I had thought.  It ended up having purple's and oranges, and even shades of burgundy in it that made it absolutely amazing as a finished product.  Ashley was so in love with it she wore it all night long, and still wears it all the time.

The other color was for Stephanie, who is a very petite Italian woman who is just a wonderful human being all together.  The yarn was called Cotton Candy, and it really looked just like that when it was put together into the hat and gloves.  It swirled from a soft pink, into a cream color, into a rosy wine color, into cream again and then into a deep purple.  The blending of the cream into the purple and the wine color was what gave the skein that brown color, but when it was actually made into something, there was absolutely NO BROWN what-so-ever.

In the case of this beautiful creation, the yarn gave just the slightest dark blue and light blue hints along with the white it is blended with, so I had no idea that it would go across the entire spectrum of cool blue hues.  If you look at the picture of it from the back you can see how it just blends so beautifully into each next color.  One word to describe it would be SPECTACULAR.

In this day and age, you have to find things that keep you guessing (and obsessing in my case) otherwise it gets boring and redundant.  I find myself on the verge of stopping this whole thing of trying to sell my stuff because I have had absolutely nothing sell and less and less views each day this month.  My creative juices feel like they are all tapped out, and if it weren't for my friends, like Tanesssa, who gave me an amazing idea for a hat yesterday, I fear I wouldn't be trying anything new and would just go back to making stuff for my family.  I know that there are people out there who appreciate hand made things.  I myself wish I could afford to buy more stuff that was handmade, but right now my  budget is strictly for my bills and food.

This was supposed to help supplement my income that I make working full time, but alas, it is just a hobby and one that I love.  I don't mind.  I will continue to make things, continue to blog about them and maybe someday business will pick back up again.  Time is the only thing that will tell.

That's all for me today,

Cheers!

Mrz Jaques

Tophatter Update! They let me schedule my 2nd hat finally!!!

I don't know if it has anything to do with the fact that I posted the blog I did yesterday but when I logged on to Tophatter this morning, even though it was after 8am PST they had a slot open for me to list my hat on March 19th at 5pm.  To me it is so silly when everything I have tried for the past 2 weeks didn't work but then I write a blog post that gets like 50 hits and the very next day I am able to schedule my item for an auction.  Coincidence?  Maybe.  I just hope that it sells because I really need to make a sale or two this month to cover all the costs that I have been putting out. 

People think that yarn isn't expensive but it really is.  Good quality yarn can be extremely expensive but it is worth it when you can get your hands on it.  Lately I have been relying on donations and whatnot to fund my yarn collection, and it is running scarce.  I am so happy to see one of my favorite sites doing a yarn give away. 

If you haven't heard of them before you should check them out,  www.HookedonCrochet.com which is a free email newsletter sent out by www.AllFreeCrochet.com.  I have found some amazing techniques and patterns that I would have never thought of before.  I am not one to TAKE someones design that they have posted for free and use the whole pattern.  I am weird I guess because I am really REALLY BIG on not wanting to COPY anyone's work unless I paid for the pattern and they get the credit for designing it, so I will always change things, and make it my own.  I find that a lot of the patterns need a little help anyway in getting them to make sense and work correctly so my years of experience come in handy in those cases. 

I mostly signed up for the site's emails because they run contests for yarn give aways, and this month they are giving away Bernat Mosaic's and I WANT IT really bad!  I don't know how many times I have been at Michael's and just sat and felt how amazingly soft and luxurious this yarn is but couldn't bring myself to pay the $7/skein it costs when it's only about 100 yards in each skein.  WAY out of my budget if you ask me.  I couldn't sell anything I made out of it because I'd have to charge like $40 for a hat which is too much in my opinion.  I know that there are people out there selling them for that, but I can't justify it to myself.  I want my hats to be affordable as well as fashionable.  So I always look for good sales, or promotions where they are giving it away. 

I won't use poor quality materials.  Some people would argue with me and say that Red Heart Supersaver Yarn isn't of good quality but I will tell you that I have always used Red Heart Supersaver and ALWAYS will because it is durable, washable, and you can find it in almost any color you want.  It may NOT be the softest yarn, but if you want something that you can SEE the details of your work in, this is the perfect yarn.  Yes it is acrylic but it's not itchy unless you don't keep up on the maintenance and shave it periodically.  (Shaving a sweater or hat made out of ANY yarn is necessary after a period of time if you want it to remain looking nice and not like a fuzzy, frizzy mess.)

I feel really scatter brained today for some reason.  I had started this as a post to update you all on my tophatter situation, which is hopefully going to get better soon, and it has progressed into talking about the quality of yarn I use.  It always amazes me how a tangent can take me on a path that I never would have even thought of in the beginning of when I started typing.  Anyway, if you get a chance to check out the Auction on the 19th at 5pm check out my hat.  Or if you just can't wait, you can always come and check out my stuff on my Etsy page.

www.etsy.com/shop/mrzjaquescrochetedit

And don't forget to "like" me on Facebook

www.facebook.com/mrzjaquescrochetedit

Wishing you all the best and happy hooking!

Mrz Jaques

Homepsun Surprise! Blue with hints of Purple

Yarn is one of the most interesting (or boring according to my husband) things I can ever talk about. To me it is such an amazing medium. When I go shopping for yarn, I see the outside of a skein. When it is balled up and you can only see the outside colors. I am a very visual person so when I see something on the "outside" I try to imagine what it will look like as a finished product and buy accents to go with the picture I have in my head.

This yarn, Lyons Brand Homespun is my favorite yarn EVER!!! I have bought multiple skeins in all different colors and each time I buy one that is not a solid color but has some crazy name like 'Colonial' or 'Waterfall' it never turns out to be the same colors I had imagined in my head.

With this one which is called 'Colonial' I had pictured in my head a more medium color blue with grey accents throughout, but as you can see it is not just the blue and grey. Purple accents are everywhere. They are very subtle in some parts and then they are more dense around the back of the hat. It's simply spectacular! Had I known that when I was buying my ribbons to go with I would have tried to find a soft purple and blue ribbon to go with maybe.

With the ribbons I decided that the navy blue wasn't enough on it's own, and neither was the light blue, so I put them together. Little did I know that when they were against one another the light blue has a line of shimmer that totally stands out against the dark navy blue of the other one. I am terrible at tying bows, so this one I just couldn't get to look right for the pictures but when you put it on it looks super cute. This isn't the hat I was talking about in my previous post, that one is still in the works so stay tuned.

That's all for me today, I have a long weekend and a lot of work to do to get ready for the show I am planning on doing for the 18th of March. If I decided to actually do it then I will post location and times if you want to come by and see my stuff in person. Thanks for looking!!!

:)