New project begun

I decided to start Celestarium. This was the pattern that was bought for me in the recent CPAAG swap, and for which I bought yarn and beads on my birthday weekend trip.

I figured now was a good time to start. It has a very non-standard cast on, and I admit after about eight tries I gave up and used my usual one, and kind of fudged it. I think it will work okay.

I also had to hunt a lot for my jar of crochet hooks (It's a little fancy glass jar; it may have once held salad dressing or something like that, I bought it with the hooks in it.) These are super-tiny hooks which is what are needed to put the beads on.

(There are a couple ways to do knitting with beads. One is to pre-string them, which makes me go "Oh heck no" because not only do you have to sit and string the right number of beads on, you then have to move all of them down the thread - a pain if the inside diameter of the bead is close to the diameter of the yarn. The other way is to put them on as needed using a tiny crochet hook, which seems a lot more reasonable).

Finally, I found an old steel size 9 crochet hook, which is something like 1.4 mm, and it works with the size 6/0 beads I have.

So I got a start:



The journey of 10,000 stitches (or whatever) starts with the first few rows....

I've decided as I get to the longer rows (as I increase), I will just put a pencil mark on the chart where I have to set it down so I don't get off count. This is not a symmetrical pattern so I can't easily "read" it like you can the old Shetland laces.

It's designed to be constellations. (I thought it was Southern Hemisphere, but it is actually the Northern Hemisphere. (So if I ever get lost in the wilderness with it, maybe I'll be able to find my way home?)

Anyway - it's a pattern I really like, I think it's a very clever and beautiful design.

And I don't think I'm alone in that.

Also, today was a Pony Mail Day. (As opposed, I guess, to Pone E-mail Day). My latest purchase, Sugarberry, arrived:



This is a pony I've wanted for a while - she's yet another of those "Twice as Fancy" ponies (I already have a couple of others). She's more common than some (Nightglider and Munchy seem to be more highly sought-after) but she's still a favorite with a lot of collectors and she IS quite pretty because of her color scheme.

She's also called the "Strawberry Shortcake Pony" because of her pattern and colors:





(Those are "Bridge Direct" reproductions of the original Strawberry and Blueberry Muffin in party dresses. I'm hoping they re-issue more of the old style dolls; I always wanted an Orange Blossom but never got one - again, Strawberry Shortcake was one of those toys I was just on the cusp of being "too old for" as a kid, but that I really kind of liked, secretly. I think with a lot of those things it was the innocence and childlike quality that appealed to me - at 12 and 13 I was really very suspicious of teenagerhood, and as it turns out, I wasn't that good at being a teenager....)

And because this is a thing I do, now, apparently, here's a Pony Selfie, taken with my computer's webcam:

Yes, she has yet another tiny "cutie mark" on her forehead, like where real horses have a "blaze" sometimes. Her colors are more hot pink than what the photo might show.