Computer Assisted Design

Well, I took the plunge and actually tried one of the patterns in that Japanese dog crochet book I bought in Vancouver. This was my first Japanese pattern, and I tell you--I could not have done it without the internet. The book itself had wonderful charts, beautiful photography showing you steps in assembly, and clear illustrations showing you how to do the crochet stitch that corresponded to each chart symbol. But even so, I would have been lost without knowing the Japanese characters for body parts, getting a quick refresher on reading charts in general, and especially having a guide to reading amigurumi patterns in particular. You should have seen me! I was working in my home office and had two windows open on the desktop monitor and another page open on the iPad, not to mention flipping back and forth between the diagrams in the book for my dog and the pictures in the book that had general assembly directions. If everyone else wasn't asleep at the time, I would have asked someone to take a picture, LOL!

Even with that, there were still a lot of things I didn't understand. I don't know what it says about recommended yarn or hook size. I just chose a hook several sizes smaller than what the yarn ball band recommended since I thought it would be better to make the stitches tight so that the stuffing wouldn't come through. The directions for the dog came with charts for 2 different torsos. I think one was meant for the standing dog and the shorter torso was meant for the sitting dog, but I'm not sure. And there was no diagram for legs. I scoured the printed directions, trying to find the character for "leg" but didn't see anything I could use. Finally, I just picked the pattern for some other dog's legs and figured the ami police would not come after me for doing so.

In the end, it was worth it.



Making this dog was a *lot* of fun. Well, mostly fun. Making the legs was not fun--at all--and I shouldn't have done them last. But I really enjoyed the rest of it. She looks lonely, though, and if I can figure out where to buy some more eyes and noses, I'll make another one. A few more details are on Rav (the page is made public, so you can still see it even if you don't have a Ravelry account).

A Knitter's Tour of Vancouver, Part I

I recently returned from a trip to Vancouver. What a beautiful city! We traveled with friends, so I did not indulge my yarnie desires as much as I might have if I were on my own, but I did have some fiber-related finds to share with you.

We'll start in Richmond, which is a large, predominantly Asian district. In the Aberdeen Centre, there is a really fun Japanese $2 store called Daiso. I tell you, this place had everything, and it was so fun to browse the 2 stories of merchandise! No pictures were allowed, so you'll have to take my word for it. In the craft section was a selection of crochet booklets, yarns, needles and hooks, along with cute premade crochet appliques. I restrained myself and only got some bento supplies since I haven't seen them locally. This is the only Daiso in Canada, but there are others in California and in the Seattle area, as well as hundreds worldwide, if you want to check it out for yourself.

In that same Aberdeen Centre is a Chinese bookstore called Sup. There were a craft section with a fair number of crochet books and only a few knitting books.




Across the street from the Aberdeen Centre is the Yaohan Centre. This second mall is not nearly as nice, but it has more fiber-related options. There, I spent almost 2 hours checking out the selection of books at Iwase.


I came away with a book called Tiny Crochet, Tiny Motif Patterns (you can see it at the front of the photo, the one with the candles) and another called Motif/Edging, which is really fun and the ideas for using the motifs reminded me a lot of Crochet Adorned:




I noticed that there were 3 whole pattern books for finger knitting! Who knew it could be that useful and versatile?! There were also a couple of books for making these cute little string dolls. They have simple heads made by wrapping a yarn ball, kind of like the base of a temari ball. Then the bodies are made by wrapping yarn around a wire, and they're "dressed" in felt.

There was also a store called Alpha Crafts. I had already spent about an hour at the Iwase bookstore and came out so dazed that I walked right past and didn't notice the shop at all until my husband pointed out the cute crocheted things in the window


By then, though, we needed to leave to meet up with some friends, so I returned another day to look at Iwase some more and to check out this shop. At first, I was awed because I saw several bins of Japanese books underneath a shelf, but it turns out those were the owner's and not for sale. There were some interesting imported yarns, but everything was kept in bags, which was of course not conducive to any kind of tactile browsing. Even though the shop was really small, the owner still made space for a table in the back, where some regulars congregated to crochet (I didn't see anyone knitting), and I thought that was nice. Although the books were in Japanese, I'm pretty sure everyone was speaking Chinese, which goes to show you how useful the charting system is. Anyway, I ended up getting this completely adorable book, along with a small selection of noses and eyes to hopefully make something



I'll have more to share from Vancouver in a future post.