Clam­a­to and spe­cial guest knit­ted Cel­ery Stalk are here to cel­e­brate gen­uine mud­pie’s 100th post! :D

Why clam­a­to, you ask? Mike and I actu­al­ly came up with the idea one evening walk­ing home from the gro­cery store, hav­ing bought a jug of clam­a­to juice. I was won­der­ing what to make after Piña Cola­da, and Mike thought Clam­a­to would be anoth­er excel­lent cock­tail to crochet!

So, I have been want­i­ng to cro­chet Clam­a­to for a while… and for the 100th post I thought adding cel­ery would form the num­ber “100”, with Cel­ery being 1 and Clam­a­to being the two 0’s. They tried, but num­bers aren’t their best suit, so they request­ed some Pho­to­shop help.

(I did­n’t make a vod­ka char­ac­ter, so they’re just a clam­a­to, not a caesar.)

I made them yes­ter­day while par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Make-a-Long host­ed by Leethal. I par­tic­i­pat­ed in the first Make-a-Long back in spring, about the time when I first start­ed gen­uine mud­pie, so I thought par­tic­i­pat­ing in it again would be the per­fect way to cel­e­brate post no.100!

So! The morn­ing of the Make-a-Long was pret­ty much spent try­ing to fig­ure out how to make Clam. Clam is not as sim­ple as he looks. Or maybe I just don’t know how to do this in an eas­i­er way. I found a love­ly lilac and a grey that seemed per­fect for a clam shell, and I want­ed to make ridges on his shell with slip stitch­es, all going in one direc­tion. That means all the rows had to be worked on the right side. It took a few tries to fig­ure this out, but it all worked at the end :D So, at around 11am-ish, I had the top and the bot­tom of Clam finished.

This is the back­side of the top shell. I had to car­ry the yarn across the piece a lot so it’s all thick with strands of yarn over­lap­ping (good thing Clam is only about an inch wide). It actu­al­ly kind of looks like the flesh inside a clam :P

I then quick­ly fin­ished Toma­to. After lunch Mike had a meet­ing so I decid­ed to go with him and knit in a near­by park, because I don’t go out much these days and change of scenery is refreshing.

I decid­ed to knit instead of cro­chet Cel­ery Stalk because I real­ized that the edges of knit­ted pieces (stock­inette stitch) tend to roll inward, and that’s just what  a cel­ery stalk looks like! :D

Vis­it­ed by one of many pigeons.

Then we went gro­cery shop­ping and bought clam­a­to juice :D along with oth­er gro­cery items. Mike kind of made-a-long by cook­ing meat­balls a la Jamie Oliv­er.

And then I attached the mag­nets on Clam­a­to and Cel­ery, and here they are on the fridge!

Young Toma­to and his sig­na­ture lop­sided smile.

Clam may seem like a cute and qui­et creature…

… until you squeeze his cheeks and he lets out a scary laugh!

And our spe­cial guest, Cel­ery in stock­inette! He’s here to remind me that knit­ting is not as scary as I thought. Well, at least sim­ple knit­ting anyway…

And then in the evening I worked on some fies­ta granny hexa­gons for anoth­er project. I love the colour combination!

All in all I had a won­der­ful crafty day. I’m thank­ful for the Make-a-Long, and a big thank you for vis­it­ing me on gen­uine mud­pie! Hope­ful­ly there will be hun­dreds more posts to come!

Have a great week everyone!