It's been a few days since I had any crochet news - I am still recovering from an impromptu family 'holiday' to Chessington World of Adventures. It was a full on couple of days in which I did more walking than I've done in a very long time, drank more Cola than I thought humanly possible, and got absolutely no crochet done whatsoever! Now I am catching up on laundry, resting my aching muscles, and hoping our bank account recovers quickly! :D It was worth it though. Look how happy he is!
Since getting back, I had my first attempt at Intarsia. I have decided - I hate intarsia. I was watching the tutorial videos linked in the Star Wars blanket pattern by Ahooka, (last mentioned here) and I noticed that the edges of the motif always have little 'bites' out of them if you use single crochet intarsia. I hate it. I would like a smoother edge, similar to what you get with a C2C blanket. So I tried my first design for the blanket in the C2C style... I got about one third of the way up the edge of the motif before realising that this was impractical - The square would work up to be about 45 cm long on each edge!! That's fine if you're only doing a few designs, but my partner has expressly told me - "As many designs as possible". Using C2C and a 4mm hook, the blanket would be at least 3 metres along it's shortest edge. While it would be a lovely snuggly blanket, it's really too big! So then I tried double crochet intarsia. This made the square smaller than the C2C did, but it was still almost 30 cm along each edge. Still too big. And so I had to resign myself to single crochet intarsia. And I hate it.
I probably didn't start with the easiest pattern for my first try - the number of colour changes along a row gets to be quite high in some places. I think at one point I was working with six balls of grey and six balls of black, all at once! And I didn't do a very good job of keeping the balls separated, so the strings all got tangled up towards the end and I got quite frustrated. But the tutorial said to start with a pattern that only used two colours, just to get the hang of the colour changes at first. I don't think I've done too badly for my first time. It helped to have a symmetrical pattern, so that it didn't really matter which direction I read the pattern. I do need to get the hang of reading the pattern in the right direction for future squares though. My Jabba will come out a bit squiffy looking if I don't get the hang of it!
At least you can sort of tell what it's supposed to be....right?
As I find myself melting over my current WiP's, I can definitely say that Summer is well and truly here! Today is the hottest day of the year so far in the UK, with temperatures reaching 35C. Melty!!
Summer brings with it the end of the school year, which is especially important this year as my son will be making the transition from primary to secondary school. He is rather upset about leaving, as he will not only be leaving his friends behind (he is going to a different school than the majority of his friends) but he will also be leaving behind some wonderful teachers. One of the people he is leaving behind is the LSA who has been working with him for the most of the last seven years!
Proud parent moment: He received the Headteacher's award at his school yesterday!! Lookit how grown up he has gotten!!
As such, I have promised that I will make a unicorn for him to give to her. I am currently making another three of these unicorns in total - one for my son's LSA, one for a friend who has put in a request (I did say they were popular!!) and one for my baby nieces first birthday next month.
The pattern used is the same one I use for all over my unicorns, and can be found over on Ravelry. Be warned though - it is not a free pattern. It is wonderful though. The directions are simple, and it works up quickly and easily. I could probably put one together in a day, if I tried, with the mane being the most time consuming part - As I give my unicorns to children, I have to make especially sure that the mane is well secured!
I just use any yarn I have lying around in my stash - I never buy anything specially for it - and the customisation possibilities for this pattern are amazing. It would make a great zebra, give it a yellow and orange mane and you have a Ponyta, or freeform some wings and you could turn it into a great Twilight Sparkle allicorn lookalike! Out of all of the patterns in my library, it is definitely the one that has got the most use.
On that note, my son's unicorn needs to be ready by tomorrow morning.... So I better get a wriggle on!
Two days ago I took delivery of pack six of the TH blanket club. The yarn in this pack is again super soft and squishable - I swear, the softness is spoiling me! I have held off from posting about it's lovely softness, however, as I wanted to complete packs one to five.
I just noticed that you can see where I threw the pillows off the bed to take this photo!! Ooopsie! Haha!
It took me a few days to correct the stitch counts in each of the first 32 squares, and then to stitch them all back together. It was mind numbing, and I don't want to put myself in that situation again. Check your stitch counts, guys!! Once I finished the corrections, creating new squares became much more enjoyable. I have decided that the rather ambiguous colour from pack four, (which looked either pink or peach to me) is actually red after all! Once it was worked up it was quite obvious, and once it was placed next to the orange it was clear.
Pack five actually looked quite yellow to me, if I'm honest. There were a lot of very sunshiney or sunflowery colours in it, with some reds and some oranges, and it wasn't until I received the yarn for pack six that I was really sure it was orange. When pack six arrived, it was so yellow and almost neon that I half wanted to check whether it glowed in the dark!!
My aim now is to complete the sixth pack so that I am completely up to date before pack seven arrives, which I am pretty sure will be green! In the meantime, however, I have three unicorns to create, and at some point soon a Star Wars blanket to begin! I better get hooking then. :D
Oh, I do love a good yarn box, and this one was Absolutely Fabulous... Literally. Back in April when I had a bit of extra money from my Ragged Priest work, I saw that Lollipop Guild Yarns were doing an Absolutely Fabulous themed yarn box. Growing up in the 80's and 90's, I was of course hooked on the TV show as a teen, and so how could I turn it down? The Facebook post promised two skeins of yarn - a collaboration between Lollipop Guild and DeFarge yarns - a crochet hook, and some extra surprise goodies. Yes please!!
And so, knowing that the packs were due to go out in the first week of July, I have been stalking Mr Postie like a madwoman, and this morning my diligence was thusly rewarded! I have yarn!!!
When I opened the parcel I found two 100g skeins of beautiful sock weight yarn - One each for Eddie and Patsy. I love these yarns. It's so hard to choose a favourite. I love the vibrancy of the colours in Patsy - The richness of the red and the deepness of the purple are wonderful. But then I also love the lightness of the Eddie. The pale blues and pinks running through the length of the yarn make me think of a light fantasy theme, like unicorns or fairies. That's probably not what it's meant to convey, but I love it nonetheless!! I am not sure what I will do with these yarns - I will have to browse Ravelry for something special.
In addition to the two skeins of yarn, there was also a 6 mm moulded crochet hook. I love these handled hooks so much - I do have some clover hooks, but I love to have the hand moulded ones too. Usually I like a Harty Hook from Fleabubs. The appeal of a moulded handle is that it fits nicely in my hand. The standard hooks are fine in the larger sizes, but as they get smaller they put pressure in various places on my hand, and so cause pain and soreness. Moulded hooks all the way! This moulded hook happens to have champagne bubbles on the handle. Some are raised up to give a nice texture, and some are painted on. It's a lovely tribute to Eddie and Patsy that just had to be done!
The tote bag with the word tree will make a great WiP bag, especially as I have Sainsbury's bags lying all over the house with my various WiPs in, and in fact my TH club blanket is already nestled inside. I do fear that the cats will make a bed of the bag though - They seem to know exactly where I don't want them sitting and they make a beeline for it!
Finally, there was a lovely wax block in the bag - strawberries and champagne scented, fittingly - which I have no idea how to burn! I have a little Stonehenge shaped oil burner, but I don't know if I can put wax in there. I am scared to try, which is a shame, as I am sure it smells lovely! Maybe I will have to ask hubby if we can get a wax burner, specially?
Do you know that feeling you get when you are in the middle of creating something amazing? You are enjoying every stitch, and can't help but look at it over and over. It feels nice, it looks great, you feel so proud of it... But the more you look at it, the more you think that something seems off... Maybe the squares aren't lining up quite right, or the tension of the stitches appears to change. So you look at it even more, trying to convince yourself that you're being paranoid. But then you see it.... That one mistake that is offsetting the entire project that you have spent so much time and energy on. And because you are a stubborn perfectionist, the realisation that hits you like a mach truck is that the only course of action from here is to sit and unpick all that you have done, taking your work back to the last point at which it was correct... It is a cold and lonely feeling.
I have been here twice. The first time was with my Rainbow Ripple blanket. My rainbow ripple was the second large project I ever started, and as yet it is still incomplete. The plan is to incorporate four repeats of a rainbow gradient of eleven colours, with each colour having four ripple rows. This means that each gradient has 44 ripples, and each ripple takes me about an hour to complete. So imagine my horror when I was just a few ripples from completing my third gradient, and I notice that for some reason, the edges of this gradient are not lining up with the edges of the previous two... It was much narrower here. What had happened was that the first two gradients had been completed with a 5 mm hook, and for some reason I picked up a 4.5 mm when I continued with the third gradient. Since then I have considered many ways to rectify the mistake, but the only way I will be truly happy is by ripping back the entire third gradient, and starting again with a 5 mm hook. As such, the rainbow ripple has gone into hibernation until such a time as I can face it again...
After this disaster, I swore that something like that would never happen to me again. I downloaded the hookers journal from the Crochet Crowd website, in which I made notes about each of my projects. What size hook I was using, the shade, dye lot and samples of the yarn I was using, links to the pattern, etc. So when I was looking at my TH Club blanket last night, I was incredibly annoyed to notice that the squares that I had previously joined together appeared to be wonky. It seems that due to the way I finished the last two rounds of cream, each and every square had three sides of 15 stitches, and one side of 16 stitches. Annoyed wasn't the word. At a time when I had previously been feeling very happy with myself because I had just finished the squares for pack four (and so was this much closer to being up to date) I was suddenly feeling absolutely rubbish. Not only did I have to un-join all 36 squares, but I then had to undo the last two rounds of each and every square, to correct the miscount on that one side that the join was on. Un-believable.
That realisation was last night, and since then I have corrected 12 of the affected 36 squares. Now I have to correct the blue and the purple blocks. Before I leave to do that though, I want to leave on a happy note. So look! Look at the 12 squares that I got right first time! Pretend that they (and I) are absolutely amazing, and they are not representative of the mere 25% of squares that I actually got correct....
Can I cry now.....?
It is so nice to be able to take a nice, relaxed approach to my crochet for a while. Over the past few days I've been able to get so much stuff organised at home, and still be able to pick up my crochet at my leisure, in my own pace. I'm enjoying it!
I am finally up to date on my Square-a-day blanket. From now on - as the name suggests - I need only do one square each day to keep on top of it. My square for July also comes from Ellen Gormley's book - "Crochet to Go!" This square is called 'Cherry Cordial', presumably because of the colour of the sample square.
This isn't my favourite square out of the book. I'm not entirely sure why. I enjoy the clusters around the edge, because they give the square a nice, soft squishy feel. But the actual look of the square is quite similar to the one I did previously (Oscar) and like Oscar, it has lots of large holes in it. I was originally planning on this blanket being a year-long project - 12 months at around 30 squares per month. After dropping it last year and picking it up again this year, I decided to add 12 months of squares to the original 4 months that I had already done. That's looking at around 480 squares, so the blanket is going to be pretty big to begin with. Now I am thinking that I might do repeat months of some of the solid squares - like the manghan square, or the solid granny square - to offset the sheer number of squares that have holes in them. I don't know if I will definitely do this, it's just a thought in the back of my mind.
Now that I am up to date with this project, my next plan is to get up to date on my TH club blanket. I have two packs of wonderfully squishable yarn waiting for me, and I believe the current dispatch date for the next pack is July 10th. That will make 3 packs left to do - literally one THIRD of the total blanket. At least it won't take me long!
I did not realise that I was so far behind on my Square-a-day blanket. Wow! Last time I was up to date was some time in May, and the last time I mentioned it in a blog post I had finished about 18/31 of the squares for May. But that particular post was earlier this month......in July..... And I obviously hadn't touched the blanket in a while at that point, because I had been focusing on my sister's Persian Tiles. Ooops!
At that point, I was busy working my way through a small pile of Manghan squares, the pattern for which I found on the same website as the Sophie's Garden crochet-a-long, Look At What I Made. I love these squares. They are so simple to make, and they work up really fast. The actual stitch is very squishable, and if you were making a blanket for really tiny babies, I would definitely recommend this pattern as a starting point because there are far fewer holes for little fingers to get caught in than say, a traditional granny square. I have to say that when I next make blankets for the maternity ward, I will definitely be using this pattern for the preemie babies. Thanks to the simplicity of this design, I was able to catch up on these squares very quickly, and swiftly moved onto my next month - June.
I took June's pattern from the book that first started this project: Crochet to Go! by Ellen Gormley.
Ellen was the designer of the Sunny Spread pattern (founds on the Red Heart website, here) that I am using for my Truly Hooked blanket club yarn. This is actually a complete coincidence. I chose the Sunny spread design for the same reason I chose this book from the craft store I was browsing in - the designs are small, quick to work up and easy to learn.
I eventually plan on working up all of the square designs from this book as I would like at least 16 different designs incorporated into the blanket, more if I can manage it! So for this month I am doing the Oscar square:
I am currently standing at 21/30 squares for June, and so I am very close to being up to date. Like all of the designs in the books, they work up very fast - the most time consuming part is changing colours! There is a lot of blue and green in this months batch of squares, as I am trying to use up balls of yarn to get them out of my drawers. I have so many odds and ends that I can't really use for any project of a reasonable size, so the only thing I can really do is use them for a patchwork project such as this one.
That said, I even have lengths of yarn that are too short to incorporate into one of Ellen's 11 by 11 stitch squares. But will I throw them away? Never!! I am a hoarder of the worst kind! That is where BoB comes in. BoB is my Ball of Bits. Whenever I have a length of yarn that I can't do anything with - and this may vary from anything from a couple of inches to a couple of feet in length - I simply tie it onto the end of BoB.
The idea is that I will eventually have this wonderful ball of many colours that I can crochet a blanket for Greebo with. Greebo absolutely loves synthetic fabrics, whether it is my dressing gown, the throw on the bed, or my current WiP. He just loves to settle down on it, and knead it with his claws. So I would like to make him a blanket of his very own, and what better yarn to use than my left over scraps? Of course, many of the scraps are incredibly short, and I won't add anything that I believe I can use for something else, so BoB is growing rather slowly.... Poor Greebo will have to wait a while for that blanket!
Ok, so my sister's wedding has been and gone - it was on Friday. She looked amazing, everybody cried when they saw her in her dress, the venue was perfect, all of her handmade decorations were exactly right....It was just wonderful. Perfection! In the aftermath of the wedding, my bedroom has found itself home to as much of my sister's bouquet as I could fit between my university textbooks. Well, I need to use them for something post-uni, right? Heheheh!
Believe it or not, I actually finished crocheting the second Persian Tiles blanket on the Wednesday before the wedding. I was so pleased with myself! Of course, finishing the crochet means I have to weave in all those pesky ends that I didn't weave in as I was going. At first I thought I could do it on Thursday but then life threw me a curve ball, as it so often does! As a result we didn't get to the hotel until after midnight, and I still needed to adjust Damien's page boy tie to fit a child! So that didn't work... Friday was the actual wedding, and I knew I didn't want to just leave the blankets in the gift pile and walk away - they were too personal a gift to gift in that way - so I wasn't in a hurry. I thought I could weave in the ends on the Saturday, and then gift the blankets on the Sunday when I went to see them before they went for their honeymoon... Yeah.... That didn't work either. After spending 90 minutes waiting on an ambulance, and over 4 hours in A&E for my partner (Don't worry - He's OK now!!!) and then still having to travel back home for three hours, I didn't have as much time on Saturday as I thought I had. So all in all I think I only managed to weave in about half of the ends, on one blanket. :-/ That was not the plan!
However, I wasn't going to let my sister go on her honeymoon before seeing her gift that I had spent months working on, and so I carried them round to her house last night. I confessed that I hadn't had as much time as I thought I would to get the blankets properly finished, but I wanted her to see them anyway. I've promised her that I will have the ends fully weaved in for her coming back from her honeymoon in the Far East. (That gives me three weeks!)
As it happens, they both absolutely loved them, and were surprised when I gave them a blanket each, which was really nice! I hadn't mentioned that I was making a 'his and hers' gift, and they seemed very touched to have one each. They love the design and the colours, and have asked me if (when I get time!) I can use the left over yarn to re-cover their footstool which is in a dire state right now. I would love to do that - In fact, I think the Mandala Madness pattern would work amazingly as a footstool cover. I don't really want to use the same Persian tiles pattern to cover the stool - For one, I am absolutely sick of those large octagon motifs, and for two, I thought about it last night, and I don't think the holes in the pattern would work well on the footstool. The Mandala Madness pattern (which I briefly discussed here) would be a nicely co-ordinating design, especially in the same colours, and has the added bonus of being a solid design, with few gaps.
The existing footstool cover
However, before I consider that, I have Edwin's Star Wars blanket to make a start on, my Square-a-day blanket to catch up on (I am currently at 18/31 linen stitch squares for May!), two packs of my TH yarn club to do, and now three unicorns to make - two are requests, and one will be a surprise gift. So even when I am not busy, I am really busy!!!
