Nearly Finished Granny Square Mario Blanket

Hey, you guys!!!!!!

I am just 24 flesh colored squares away from completion!! Well, then comes to the daunting task of joining them all up, but my Mario Blanket is nearly finished!

Blinged Out Wedding Pumpkins

Any one who knows me knows how much I LOVE glittering the heck out of everything! I couldn't be happier when my bride-friend told me that she wanted glittered pumpkins as a part of her centerpieces. We went to a farm to pick up a bushel of pumpkins. (I will add more photos to this post later. I can't find my camera cable right now.) I had taken some pictures at the farm.

Anyway, this is a bushel of pumpkin gourds, which is what they officially call these mini pumpkins. WeeBee pumpkins are actually small, round pumpkins; smaller than a regular pumpkin, but larger and rounder than a pumpkin gourd. A bushel has nearly 60 mini pumpkins inside. And, they sold it to my friend's fiance for $24 which is an absolute STEAL!

My friend too this picture of the bushel. We had already taken out nearly 45 at this point. About 32 of them were good, and nearly 10 were either dented, missing stems, or not cute enough for the wedding. Still, though, she has nearly another 40 or 50 in there, and she only needed about 50 to begin with!!

After running out of glitter and time, this is what she had. The wedding isn't until the 30th of Oct, so she's storing these in a flat plastic container and laying it flat on a rack.

We messed around with centerpiece ideas. We settled on 4 different colored pumpkins laying outside of a round mirrored tray with tea lights and a small round vase with cut Gerber daisies in fall colors. I didn't take pictures since it was only a trial run. I'll take pics of the actual centerpiece.

Wedding / Bridesmaids Crafty Goodness

It's not the first time I made these bridal pumpkins for Fall Weddings. The first time I did it, it was for the bridal party for my friend's Halloween Bachelorette party. Had I been with a more adventurous group of girls, it would have been more fun, but alas....My pumpkins were awesome, though!

That picture was taken YEARS ago! It was my fat phase...How ironic that I'm back where I started. =/ You can't really tell from the picture, but there's barbed "wire" with tiny spiders wound around the tulle.

Considering my friend is having her wedding the day before Halloween and a lot of her decor is bourderline Thanksgiving/Halloween, I took it upon myself to design the goodies for the bachelorette party. As if I'd let anyone else take that way from me!!

She's a big Hello Kitty fan, so imagine my excitement to find this little gem in Target! The gems and tulle totally made the Hello bucket more bridal.

I think it was cute all on it's own.

The bride-to-be was QUITE happy with it!

Not to be left out, I put these together for the bridal party. I'm part of that little group!

Unfortunately, the bridal party never got their pumpkins because the girl holding them got sick and didn't come out with us. We'll have to delay their debut until next month. Personally, I wanted to get myself a purple one, but the other bridesmaid wanted pink and wanted us all to match. Well, no one can ever say I don't know how to compromise!

WIP: Crochet Mario Bros. Blanket - We Have a Problem!

Hey, happy hookers!

On my last Mario Bros Blanket update, I mentioned that I had issues finding the correct color yarn for his peachy/pink skin in the Lion Brand Wool Ease blend that I've been using for the rest of the blanket. I finally consented and bought Red Heart Classic yarn in light peach.

That was scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to yarn. It's cheap, it's acrylic, and it sort of burns my fingers when I'm crocheting quickly. In desperation, I bought 6 skeins of it. After completing the last of the chocolate brown squares, I pulled out one of these skeins and immediately felt the difference in texture and weight. I did one granny square and realized this wasn't going to work. LOOK:

My flash sort of messed up the shot, but you can see the size difference of a square crocheted from the same pattern with the two different yarns. The Red Heart brand is bigger, and less pleasing to the touch. This won't work if they're all going to be joined up to form one huge blanket.

I need to crochet 43 of these little peach squares, and I'm not going to do it with the wrong yarn only to find out at the end that none of those squares will work out. It will take me about 3 days to do it; three days I'll never get back if I go one using the wrong material.

Back to the drawing board, I'm afraid. I'm going back to the craft stores to search again for something in the Wool Ease brand that may do or even Vanna's Choice. I'm not going to let my 2 year-long project go to shit because of ONE color!