Free Pattern Friday: Fail.

During my fantabulous Chibication in New Mexico, I convinced my darling Chibi to take me to a Hobby Lobby.  I really wanted there to be model trains and die-cast miniatures inside, but instead I found these:

 

a cool thing in New Mexico? Really?

Wait, what? TWO cool things in New Mexico? …weird…

My first thought (other than, OMG, why are those two pictures such different sizes?) was, I can totally make those!  Hooray! They look easy enough, right?  Wrong.  Blarg.  The official pattern for my attempt is this:

1: make a rectangle of double crochets 6×30 stitches.

2: sc in the…er… round around the rectangle 5 times and FO.

3: give up now.  this is the best it’s ever going to look.

SO, the important part of this project is the stiffening.  I was too lazy to make my own stiffening mixture, so I ended up with a bottle of generic store-bought stiffener, which instructed me to paint it on the item I wanted to stiffen.  Well, that part went okay, I guess.  I used a foam paint brush, and if you look closely you can see that the foam pulled up tiny strands of yarn along the way, giving the whole tray a rather matted, wet dog sort of look.  Awesome.

It kind of looks like a fail boat, no?

Next I was to shape my little black tray along a form (which I had even planned for, as my pattern makes a tray exactly the same size as the long end of a Cheerios box) and let it dry.  Okay.  Here’s what.  When the directions tell you to put a layer of waxed paper down over your cereal box to prevent sticking, DO NOT feel guilty about using a disposable product.  DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP.  Unless, that is, you want to spend some quality time picking tiny bits of cardboard off the bottom of your tray (You’d think I would have learned this particular lesson after the rag rug incident.  *sigh*).  I even tried the old color-it-in-with-Sharpie-when-no-one’s-looking trick.  Still a Fail.  For some reason, cereal box cardboard gets shiny when you Sharpie it.  You can’t see it in the picture, but there are actually several spots of tiny, shiny Cheerio box sticking to the bottom of my tray.

It doesn't look so bad once you fill it up with something, I guess...

But, since I was determined to salvage this little tray (read: my dignity), I couldn’t just throw it away!  I ended up stashing it in the back of a utensils drawer to collect bottle caps (which I’m saving for another project, of course).  So there you go.  I never said it was going to be a *good* free pattern, did I?  })i({

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…AND THE WINNER IS…

…uhm, no one, actually. Apparently none of you hang out in airport bars in Pittsburgh with your parents. Never fear, though. We are the Queen of This Blog, and We have decided to name a Winner anyway. The Winner, chosen by Ourself the Queen because she left the snarkiest comment, has been contacted via e-mail, and We are pleased to bestow upon her the Custom Order of Her Choice from Our Etsy Shoppe, valued at $50.  Congratulations, Brooke!  (Can you tell I spent the week catching up on the Tudors?)

And now, because you, Our most loyal readers, are yet unsatisfied, here are the rest of the guessing game pictures: 

My daD and I were waiting for my Mom’s flight to arrive at the Pittsburgh airport, and so we stopped in for a beer and a shot.  Yes, yes.  daD and I drink beers and shots together.  I LOVE IT!  I’m not sure if it was the beers (or the shots), but daD & I thought the counter top at this particular bar was the coolest thing we’d ever seen.  We especially liked (read: “mocked”) the fact that people wrote their initials on pennies & then shoved them up under the bar top (FYI: it was extremely difficult for me to take a picture of the bar top without either my legs or bar paraphernalia in the shot).

daD began to ridicule both the pennies and the countless people who had wasted their money (and defaced currency), and ended his diatribe with the following: “And what kind of person carries a Sharpie around, anyway?”

Well, friends, I was a Girl Scout.  I was told to “Be Prepared.”   I whipped out my click-top Sharpie marker & initialed daD’s pennies like a champ (What, you thought I was going to spend my own money?  Come on now.  I just batted my eyes a little and three pennies appeared in front of me.  Aren’t daDs great?).  It is important to note that by this time the entire bar was listening to our conversation, and everyone (including the bartender) was now openly mocking Yours Truly.  It didn’t help that I was the only woman there.  Mom’s flight had landed, but she was still waiting to disembark, so we sent her this picture to give her something to look forward to:

Welcome Home, Mom!  And just for good measure, here’s a shot of our bartender, who is my cousin Nick’s doppleganger, and who graciously agreed to let me photograph him:

And THAT, friends, is that.  Congrats again to Brooke, and thanks to everyone who commented or e-mailed!  })i({