Outdoor Crafting

I'll share two projects from last week. We had a lot of time to craft while Mr. GAIN was out of town. Tuesday night, I suggested that the kids go outside to play after dinner. "A" of GAIN chose two activities and two of her siblings thought they would go along with her decisions -- making a snow fort followed by making no-bake cookies. A great way to celebrate a good snow. This was big, outdoor crafting.

You can see "N" of GAIN helping her in the photo. He would "harvest" the snow from the side yard, then "I" and "A" would fill their buckets with it. "A" performed all the construction, placing each snow "brick" in its place, making a fort with plenty of room for everyone involved in its construction.

I decided that my craft would be a knit shopping bag. I had looked at many knitting patterns for something like this in the past year. I chose Lion Brand's shopping bag simply because I knew that I could find the yarn quickly.

One pattern that I liked called for hemp yarn. Can I find hemp yarn quickly? Not in the big box stores. I just haven't had the best luck with small, local yarn stores. Two have closed in the last year or two, and I didn't like the service at one of them at all. So I went with a mainstream pattern and a large chain store for supplies. Sorry, Creative Corner. I just don't drive in your neighborhood very much.

How about those huge size 17 needles? The handle is going very slowly; the bag goes very fast. the handle contains over 200 stitches on size 8 needles. The picture here shows part of my first evening's progress, pre-handle. I hope to be finished by the end of this week. Families attending Game Day saw me working on this last Thursday. My aim is completing the handle by next Game Day.

I did change something (of course) on the model bag -- the yarn is Lion Cotton, in Sage and Natural. The brand promotes its new organic cotton yarn in colors vanilla and bark. My color scheme needs a little more oomph than brown and tan. My colors are still muted and not screaming, but not brown. I kept thinking of uses for this bag's leftover yarn. If I end up with leftover handle yarn, well, a brown dishrag doesn't leave me with a good feeling.

Being the suspicious person that I am, I asked the company if its yarn was organically grown cotton; just natural, un-dyed cotton; or cotton dyed with natural colorings. I was very suspicious after reading that less than 1% of cotton is grown organically here and in family-type magazine (maybe Family Fun, but I can't find a link to the table I remember seeing. I kind of doubt Family Fun, being Disney-produced and me being suspicious). The reply was that it was grown organically. Unsure of the source -- American or overseas. The reply wasn't the friendliest or informative -- "just the facts, ma'am."