Fall Forest Wrap

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I love the colors of fall, especially the variation you see in the leaves as they start to change, from bright greens to golden yellow, oranges, reds, purples, and browns. It is my favorite time of the year. So with fall just around the corner and the hope of cooler days coming and the anticipation of changing leaves I have been wanting to make something cozy and fall-ish. 

Textured Newborn Baby Hat

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While I was at Hobby Lobby a few weeks ago I decided to pick up a tiny little ball of yarn, Yarn Bee Lil' Dollop. It was one of those times I bought yarn without a specific project in mind, it was just something I had never seen before and thought might be interesting to try. It was like a mini striped yarn cake and I thought it would be fun for a small project.

Alternating V-Stitch Infinity Scarf

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One of my favorite things to make with striped cake type yarns, like Lion Brand Mandala or Caron Cakes, etc., is infinity scarfs. The long color changes give the scarves a color blocked look. I feel like the abrupt color changes are not as noticeable as they are in something larger and flatter like a blanket. For this scarf I used Lion Brand Mandala Sparkle in Aquarius.

Pop Blocks Baby Blanket

For a while now I have been wanting to try making a blanket with two colors of the striped cake yarns (Caron Cakes, Bernat Pop, Lion Brand Mandala, etc) alternating colors each row or round. I thought it would be kind of fun to see how the color changes happened between the two colors. I finally got around to actually trying it and this blanket is the result. 

5 Little Monsters Top Ten Posts from 2017

It is always fun to look back at the end of the year to see which posts were the most popular. I like to look back at  all of the things that I have made throughout the year and to see if my favorite projects were your favorites as well. For this post I am only counting projects that were published to my blog in 2017. If you saw my post from a couple of days ago, The Best of the Best crafts of 2017, where I got together with more than 30 craft bloggers to share our best posts of the year, than you already know my top post but I am going to count down anyway. So here goes, my top posts of the year are:

Self Striping Yarn Cakes: A Comparison of Caron Cakes, Premier Sweet Rolls, Lion Brand Mandala, and Bernat Pop

Several months ago Caron Cakes came out and they were the new big thing in yarn crafts. Every crochet group I am in on facebook was going crazy over them. They were only available at Michaels and they couldn't seem to keep them in stock. I'll be honest, I thought it was a little crazy how excited everyone was about them and wasn't really interested in joining in on the hype. I wasn't crazy about a lot of the color combinations and I didn't really like the idea of such abrupt color changes. I didn't really have much of a desire to try them out and thought they would just be a fad that would last for a little while before disappearing. Boy was I wrong. Pretty soon Premier came out with Sweet Rolls and Caron came out with a new batch of colors. It looked like the cakes were here to stay and after a while I decided that if I wanted to be taken seriously as a crochet blogger I better make something using Caron Cakes, or one of the other similar yarns. I picked up a couple of Caron Cakes and started a project, I was pleasantly surprised that I actually liked the yarn quite a bit and didn't mind the abrupt changes nearly as much as I thought I would. Not long after that I was trying to come up with a project to do for Fairfield World and decided to pick up a couple of Sweet Rolls. At that point I thought since I was trying both I would do some sort of comparison post about what I liked and/or didn't like about each yarn. Just days later I started seeing stuff on Facebook about Lion Brand Mandala and Bernat Pop coming out at Walmart. As far as I have been able to find it seems like the Walmarts around me are currently only carrying the Lion Brand Mandala, I have not seen Bernat Pop but I picked up some Mandala to compare to the other. I have information about each of the different yarns and have tried all but Bernat Pop. I made a little chart to compare all of them and will share my opinions on each. I purchased all of the yarns I tried myself so this is not sponsored by any of the companies, all of the opinions I share here are my completely unbiased thoughts on each type of yarn.