Moo cozy

They arrived! I’m very excited!!! My blog minicards; they’re business cards, for my blog, and they’re mini! You might we wondering why on earth I’d bother getting business cards for a blog? Particularly a small blog like this. I know that a lot of people I’ve mentioned them too have asked that. But to me it makes perfect sense… you see, I started this blog because I love fibre and fibre craft, and I wanted to share my passion with people. When I’m out and about, maybe on a bus or in a cafe, I’ll be spinning or crocheting, and people will often come up to me to ask what I’m doing.

So here I am talking to a person who has come up to me, a stranger on the street, to ask me about what I’m doing. Obviously this is just the kind of person I created this blog for, and of course I tell them about forever in fibre. But what are chances that by the end of the day, when they’re at home, doing whatever it is they do, they’ll be able to remember the name of that blog that random women told them about? It’s slim to none I’d imagine.

Enter the minicards, they’re a cute, simple, affordable way in which I can give people I meet in real life information about where to find me online. I thought that full sized cards would be over kill, when all I really wanted to do was direct people to this site. And the minicards are something different which will hopefully stand out, while not seeming as much of burden to keep hold of.

I got my minicards from Moo. There are lots of online sites for ordering business cards, but I remembered hearing about moo and minicards at some point in the past. And the site provided an easy way to start designing my cards then and there. They also informed me that I could get 100 cards for around $22… so that was that :)

The cool thing about Moo is that you can put as many different images as you want on the back of their cards… in theory I could have had a different image on each of my 100 cards. I went with three, two (the serious ones) of my noro scarf and one of my Delle in the Kody fur hat, because she’s just so cute!

The other side of the cards have to be the same, I added a small image of my pink sari silk rolags and then used Moo’s text entry option to add my details, keeping it simple: blog name, tag line, url and email. In the future I think I’ll design this side of the card myself in an image editing program, so that I have more choices in typeface and layout. But for a first run, I’m really very happy with how they turned out.

The cards are made with really nice thick card stock, thicker then I would have hoped for, given the price. I went with the matte finish, so that they’d be easier to write on if I needed too. Glossy would probably show off my images better, but I do like the feel of the matte.

The first thing I needed to do when my minicards arrived was make them a cozy! Because if I’m going to be carrying them around, I need something to keep them in and protect them.

Cozies are great projects for improvisation. So I grabbed some yarn (fingering-weight (4-ply) hand-dyed Bluefaced Leiceister in Cat’s Eye Green from Ancient Arts), a hook (3 mm), a pile of minicards (I went with 27 because it seemed like a good number) and started crocheting.

I started with a chain of five (yes, I know that I just finished extolling the virtues of foundation crochet, but sometimes things are just too itty bitty for that). The good thing about improvising cozies is that you can check the fit to your object at each step.

Then I start single crocheting around the chain, making sure to increase at the beginning and end chain by crocheting into them three times.

I continue around the chain, making three single crochets in each corner so that my rectangle grows flat. Until I get to the point where I’ve covered the base of the object. Now I stop increasing, and make a few more rows crocheting once into every stitch below. This gives me a solid base for my cozy. When I decide that my base is done, it’s time to get more elaborate. I went with a cable design, starting with a row of half-double crochet, then going into alternating front-post half-double crochet and half-double crochet, and seeing where my imagination took me from there.

Because I wanted to keep the design simple, I finished the cozy with a few rows of alternating front-post half-double crochet and half-double crochet extending past the hight of the cards. This pulls the top of the cozy in, holding the cards in place and protecting them, while being stretchy enough that I can easily pull it down to take out a card.

Here’s the pattern for my cozy:

Each round is joined with a slip stitch

Rounds that start with a front-post stitch do not need a chain, simply commence the round following the slip stitch join.

fphdc: found-post half-double crochet

fpdc-3-tog: yarn over, insert hook under first stitch, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two loops on hook; yarn over, insert hook under second stitch, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two loops on hook; yarn over, insert hook under third stitch, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two loops on hook; pull through all four loops left on the hook

fpdc-2-tog: yarn over, insert hook under first stitch, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two loops on hook; yarn over, insert hook under second stitch, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two loops on hook; yarn over, pull through all three loops left on the hook

fphdc-inc: create two fphdc stitches around a single stitch

Round 0: Chain 5

Round 1: ch 1 (does not count as a stitch), 4 sc, sc3 in last stitch chain, 3 sc along the other side of the chain, sc2 in the first stitch of the chain. From continue to work in the round.

Round 2: ch 1 (does not count as a stitch), 4 sc, sc3, 1 sc, sc3, 3 sc, sc3, 1 sc, sc2

Round 3-5: ch 1 (does not count as a stitch) 20 sc

Round 6: *fphdc, hdc* x 10

Row 7: *fphdc+hdc in same stitch, sk, fphdc-inc, sk* x 5

Round 8: *fphdc, sk, fphdc+hdc in same stitch, fphdc, sk* x 5

Round 9: *fpdc-3-tog+hdc in same stitch (starting in last stitch of previous round), hdc* x 5

Round 10: *fphdc (around fpdc-3-tog)+hdc in same stitch, 2 hdc* x 5

Round 11: *fphdc-inc, 2 hdc, sk* x 5

Round 12: *fphdc+hdc in same stitch, fphdc, hdc, sk* x 5

Round 13: *fphdc+hdc in same stitch, hdc, fphdc, sk* x 5

Round 14: *fpdc-2-tog+hdc in same stitch, 2 hdc* x 5

Round 15: *fphdc, hdc* x 10

Round 16: ch 2 (counts as first hdc), sk, fphdc-inc, hdc, *hdc, sk, fphdc-inc, hdc* x 4

Round 17: ch 2 (counts as first hdc), fphdc+hdc in same stitch, fphdc, sk, *hdc, fphdc+hdc in same stitch, fphdc, sk* x 4

Round 18: *sk, fphdc+hdc in same stitch, hdc, fphdc* x 5

Round 19: *fpdc-2-tog+hdc (starting in last stitch of previous round), 2 hdc* x 5 Row 21-21: *fphdc, hdc* x 10

fin :)

I’m sure if I’d stopped to plan out my design, or took some time in trial and error, I could have come up with a more sophisticated and cohesive pattern. But there’s something to be said for just throwing yourself into it and committing to each row as you go… working with what you have rather then ripping back and making changes. Particularly in a very small project like this, which only took an hour or so. And I’m quite pleased with my cozy, I cant wait to pull it out and give someone a card!