Spring and Luxury

After a fairly mild winter here in Utah, spring is just starting to make itself known. It’s wonderful to see the trees blooming and flowers starting to peek out from the ground.

This issue has two patterns, both designed by me. The first one uses the Spiderweb stitch and can be made into an afghan, scarf, or wrap. Just add or remove stitches from the width or length to get what you need. The second pattern is a bright flowery purse that is perfect for welcoming spring and looking forward to summer. Included are instructions on sewing a double lining for the purse.

There is also a short tutorial on making a six pointed star and joining them together. There are similar stars available but this is one I accidentally made once while trying to come up with something else. The sizes of the stars will vary depending on the yarn weight you use.

Also included are several book/booklet reviews as well as some of the finest and softest yarns I have ever had the pleasure of actually touching. While they are expensive, the end result and luxury you get from them is well worth the extra cost.

With the change in Pinterest’s TOS, I’ve created a new board there for Crochet Uncut. You can find a link to the board in the left-hand menu. Feel free to like the board and re-pin projects you like along with any comments you have on them.

On a side note, a couple of weeks ago, I was offered a large sum of money to sell Crochet Uncut to a company that purchases free content and then somehow improves it makes it more available to the potential audience. I didn’t hesitate before turning them down, even though I’ve never made a dime from the site, pay all expenses (except for a few donations I’ve received) out of my own pocket, and the sale price would have paid off all my bills and allowed me to move back to Texas. First of all, this site is an extremely personal project for me and if someone else owned it, the vision I had for the site would no longer be something I could control. Secondly, I promised when I started the site that the patterns and other content would always be available for as long as I was able to keep them where they are. If I sold the site, I can’t sell the content that doesn’t belong to me and wouldn’t sell my own designs this way – so I could no longer keep this promise.

Even though the pattern contributions from other designers are not as frequent as they used to be, I hope that each of you find the site useful and continue to support it by spreading the word about it and, hopefully, creating projects from the patterns.

Finally, I’ve received quite a few E-mails asking how to become a member since there is no way to create an account. Over the last few years, the hosting company has shut the site down due to spammers who were creating accounts and, since the E-mails were fake or never actually used, the activation E-mails kept bouncing or being returned as undeliverable. There were literally thousands of these accounts being created which ended up taking up most of the server time and, as a result, the host shut the site down until I could deal with it. The only way to do this was to not allow accounts to be created at all. I still get some that circumvent the form pages but nothing like before.

Being a member is not required to access the patterns and articles, however, if you want to keep up with news on the site, there are several links in the site menu to the Facebook fan page, Google+ page, Twitter, and Pinterest. There is also a Ravelry group you can join. Hope to see you all there!

Thanks again for your continued support!

Darlisa Riggs
Editor, Crochet Uncut