About Me

I'm not very comfortable with "about me"s, but I thought it would be weird to start a blog and have no information about who was talking.

My name is Iliana and I have always been interested in crafting.

The earliest yarn experience I can recall is learning to crochet a chain from my grandmother during a trip to Mexico when I was a kid. Sadly, I would never get past this point while she was still around. I never really got to bond with her over yarn crafts but I did retain the ability to crochet a chain, so I am proud to be able to claim that my grandmother (technically) taught me to crochet.

I never could draw and was never really proud of my work in school art classes. However, in high school I took ceramics as an elective for two (non-consecutive) years and loved it! My greatest accomplishment was a little jar shaped like the TARDIS, which I still have. I also started using polymer clay and began experimenting with making beads and jewelry. I made a pair of TARDIS-shaped earrings which I also still have.

In my first year of college I fell in love with a picture I saw on Tumblr of hands gripping a Starbucks cup of coffee. The most hipster thing ever I know, but I loved the hand-knitted multi-colored fingerless gloves that the woman was wearing. (Her multi-colored nail polish also contributed to an obsession, but I digress!) I searched everywhere for similar gloves but had no such luck. I resorted to cutting the tips off a cheap pair, but I hated how the tips would roll and how I couldn't find a color scheme as gorgeous as what I had seen. I ended up at a Michael's sometime that winter and on a whim bought two skeins of cotton yarn and a pair of size seven bamboo knitting needles.  I was determined to learn to make my own if I couldn't find some in-store. After some googling I learned to knit, purl, and, eventually, that I actually needed double-pointed needles to knit gloves. 

My first project was ambitious. I found this pattern online and loved that it was based on Rose Tyler's gloves from her goodbye episode. I learned a lot from this pattern: cabling in action, what a thumb gusset is, and that going off-pattern is not as scary as it seems. I knew that I didn't want gloves as long as the pattern, and that I also wanted individual fingers (i.e., fingerless gloves as opposed to fingerless mittens). I ended up with these:

 

I was so proud and showed them off to everyone I wore them around—I'm sure my roommates did not care.

In my second year of college I discovered that there was actually a crochet club on campus. They happily accepted knitters, and they finished the work that my grandmother started. I learned to crochet. My first project was three different attempts at making Iron Man themed gloves:

 

I became a lot better at both knitting and crochet, I promise. Most of it is chronicled at my Ravelry page — I'm sorry for the oft-terrible and inconsistent pictures.

I guess I'm starting this blog now because it's time for a new phase in my crafting life. In college, my club meetings were the highlights of my week. Now that I've graduated, this blog is to accompany this new phase in life. I've grown and changed a lot in the 3-4 years I've been at this. I'm a more creative crafter, and I'm no longer so obsessed with Doctor Who. I know that knitting and crocheting is one of my passions and I'm excited about the possibilities that can come from a few sticks and some string.

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