MTM and other acronyms

I sometimes refer to my ever-loving, ever-supportive and wonderful other half as DH (standing for Darling Husband).

Yesterday, I had my nose stuck in this book, Freeform Crochet and beyond by Renate Kirkpatrick. I love it, it's gots lots of instructions and inspiring pics and ideas for creating freeform items. DH picked up on the title and incredulously proceeded to take the micky in the merciless manner which is his forte.

"Freeform Crochet and beyond ..." he says "... whatever is the 'beyond' bit, what comes next?! Extreme Crochet? White-water Crocheting? How Crochet Won the Cold War?" and so on, not what Ms Kirkpatrick intended, I suspect!

Of course, he made me laugh as he always does, one of the first things that attracted me to him was how funny he is. I shall be using a different acronym for DH in the future, it's MTM (standing for Micky Taking Monster).

I was looking at the book because I have a pile of tension squares and experimental motifs where I was playing around with ideas or trying new stitches out. For example, MTM gave me a set of tunisian crochet hooks with an instructional book for one of my Christmas present (which he gleaned from my Amazon Wish List). You can see bottom right of the photo my experiment with making a tunisian crochet circle. For the last several months, every time I've been making such little pieces of try out crochet, I've been making them in a restricted colour pallet so that eventually they can become a blanket or a throw that will go over one of the chairs in my lounge. I've got quite a few now so I'm thinking about how to start putting them together and this book is my inspiration.

So, I'll add that to my list of WIPs (Work In Progress) items:

• Freeform blanket/throw
• Spiral blanket in lounge colours. This time I've shaped the spiral circles into hexagonals and the border is causing me a right old headache; gotta frog it back and rethink it
• Square babette style blanket (again for the lounge, I have LOTS of chairs!)
• Lace weight stole (may become a shawl, depends on how far the yarn goes)
• Four-ply summer weight cowl
• Small cross-body bag to carry return Lovefilm DVDs to the postbox when walking Missy so I don't drop them every time I get a treat out of my pocket for her. She has to be rewarded for crossing the road, staying calm when she sees another dog and after any kind of emission from her rear end (so quite frequently)
• Short row cushion cover needs a zip and an inner pad making to measure
• Recycled plarn shopping bag

Plus I found a lovely new yarn store in Oakham, a town where we do our banking, it's been open a year down a street I don't use very often, I had to support such enterprise and bought two lots of new sock yarn (and a button for the bag WIP) from its delightful proprietor, Julie.

So I've got enough to keep me busy for months, I hope you are happy with your crafting or whatever you do to keep busy in your spare time.