>Only when absolutely inescapably necessary, like for State Occasions or crochet conferences, will you ever see me totally dressed up. I mean in a dress, with the obligatory high-heels, jewelry, accessories and make-up. Heck, most days it is rare to find me in anything but pjs. Shoes? What are shoes? Reading a few of the comments made here by my alleged friends, I feel I must defend my right to choose not to wear dresses. I can explain.

You assume I’m about to blame my mom, right? Isn’t she The Mother Who Longed for a Girly-girl and got me, the kid who ripped the bows out of her hair? Nah. I survived my childhood. The true dress-up trauma came later, much later.

For a few years during the late 80’s/early 90’s I sang in a semi-professional oldies band. No, silly, that doesn’t mean WE were oldies (although I suppose we were all more mature than your typical garage band), but that we performed oldies music. We specialized in the sounds of 50’s doo-wop and 60’s girl groups, rendering nearly note for note recreations of some of the greatest hit recordings of the era. It was bizarre fun; it was horrible torture.

Not only did we four ladies, the Dialtones, have to sing (and dance) like the Ronettes, Chiffons, Supremes, Shangri-las, Vandellas, Marvelettes, Crystals, Angels and Shirelles (to name a few) but we had to wear costumes in a style typical of girl groups of the 60’s. To our costume designer that meant over-the-top matching outfits, with different looks for every set which meant three or four costume changes a performance.

Here’s a little gallery of what I endured for my “art”, including a pink satin baby-doll number with beaded and sequined appliques, a tiny black sequined dress that I had to be sewn into, a leather skirt and chain belt (our “bad girl” look). Mercifully not shown was a tight leopard-print outfit with layers of fringe. Every gig meant five or six hours in extreme stage make-up, stuffed in an array of silly dresses, teetering on different pairs of stiletto-heeled pumps while shimmying as though I were being held captive in a go-go cage.

So, yes, I know what it’s like to be a Barbie doll. Been there, suffered wrecked ankles, won’t go again.

>When you’ve tinkered with enough yarns and fibers you get to know which ones are going to give you grief. I personally crochet all my own design samples so I need to work quickly and efficiently in order to meet my deadlines… er… come close to my deadlines… hmmm. Let’s not talk about deadlines, huh? Anything that holds up the production line is my enemy; yarns that split and snag are the worst culprits.

With experience I’ve learned to come to terms with yarns that tend to split. If you use a large enough hook in a loose enough gauge you can keep splitting to a minimum. Still, if the project is important enough and has to be perfect (which describes pretty much everything I crochet!), you should check your stitches occasionally and be prepared to frog back and fix the split.

Snagging is a whole nother matter. Snagging has nothing to do with how you crochet. It is an insidious cosmic conspiracy devised to keep us humble. It is a reminder that even though we among all beasts are blessed with opposable thumbs, we are but lowly, inept mortals.

My issues with snagging began way before I had a career in crochet. My mother, in a useless attempt to civilize her daughter, persuaded me to replace my beat-up Chucks with stockings and pumps. I saw nothing wrong with pairing sneakers with skirts (I still see nothing wrong with that) but mom was horrified, so I caved in. You chickadees might not remember the Dark Ages before that miracle of modern science — no-run-panty hose. Lucky you. For a couple of years in junior high I had to wrestle with old-fashioned nylons and garters and it wasn’t pretty. I was never able to put on a pair of stockings without encountering a host of snags, which resulted in runners which resulted in abject misery. I was happy but I believe my mother was even happier the day the assistant principal announced that girls would be allowed to wear pants to school.

A useful hint I’ve heard from other fiberazzi is to keep an old pair of panty hose to run over the hands in order to test for any trouble spots that might cause yarn snags. Since I have not owned panty hose since 1999, I came up with a different solution. Every time I encountered a yarn with a real snagging problem I kept some aside as a snaggle ball. Each new yarn that snagged even worse than the current snaggle ball would replace it.

Today, even with my superbly smooth and soft hands due to obsessive hand care and slathering of rich creams and precious home-crafted oils, I occasionally get snags when I crochet. There are yarns, evil yarns that seek out the least little nano-particles of skin on which to get hung up. Hey, there are yarns that snag on air, know what I’m saying? I still pull out and manhandle my long suffering snaggle ball before I touch any suspicious yarns.

For years the most cunning offender was Lion Brand Microspun. Many have tried to topple this grandaddy of all snaggers; none have succeeded until recently. The usurper wasn’t a cheap, indifferently manufactured yarn. It wasn’t an unfortunate choice made by an editor that I was obliged to live with. Nope.

At the time it earned the title, this yarn was my single most expensive purchase for personal use. I totally fell for the luscious colorway, the sheen, the elegant drape, the luxury of the 100% hand-painted silk. And to this day I have not been able to bring myself to crochet anything out of it because it snags like a S-O-B. May I present my galactic champion snaggle ball of all time: ArtYarns Silk Ribbon.

>Just a quick plug for the next Getting Loopy blogtalk radio show, live on Monday night, 9 pm eastern. Mary Beth Temple, brave girl, is hosting the gang from SFTD (Straight From Today’s Designers) who will be talking about our first collaborative effort, the book Crochet Belts From the Hip. The guest list reads like a who’s who of the crochet universe and we will all be spilling our guts if MBT has anything to say about it.

If you can’t join us live, not to worry. Immediatly after the show and forever more, that episode will be available in archive so you can hear it at your leisure. But there’s nothing like the immediacy of live talk. Hey, you can sign in and join us in the Getting Loopy chat room during the show. Or the truly intrepid may want to phone in and talk, too. But I’m warning you, with all of us bouncing around you’ll hardly get a word in. Good thing this special show is going for a whole hour. I mean, with me and MBT on the line that leaves… what… 15 minutes for everybody else. 😀

>Somewhere between home-made and hand-crafted there lies the realm of “home-crafted”. To me “home-made” hints that the product is in some way amateurish, unsophisticated, homey. “Hand-crafted” means made by the work of hands, but to me implies at least a modicum of skill and artistry, even a touch of professionalism. So I use “home-crafted” to describe some of the things I make at home with my own two hands, that often elicit one of two responses; it’s either “Where did you buy that?” or “Gee, kid, you should sell these!”.

For example, my Death By Chocolate cookies are not just any old home-made cookies (ask anyone who has eaten some). Neither are they artisanal hand-crafted sweets. They are home-crafted with pride and obsession from a recipe hybridized from Marcel Desauliniers‘ Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge Cookies from his book “Death By Chocolate” and Christopher Kimball’s Double Chocolate Cookies from Issue number 40 of Cook’s Illustrated magazine (September/October 1999). In case you were wondering, each batch of 36 calls for two and a half pounds total of three kinds of chocolate.

Another example is my home-crafted beauty products, which involve no art or skill, just the right high-quality ingredients and a bit of experimentation. I discovered I can make face gack that rivals, even out performs many pricey brands for a fraction of the cost. How easy it is to mix equal portions of commercial witch hazel with some heavenly fragrant Moroccan rosewater for a facial toner. For an eye pick-me-up, soak cotton pads with it and place on closed eyes to refresh and reduce puffiness from those hazy, crazy conference after hours marathon pajama parties. I’ve also taken a run at lip balm with varying success.

But my favorite target area for home-crafted improvement is my hands. Juggling housework, a stinky lap dog, chocolate, computer keyboard and yarn requires frequent hand washing. I’ve learned to take care of my assets by keeping my nails well groomed and applying hand cream as often as I breathe. Here’s part of my hand cream stash, call it Defense Against the Dark Arts:

As you well know, certain fibers will catch and split on anything not perfectly smooth, like stitch markers, fine hooks and needles, zipper pulls, jewelry, rough cuticles, hangnails (OUCH!) and chewed fingernails. OK, I admit I used to be a nail-biter. When I would split or break a nail, making it ragged enough to impede crochet progress, I would immediately worry at it, usually with my teeth. Bad bad bad. Today there are emery boards and tubes of Perlier hand cream scattered all over my home at any of the places I might choose to hover or land. It’s scary.

But that little glass bottle in front is my secret weapon against yarn snags. It is home-crafted cuticle oil, a mixture of jojoba, sweet almond, grapeseed and hemp seed oils with a touch of mixed tocopherols (vitamin E) and a few drops of rose essential oil. I like to keep it in roller bottles for mess-free easy application. Heck, I never knew it was necessary or desirable to fuss over your cuticles. But let me tell you, if you gently push back your cuticles when they are soft, like after showering, and then roll on some cuticle oil, then slather hand cream, you’re good to go.

I have become a cuticle oil pusher. Yup. I got several of my friends hooked on using their little roller bottles every night. You’ll know which friends right away; they’re the ones with the beautiful hands!