I've got the kippot blues

....from my head down to my shoes.

I crocheted my dad a kippa last year, but he recently lost it, very sadly, so I decided to make him a new one. I also recently inherited a bunch of crochet hooks from my Nana, so I decided to make another one, for my friend Ben, in a heavier weight yarn.

With the leftover cotton thread from my kippot-related activities last year, I began a kippa for my dad in cream with variegated blue accents, the same blue I had used to make the original kippa. I started experimenting with color patterns-- I don't really know anything about crochet other than the simple stitch I learned last year, so I was trying to teach myself new tricks. I made a few simple stripes and then a kind of dotted line, with ten stitches in cream, ten in blue, etc., all the way around. I only had a very little bit of blue remaining but I thought I could finish the row. Wrong-- I was just ONE ten-stitch repeat away from having enough. So I used my brain and colored in the string with a blue sharpie. It looked fine-- a little bit smudged but it was okay. I went on and crocheted around and around and round until I was almost finished. Then I cleverly thought to myself, "I'll just clean up the smudge around the Sharpie section with a Tide Pen." However, the results were dismal. It got totally ruined:

I really liked the broken line row of blue.

All smudgy! Ugh. I knew it wasn't THAT bad, but it really irritated me. So I started a new one, with different, thicker thread, and attempted a spiral pattern:

It didn't look too bad but I was getting tired of it and didn't want to continue all the way around, and the fabric was a little stiffer and not as neat-looking as the original kippa. So I abandoned that and went back to the cream one. I ripped back to the beginning of the smudge, which, unfortunately, involved that cool broken-dotted line, and went back to going around and around in the cream. But I worked on the other one for two days to get to where I was, and it's going to take a good few hours to finish up.

Here's the one I'm making for Ben:

I am SO bad at it, really. I can't seem to make it all nice and flat like Shira's. I guess it just takes practice. I have only made three complete kippot in my life. But I just cannot seem to manage to make them flat, even with the three new ones.

Anyway, in other news, Daddy made me new, longer arms for my Swift, and yesterday I sewed a case out of canvas for it:

My first time using my sewing machine in I don't know how long! I forgot how to thread it, and had to look it up online. Ha. But I got it all figured out anyway. The zipper ended up a little bulky at the very end, but otherwise it came out okay. It achieves its function at least-- and now my Swift has a little home.