Arts and Crafts, yay!

Official Blog Post Joke: X-mas is like normal Mas, but uses league average home run rates! A-hahaha.

While I am, fear not gentle reader, diligently weighing hot stove options and winter meeting possibilities, for later posts, today I’m just here to prepare you for the Holiday Season, with another Reds themed crochet project.

This one I’m pretty proud of, as it was more than just running an image of the reds logo through a grid generator and adding a small border to it. But, to be fair, I did borrow from Deborah Atkinson’s pattern “Changling Flake” over at snowcatcher.net.

For the Cincinnati Reds Snowflake, I started with a wishbone-C shape in the center, did some of the snowflake-y bits, and then added bats and gloves as the snowflake ‘spokes’. Well, they kind of look like bats and gloves. Ok, so once I’ve told you that they’re supposed to be bats and gloves, you will recognize that that was in fact what I was going for. But the wishbone-C really does look like the Reds logo. Without further ado, here’s the Cincinnati Reds snowflake!

“Those don’t look like baseball bats or gloves at all!” “Well, ya see…ya gotta squint, and sorta turn your head and Ooooooh! It’s just so baseball-y.”

Isn’t this the perfect thing for your Reds themed Christmas tree or Yule log? Or maybe just a seasonal decoration to hang from your rear view mirror  that says “I have too much time on my hands!” Here’s the pattern after the jump

» Continue reading “Your Grandmother’s Reds Blog, Part 2: X-mas Style”

Yeah, that’s right, my extremely silly, old lady crochet, reds themed project has finally come to completion. I didn’t end up going on quite the scale that the pattern on my previous post did. I don’t know about you, but I really balked when it come right down to doing 150 rows of filet crochet essentially for the purposes of a joke. Anyway, here’s the finished product.

Yup, I mean, I bet you didn’t even know how much you needed a red doily with the Cincinnati wishbone-c on it until right this second. But now you want one more than anything. Well, too bad. (I mean, unless you can crochet. It’s not that hard. Here’s the final pattern I used. In any case, this beauty really deserves to be sitting under some baseball-themed tea set or something like that, so I’d better get to work.

So, earlier this week, I was perusing the Reds shameless-capitalism-osphere, and I found something that I thought was a bit silly.

If my fiance is reading this, this is not what I want for Christmas, hint hint.

I mean, it’s not that crazy. But you have to imagine that someone out there had this thought process.

I’d like to have a watch. Yeah, a silver fashion watch. A charm-bracelet-watch kind of thing, yeah that’d be really pretty. I’d really like it if it was heart shaped – and if it had rhinestones, that would just be perfect.  OH RIGHT AND IT SHOULD DEFINITELY BE CINCINNATI REDS THEMED.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not judging on this. People like sparkly stuff, and people like the Reds. If you want to combine those to things in the form of a watch, far be it from me to tell you that’s somehow wrong. I mean, I’m sure some of my sartorial decision-making processes would probably put this to shame. It just seemed a little of an odd thing to pop up in the Reds store.

On the other hand, if you pay $15 for this, I might just a teeeensy bit be judging you.

Hey baby hey baby hey.

I mean, maybe there’s a market for Cincinnati-logo-ified striped, cheap hair extension clips amongst women and men who are smarter, thinner, richer, and better looking than me, but I’m just saying, you’ve really got to werk it.

So, I was thinking, SURELY, I can put the Reds logo on something FAR SILLIER than either of these two things, while giving me something to write about in an offseason that could be described as “dull.” Well, I do crochet. A lot. And I’ve always loved really kitchy doily-crochet projects. So I’ve decided to make a Cincinnati Reds doily. In case you want to make your OWN sports-team craft project, I’ve provided some tentative step-by-step instructions.

1. Download a logo for your team.
2. Use a free photo-to-pattern converter like this one. These create a little grid version of your picture, and work well for cross-stitch, filet crochet, color knitting, giant tile mosaic tributes, etc. etc. If you’re doing filet crochet, just turn the number of colors to “2″
3. Download the file, and copy it into paint (or something fancier) to massage  things a little bit. Here’s my final version.
   

   Click for full size

   4. CREATE.

So all that’s left to do is go by some red crochet thread. (I’m strongly hoping that in the spirit of Christmas, the craft store will have glittery red crochet thread). Crochet. And then put the frilliest possible border on it, and decide which Reds fan I know is the most deserving of this horrifying monstrosity. It’ll probably be you.