In between working on my crochet cats I took a few minutes to hide the ends on my large plarn tote from my February 7th blog entry.  It took so little time I don’t know why I put it off.  I decided that the handles are a good length especially if it gets used as a beach tote or something like that.  I’ve taken it out for a trial run buying a couple groceries and it works well.  It slings perfectly over the shoulder.  Now that I’m done with it I like the single crochet just fine for a tote and I’ll consider both single and double crochet in the future.  I took some photos of the tote itself to show on here and then I had a fun idea: put a cat in the bag!  I looked at Kes and decided she’d be slightly uncooperative and that it might be a little unnerving for her since she’s a threelegger.  I decided Onyx would be a good candidate but I wanted to have her go in on her own volition.  I took the tote and rolled down the sides so it would be inviting then threw in a toy mouse for good measure.  The trap was set now to wait.  Ten seconds went by and Kes was in investigating but decided that it wasn’t so interesting.  That was a bit of a surprise to me because she loves plastic bags and will claim anything plastic as her throne.  A minute later and Onyx came by.  She hopped right in just as I had suspected she would.  She even did me the favor of facing outward away from the wall so I could take her picture.  She had a grand old time batting the toy mouse in the tote.  I let her relax in there for a bit and then it was picture time: Cat in the bag!  I had my husband take photos to show the process of turning the tote bed into a tote bag with a kitty in it.  It was a pretty cool set of sequence photos except that I had left the camera in manual mode and all of them were completely blurry!  I really wanted to show them here but it’ll have to be a project for another day.

I have one more plarn tote that still has to be completed but first I’m crocheting a small plarn basket.  A week ago I decided I wanted a washline for the backyard so we can harness the power of the sun and save some $ on electricity.  We got a pretty cool system of a retractable line that I can just take inside with me when I’m done.  Now using a washline requires washpins and these require some kind of storage.  I’ve been wanting to crochet with a plarn that isn’t made of white bags so I prepared some brown Home Depot style bags for this project.  I found a cute pattern from the Chickpea Sewing Studio.  Of course I realize the basket they show is so much cuter than mine will be in that funny brown color.  I’m not going to make mine as tall as theirs.  I’ll probably test along the way to see if all the pins fit in the bag.  I might also make it wider so it’s easier to reach into.  I’ve started on the bottom rounds and think I’ve already missed a few stitches here and there, nothing drastic though.  That’s what I get for doing it while watching TV.   I’ll post a picture of it part way through at a later time.  The Home Depot bags are crocheting very nice.  The strips are about 3/4 inch wide which seems to be my preference.  Now I’m getting all fired up to work on it again but sadly breakfast and a shower come first before today’s errands.  Crocheting will have to wait until this afternoon.