Who's Ready for a Vacation?

January 13:
***Um, so apparently I never posted this! Better late than never, I guess? At least it makes what I was going to post about how vacation went make more sense***

January 5:
I am! And coincidentally (or not so much), I'm leaving for one tomorrow - woo hoo! The husband and I are going up to Lake Tahoe with my family for 6 days. I don't know whether or not I'll have any sort of Internet connection, so I may pop up on Twitter or something but I'll be taking a blog break.

Before I go, here's a super quick little how-to add-on to the crocheted Christmas trees I posted a while back: I totally forgot to mention the little dots on the garland chain! If you know how to crochet, even just a tiny bit, this is an easy way to make a simple yarn garland. I simply chained for a while (it's really your preference, it's just spacing and will change depending on your yarn and hook) then made a little circle by doing one round. For the Christmas garland, I attached the trees in between dots, but you could also just leave off the trees and have a simpler finished product.

You create the dot by chaining, then going back to the 3rd or 4th chain from the hook, slip stitching into it to make a tiny little ring, and then doing double crochets into that space in the middle of the ring - do a small ch-2 as the first "double-crochet" stitch to bring your yarn up to the right height. I think I used 9 DC's for kind of cupped discs, but using 8 will flatten them out if you want. This is a pretty good tutorial (pictures and all!) if you haven't done this before. When you get enough of them to make a good circle, slip stitch into the first stitch (whether that's the first "real" DC or the turning chain doesn't make a huge difference here) and start chaining again. Keep doing this as many times as you want to get the length of garland you need.

I also found these instructions a while back and thought it was really interesting. I didn't know how to create anything in the round without following a pattern, because I didn't know the pattern for the increases. But, it's pretty simple and opens up all sorts of ideas for me.

I want to use this garland technique to make some big, long garlands. Just one of many things I want to do... Planning on using some vacation time for crocheting along with finishing the binding for the baby quilt. Soooo looking forward to just chilling for a few days. Will share finished projects when I get back!