Crochet Archives ⋆ Light House Life Lessons

January 16 2023

Failing to Win

I started playing Wordle on a Thursday because my friend Ruth was able to explain it so I understood it. I began sharing my results the next day, on Friday 2/18/2022. My husband had previously tried to get me to join in with him and the kids and play daily but it didn’t make sense when he explained it, so I didn’t try.

Let me attempt to explain the game. You have six chances to guess the correct 5-letter word each day. You can only play once a day. If a letter is the right letter in the right spot, it turns green, if it is a right letter in the wrong spot it turns yellow. It just makes sense to use what you learn in each guess to help you choose your next guess. You can play at https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

When I first learned to play, I didn’t worry about how many guesses it took me to get the word, I just didn’t want to fail. I was excited by the fact that I could get the word right in 6 guesses or less. My immediate family has a group text titled Wordle where we post our results each day. . On the group text we often comment on the cool patterns created by our unique guesses that day. I also share my daily results with Ruth. I try to remember to play daily.

I have discovered many of my friends and acquaintances also play Wordle. We have even had discussions about whether it is better to start with the same word every day or pick from a variety of words with 5 of the most common letters. One of my favorite words to start with is STORM, another is FRUIT, but I also use LEARN sometimes. Sometimes as I think of which word to start with, a word pops into my brain and anything else I think of using just doesn’t seem as perfect as the one that popped into my head, so I go with it. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not so much, but I have learn to trust the words that push themselves into my brain. I have trouble guessing words with two of the same letter, or with an X or Z, these just seem so unlikely that sometimes it causes me to fail. A few times the word of the day made me say, “Really?!?, with 14,000 plus 5-letter words to pick from they chose THAT?”

Today a comment by my friend Ruth inspired me to write this post. Her inspiring post is shown here. “Wrong guess between two possibilities. RATS. Have to start a new streak.” My response to her was, “It’s not about streaking. It’s about challenging your brain to think every day. It thinks longer on the days you fail than it does on the days you get to the right word in 4 or fewer guesses. So as long as you were thinking and not trying to fail, every fail is actually just you exercising your brain longer, and when muscles get exercised longer, they get stronger. So you win.”

It has been almost a year since I began playing Wordle, and I want to share my stats here. I will take that 98% win rate and ignore that it also means I have failed a few times.

Sounds almost like a life lesson, I thought. Maybe worth sharing. Could turn it into a blog post. That seems like a good idea. So here I am writing my first blog post in almost three years, and it’s all Ruth’s fault!

The longer we stay away from something, like posting to a blog regularly, the harder it is to come back. I was in the habit of posting once a week every Thursday without fail. I posted March 5, then March 12, 2020. Then on March 17th the company I work for sent almost every employee home to work and only a handful of us, considered essential, continued to show up in person. My creative impulse was stifled. I tried again, on March 26th, after missing just the one weekly post. Then I posted again after skipping three weeks and a day, on Friday April 18, 2020. I wanted to share the cheerful Shaun the Sheep statue photos I had taken in September 2015 on our last trip to London. I took so many photos because they were all so colorful and cheerful. That seemed like something everyone could use after living more that six weeks in a pandemic world. After that, I stopped doing anything creative and haven’t started up again.

All my writing groups and crochet groups had gone dark, not meeting for the foreseeable future. I saw almost nobody I knew or recognized except the handful of people at work. It has taken a long time to make sense of the new normal in life. I didn’t intend to stay away so long, but making a come back is hard. I got yarn from my daughter for Christmas and at first I felt bad that she had spent her money on something I would never use. Then I figured I should give crocheting a try again, and that perhaps the yarn cakes she gave me that were so colorful a pretty should be my inspiration. So on Christmas Day, I found myself searching for crochet patterns that would take just the one cake she had provided and I wouldn’t have a bunch left over. I wanted to use it all up, but not need to buy more to finish the project. That was tougher than I thought it would be. So I am back to crocheting having done almost none since March 2020. I am using the less colorful of the two cakes she got me (Baby Cake Pool Party) to make a baby afghan. No for anyone I know, just because. We shall see how well it turns out before deciding what to do with the slightly larger and much more brightly colored Big Cake Rainbow Jellys.

Since I have jumped back into one of my former creative activities, it only seems logical to give writing a go again too.

I can’t promise I will get back to posting weekly, but now that I have created one post, maybe the next one will be easier. I can tell you that I have made the commitment to keep this domain name for 5 more years and paid for hosting for the next 3 years. So it would seem silly not to use it. Stay tuned…

Category: Blogging, Come Back, Crochet, Writing | Comments Off

April 4 2019

Using Fancy Yarns for Charity Crochet

I am not a yarn addict, nor do I very often even buy yarn. Mostly yarn just finds me and begs me to make something useful from it. It seems lately that people in my various knit and crochet groups are given yarn by some friend who is decluttering their stash, or outgrown the cheap stuff and moved on to the expensive yarns. At most of the three once-a-month meetings I attend, someone brings some yarn to donate. They put it out on the table and it is up for grabs. There is usually just one skein leftover from a project they finished or even just a small ball of assorted yarns of varying ages and colors.

Other times word gets out that I crochet for charity using donated yarns and suddenly a tub or bag full of yarn comes my way. I don’t work with wool yarns, and since I am donating almost all the hats I make I actually prefer working with acrylic yarn along the lines of Red Heart Super Saver or similar. I’ve found it really doesn’t matter if it is thinner yarn because I like working with 2 different yarns at a time to make interesting designs and textures. I especially love the mystery of what a variegated yarn will look like when it is made up. Thick yarns are great because you can use just the single strand, but often even an entire skein of the chunky yarns is not enough to make an entire hat. Then I have to get creative and find something to pair with it as a band.

Over the past six months or so I have been more daring with what I pick to work with from these donated yarns and I have had a lot of fun experimenting with them to see what I can do and which I like or dislike working with. Below are photos of a few of the Crochet Hats I’ve made recently with donated fancy yarns.

Eyelash/Boa Yarn

I paired the black and navy eyelash yarn with simple black yarn and had to feel my way from stitch to stitch but it was fun and challenging and feels so nice to touch. It has a shimmer to it that made it difficult to photograph, but you get a pretty good idea from the 2 photos below. I happened to have the label for this yarn and thought some of you might want to know what it is.

This hat worked out so well that when a friend brought in a bunch of interesting yarns I decided to be daring a take a bunch of different ones to make up. Maybe the person who sent the yarn with her to give away will enjoy seeing that it is being put to good use. In the case of the hats below with the contrasting bands, I ran out of the fancy yard before the hat was finished so I improvised. These are all one of a kind hats as you can imagine.

Soft/Fluffy/Fuzzy Yarn

Multi-Colored Sparkly Yarn

Light-Weight Variegated

Compared to the others on this page, the hat below is kind of boring. It is much like the hats I usually make. I showed it here as a way to use up yarns you might not know what to do with. I also wanted to point out that the green acrylic yarn is the same for this hat and the one below.

Variegated Long Stringy Yarn

I took the photo below to explain how I was using the two yarns in tandem to create the cool fuzzy effect. The fancy yarns are not suitable alone to make hats, they are too thin to work up well with this pattern, but the basic acrylic yarn gives it stability, strength, and character.

This hat looks the same inside and out. The color of the green base yarn didn’t really match either yarn I paired it with but it turned out nice in both cases.

The lower band on this hat shows the true color of the green base yarn. It is the length it is because I ran out of the green yarn too, but I think it is a nice length.

If you know me in real life or live near central Indiana and want to donate yarn for myself or others to make various items for charity, please contact me and we can plan a time and place to meet up. This is a great way to declutter your stash to make room for new and exciting yarns you can get excited about making new projects with.

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September 6 2018

Crochet Hat Goal Met!

I set the goal at the beginning of the year to crochet 36 hats to give away to charity. I met that goal on 8/28/2018 and thought I would share a bit about how setting goals and tracking them has revolutionized my productivity.

Actually, maybe I am just as productive as I ever was, but tracking my goals has made me realize just how much I am capable of accomplishing when I set my mind to it. When I don’t set a goal or track my progress toward a goal, I lose track of just how much I have done and so I am always feeling like I don’t get anything done.

Sometimes when it comes to crocheting the hats I make for donations to charity, all it takes is an idea for a new color scheme or yarn combination and then I want to at least start it so I can see how cool it will look. I hate having more than a couple of things started at once so I try to start and finish the hats during each of my monthly two-hour long crochet/knit group meetings. The knitters are always amazed at how quickly I can turn out a finished hat because apparently knitting takes much longer.

I won’t bore you with all the hats, but here are a select few for you to see how the same basic hat pattern can be infinitely different because of the combinations of yarns I choose to make them with.

This was a fun experiment with the boa yarn someone was giving away. I paired it with basic black and had to go by feel to hit the stitches, but it turned out amazing. The black and navy combo of the boa yarn was a nice choice.

These were made with thick chunky yarns and trimmed with a variegated yarn. Note how the bands look different when paired with different colors on the top. The band yarn is the same.

Made these using up small balls of variegated yarn paired with a solid, then adding another solid when the ball ran out.

These are made with a light aqua and a peach colored yarn paired with a basic heather gray yarn.

First hat on the right. Second hat on the left. The blue ran out so I finished with gray giving this banded effect.

Not only have I crocheted the 36 hats this year, but I also made 5 small fleece blankets edged with crochet to donate to charity. Then there are the dozen or so soap sacks I made to give to the homeless with new bars of soap in them.

So have you met any of the goals you set for 2018? How do you make sure you meet or exceed the goals? Let us know how you are setting and achieving goals in the comments below.

If you want to support my efforts to crochet or just want to own one of my hats, check the selection available for sale on my Etsy Shop. If you have leftover acrylic yarn and want to have me make it into hats to donate, contact me to make arrangements to send me your leftover yarn stash and I will get right on it!

Happy yarning!

Category: Crochet, Goals | Comments Off

June 7 2018

Crochet Soap Sacks

I recently found a new charity crochet project to make. It all started with an email from Lion Brand Yarns. There was a video all about these little soap sacks. Because they explained it so much better than I could here is the video.

They linked to the free crochet pattern found here. When I looked at the pattern it seemed very familiar. It is almost the same as my hat pattern, so of course, I had to make some. If you happen to be a knitter, there is a pattern for you here.

I found 5 unopened bars of soap while cleaning out cabinets, so I figured I would make sacks for them. The white one was my first attempt and follows the pattern exactly.

Category: Crochet | 1 Comment

January 25 2018

2017 Crochet Wrapup

You may remember that my goal was to crochet and donate 26 hats to charity in 2017. Above is the tracker in my bullet journal showing the approximate color schemes of the 52 hats I crocheted. Quite a few of these hats were actually infant hats. The last 8 were 8 or the 10 hats I made for the American Heart Association’s Little Hats Big Hearts Project. See those hats shown below. I am so over solid red hats for the time being. These are all packed up and ready to drop off.

I made these 15 hats using as many bright colors as I could and donated to the church hat tree to be given to students in need at local schools.

I made the star ornament below to test a pattern for the YarnSlingers group.

It took 10 minutes to make the first star, but only 8 minutes to make the second one.

Here are some of the other hats I made in 2017

All but a couple of the hats I made were donated to various charities to either help children or the homeless. I love crocheting when I know it will help others. It helps me to de-stress. I almost never actually crochet at home. The secret is to find groups to meet and crochet with. I have three such groups I meet with once a month and I can make a hat during each two-hour meeting. I occasionally miss a meeting but only if I am sick or out of town. I also crochet while we are on our trips. It helps to focus on my hat making while hubby drives and it is a great way to relax on vacation.

I finally got around to packing up the 14 baby hats shown below that I made in 2015 for Click for Babies and getting those mailed off. The requirement for these hats was that they had to be at least 50% purple of any shade. They seemed to be in need of hats for boys which is why I chose to pair the purple yarns with black and gray. They were some of the first hats I made as you can tell by the fact that they are made entirely of single crochet stitch.