Merry Dot Garland!

So, I set up my Christmas tree last week for my post about Christmas Crochet. And since my sister bought a giant new house recently, she's determined to host Thanksgiving this year.  Somehow those two things have combined in my brain and I've completely skipped Thanksgiving.  I am all Christmas, ALL the time.  The upside is, most of my shopping is done.  The other upside, I'm not cleaning frantically to get ready for Thanksgiving company, which leaves me more time to crochet!

A couple of weeks ago the very kind people at Belkin sent me the coolest thing.  It's their Portable Tablet Stage.  It's designed to hold your tablet, and give you a clean white surface, so you can do presentations, or TUTORIALS (!) without trying to balance it with one hand and work with the other.  So when I started working on my Merry Dot Garland, I wanted to see what my new tablet stage could do!  Oh my goodness, it's so awesome!!!  I was able to stage my pictures, and adjust them by looking at my screen, and once they were composed the way I wanted, I just snapped the picture.  It couldn't have been easier,  So often, with my camera, I have to take 6 or 8 shots, just to make sure that it's angled the right way, or centered the way I want it,  I LOVED being able to fuss with my pieces until they were perfect, and then take exactly the shot I wanted.  

Not only did I get the exact picture that I wanted, I didn't have to clean off my desk to do it!  LOL!! 

I still haven't brought the ornament boxes up from the basement yet (there are spiders, and vampires, down there!) so my tree is still pretty bare.  I really wanted to crochet a fun garland for the tree, but the only ones that I liked this year were not crocheted, they were made of felt dots in fun colors.  I decided I could totally re-create that look, but in crochet!  It was so easy, it took me about 2 episodes of So You Think You Can Dance (Season 11 on Hulu Plus. I stream it through my Roku!) to make the thing from start to finish (and that included stopping to watch the dancing, and then only crocheting through the critiques!)

If you'd like to crochet a fun new garland this year, here's what I did:

MERRY DOT GARLAND

approximately 10 feet long

Supplies:

Worsted Weight Yarn -  It doesn't take much yarn to do this project, less than 50 yards for each of 3 colors. I used cheapy-cheapy acrylic in holly berry red, grinch green, and snowy white, because I wanted it to be cartoonishly bright (those aren't the real color names, btw.  I think the actual color names are Red, Spring Green, and White).  **I think that if it was made with more sophisticated colors, it could be exceptionally beautiful.  I'm considering making a shades-of-blue garland to hang in Mimsey's surfer girl bedroom year-round.**

Size H crochet hook

Yarn needle

Large Circles:

(make 10 in white)

R1: Make 10 dc in a magic loop, pull loop tight, sl st to first st to close round (10 st)

R2: ch 2, 2 dc in each st around, sl st to first st to close round (20 st)

Fasten off.  Weave in ends.

Small Circles:

(make 18 in red, make 9 in green)

R1: Make 10 dc in a magic loop, pull loop tight, sl st to first st to close round (10 st)

Fasten off.  Weave in ends.

To Make the Garland:

Using white yarn, sl st across large white circle, (ch 6, sl st across small red circle, ch 6, sl st across small green circle, ch 6, sl st across small red circle, ch 6, sl st across large white circle) 9 times.

Fasten off.  Weave in ends.

I made a short video tute to go with the instructions, which is a first for Crochet Dynamite.  I know, it's about time, right?!  The Belkin Tablet Stage made it so easy.  I got to just crochet away, and pick stuff up off my floor (you'll see) and I didn't have to worry about the dreaded shaky camera, since it held my tablet securely in one place.  I will say that I think my tablet camera had trouble with it's auto-focus, but that's something I can improve on in the future.

Mims liked wearing the garland as a scarf, she doubled it up and flipped it around her neck.  I like it on the (super bare!) tree,  It's fun and festive and a little silly, which I think should be my tree theme this year. 

One last thing about the Belkin Portable Tablet Stage - the software that goes with the tablet stage lets you write on your pictures!  How flippin' cool is that?!  Very cool.  I think I need a stylus, because my finger writing is clearly not up to par.  LOL!!  It makes me want to give a presentation!

xoxo


*Full disclosure, while I received the Belkin Tablet Stage for free to try out, all of the opinions about it are mine alone.  It really is incredibly cool, and I loved working with it!  If you'd like to check it out, or get on of your own, you can go HERE: http://www.belkin.com/us/B2B118/p/P-B2B118/