Blogging From Work Today

Shhhhh, don't tell anyone!

I just wanted to post a quick note to let you all know that the Penny-A-Day challenge has started!  I created a Google+ community, and I think we're up to 9 challenge members.  If you're interested in joining us, you can go here to check it out.  It's a public group, so any stitchers are welcome to join.

Just as a reminder, for this challenge you are doing one mini per day.  Personally, I'm crocheting a Sea Penny per day.  You could also knit one row of a scarf.  I'm encouraging people to choose an inspiration (I'm using daily weather conditions) to help keep you on track and make for a beautiful whatever-it-ends-up-being!

And to use Google+, all you need is a Google account.  Let me know if you have trouble finding the group, or if you need help setting yourself up on Google+!

A Challenge for 2013 - a Penny-A-Day

I found this tutorial for Sea Pennies on Pinterest (a while ago, actually - I pinned it originally because of the colors).  The link will take you to the tutorial on Julia Crossland's website (which is wonderful, btw).

I don't know if you've seen these row-a-day scarves people knit based on the color of the sky each day?  I saw something about it (on Pinterest, of course) and I thought it was a cool idea.  But there were 2 problems I had with this idea - first, I hate carrying threads/yarn (and there's a good chance with this project that the color I need would be at the opposite end of the row); and second there are a whole lot of possibilities for sky colors, and that's a lot of yarn to buy and keep with the project.  I was sad, I really wanted to do something like this.  And the grays/blues/whites of the sky color knitting project are so beautiful - it's like a chronicle of your year.

But I was thinking - what if I combine these 2 projects? *cue lightbulb ding-sound*  I could do a sea penny each day.  And I could simplify the color scheme by just doing the weather for each day - sunny, cloudy/rainy, snowy, etc.  Not as many colors to worry about!  But they would still be gorgeous together!

So my challenge for 2013 will be to crochet (and attach after the first day) a penny each day, using yellows, grays and white.  The possibilities for this are pretty cool - it could be calendar shaped, for a chronological record of the weather.  Or it could be more free-form (this is what I'm thinking about - we get a LOT of sunny days in the summer here in Idaho, so there would be huge sections of yellow if I stay linear).  Maybe a spiral, maybe more triangular like Julia shows....

So does anyone want to join me?  Let me know here if you are interested - this is not an official sign up, I'll do another post when I see what kind of interest there is.  Let me know if you're interested in doing the penny idea, or if you would do the "a-day" challenge but with a different medium or format (a granny square or the sky scarf maybe?), or even a different inspiration - I thought about doing something with the shirt color I wore each day.  Okay, that should get your brains turning.  Yay!  I'm excited for 2013 now!