Butt Cushion and other wips

I've been working on a butt cushion for a chair given to Geof by our neighbor. It's a kid-sized wooden chair, reminds me of elementary school. I've been bitten again by the crocheting bug so everything in site practically has a custom-made cozy or covering or something...well, almost. I'm also trying really hard to work through my stash, I'm tired of looking at it. The cushion uses the Spike Stitch which I have completely fallen for. It's such a great way to add interest and it is so versatile. Do an image search on Google for "Spike Stitch" and you'll see what I mean. I got the inspiration for my Butt Cushion from the Spike Stitch Pillow Sham by Josi Hannon Madera over at CrochetMe. That was where I was introduced to the Spike Stitch and my life was changed forever...ok that was a little dramatic. I will say that I look forward to doing more experiments with this stitch.

I also have two afghans in the works with Christmas deadlines. I'm not sure I'll make it but I most certainly will try. The first is for my Mom. I want to make her a quilt-inspired afghan. I've already let the cat out of the bag and sent her a few links to patterns on the web to get her input. My mother and I have differing tastes so I wanted to make her something she'd like. She picked out Prairie Star (scroll down for pic) and Woven Blocks as favorites. I've decided on making the first one. That's about as far as I've gotten though, shamed to say. Some of the yarn suggested in the pattern has been discontinued and I haven't done much searching to find substitutions. I'm terrible, I know.

The other afghan is for a friend. I'm making it up as I go. It consists of single crocheted blocks decorated with embroidery and pieced together. So far I have probably 6 ^1/2 squares with no embroidery. I'm using some über red almost orange yarn given me by my mother-in-law paired with gray and deep blue...like in the pic to the left. The squares are the solid red and the embroidery will be done in the gray and blue. Sounds a bit odd, but so is she! Wondering how I got that square over <--- there? It came from an awesome website I found via Heather. It's called ColourLovers. It's a great tool for putting together your own color palettes and create and name your own colors. It's great for working out color combinations for yarn projects...or anything else for that matter! I named the palette you see up there "Morgan in CoMo". It's a lot of fun and very helpful. Go check it out you can find me there under the alias "yarnjunkie", what a surprise, no?

Last but not least is an FO. I made a simple hanging plant holder. It's nothing spectacular, but it is pracitcal. It's crocheted in the round with the bottom most part done in single crochet and the "holey" part is a 5 dc, ch 5 pattern. I made it in a basket shape, just one continuous strap to hang it from. And yes, those are tomatoes in the window. We had a late frost back in the Spring which killed most of our plants so we had to replant the garden pushing back the harvest time. We were still getting tomatoes up until a few weeks ago when it frosted for the first time killing all the plants. We picked all we could before the frost came and let them ripen in the window. It's great to sill be enjoying tomato sandwiches and fresh homemade salsa well into November!