Pirate ducks and other stuff

What do you get when you combine a knitter with a large assortment of craft items and then throw in Ravelry with all kinds of creative ideas for using them? You get stuff like this:

No, not the cute little lamb (it was a Christmas gift from my friend Angel), but what she's holding. Okay, at first glance, it doesn't look like much, I'll grant you that. Just a couple of pirate devil ducks connected by some silver string or something.

But little lambkins has something more utilitarian in mind for these pirates.



If you're saying, "Who shoved sticks up those poor duck's butts?" well, then we share a sick sense of humor.

I'd love to take credit for this idea, but I saw it on Lime & Violet's Daily Chum. There's a tutorial of how to do it over at Robyn's blog, Sweet Little Domestic Life. I made a couple of modifications, but it's her original idea, not mine. :)

Anyway, these are pirate devil duck pencil toppers that I bought one time 'cause they were cute. They sat in my craft stash until I saw this idea online. I scrambled through my craft stash and found some elastic braid in a perfectly suitable silver shade to coordinate. To keep the DPN points from poking through the duck's heads, I stuffed some fun fur I had leftover from making Christmas stockings years ago inside of them. Works great!

So for the record, all those craft supplies aren't clutter and they aren't hoarding, they're inspiration waiting to be implemented! :)

I've been teaching beginning crochet at the shop and one of my students wanted to make slippers. We found a free pattern on Lion Brand's Web site (you may need to log in to see it) that looked cool. Saturday morning in the shop wasn't too busy, so I picked up some Plymouth Yukon and started working on the pattern to see how it turned out. This is the result. BTW, the picture on the Lion Brand pattern is NOT representative of the pattern. It's a picture of a knitted slipper sock, not a crocheted one. False advertising or an uninformed Web content builder? I don't know. This is a quick crochet project, though, and they're big and bulky and warm. Not much else you can ask from a slipper sock, I suppose.

Finally for today, I'll leave you with an update on Mr. Greenjeans. It's finally starting to look like a sweater! I'm just starting the cabled section. It's BIG right now, but that's okay because it will lose some girth when I wash it, which is what I planned all along. Woo hoo!