When I found out I was pregnant this time last year, to say I had mixed feelings would be an understatement. Obviously I was happy - It was what we had wanted for some time. But I was terrified. After our previous problems, culminating in losing our son in 2015, pregnancy was a terrifying concept - every day that went by should have been something I enjoyed, a celebration, but instead it was just one more day that something could go wrong. Even though we were offered a new scan every four weeks, I struggled to believe it was possible that everything would be okay.
It was for this reason that I was reluctant to crochet anything. I had previously started cross stitching the Vermillion Stitchery Fantasy bears onto a 16 count afghan for Quinn, and to this day it is sitting in a drawer, unfinished. I found many beautiful patterns online for everything from blankets to booties, rattles to cardigans, and more. But I was frozen in fear. While people around me were excitedly baby shopping, I was to scared to believe. Melodramatic? Maybe. But no less true.
After we passed the six month mark, I decided to risk crocheting something. But what? It had to be a blanket. Every baby born into my family has had a blanket. Both of my sons, my nieces, even my mum and sisters. I knew our baby had to have a blanket. A rainbow blanket for our rainbow baby.
I had originally wanted to use the My Little Pony yarn from Dye Candy for this blanket, but my son had previously claimed those and was not letting go. With only 12 weeks to go before bay arrived, buying more yarn wasn't exactly an option - babies are expensive!! So I raided my stash and discovered an unused Easter yarn box - nine mini-skeins of sock weight rainbow yarn. The rainbow gradient wasn't complete, however. I had a lovely deep pink-red, all the way through to bright yellow-green, but nothing beyond that. I couldn't have an unfinished rainbow, so I took to my trusty online yarn supplier - Wool Warehouse. There, I was lucky to find some mini skeins of sock weight cotton for only £0.59 each! Buying several of each colour needed to complete the gradient - as well as several skeins of Drops Safran cotton in off-white - I knew I had my colourway. I just didn't have a pattern!
One pattern I had always been fond of was the "Call the Midwife" blanket. However, at the time I was considering making the blanket, the CtM was a very popular pattern choice - and it still is, actually - and I wanted to be different!! By chance a pattern was posted to one of the many Facebook groups I follow, and I fell in love with it. Firstly, for its pattern - similar to the CtM, but different at the same time. Secondly, for its name - "Rainbow Spirit". A bit cheesy, maybe, but I felt the name embodied the very feeling I was trying to convey. I was sold!
Combining each colour with a strand of off white, I was able to work up the blanket as if it was DK weight yarn. Following the pattern, however, I soon encountered a problem - I had too many colours!! Ok, not your average crochet problem, I'll admit, but the blanket was going to work up too long and narrow for a baby blanket. I had come too far to frog it, and I certainly didn't want to leave any colours out... I would just have to widen the blanket in some way. Though when it came to the end, I didn't have enough yarn left over to do much of anything. A simple SC rainbow gradient down the right and left sides was all my leftover yarn could muster! Still, with all those colours, I managed to add several inches onto the width. It was about twice the size that I had originally intended, but that just meant it would last her longer!!
To finish, I decided not to use the edging that came with the pattern, but instead used an eyelet lace pattern that I found here on Ali Pyper's blog. Blogger is a great place for crochet patterns, it seems!!
Since her safe arrival I have been inspired to crochet so much for her, but this blanket was the first ever item crafted for her by me, and I'm hoping that she continues to use it for many years to come!
Always on the lookout for new patterns, I jumped at the chance to crochet something new when a friend asked me to make a couple of ninjas for her. She wanted specific ninjas in bright pink and purple - she had seen pictures of them online and fallen in love with them - and I was fortunate enough to find the pattern on Amazon for relatively cheap.
The pattern is relatively simple, although I still don't quite understand the unusual pattern of increases when crocheting in the round. I find that - more often than not - a pattern requires increases every n*6 stitches. This pattern didn't follow that formula. It still works up lovely though, and was a welcome distraction from the multitude of blankets I have been making! The pattern worked up so quickly that I feel fairly confident that I could make several of these in a day, were I not baby-wrangling at the same time. It was darned cute, too! I used scrap DK acrylic yarn and a 4mm crochet hook.
In fact, they are so cute that said baby saw them, and she fell in love with them too!! Have you tried telling a four month old that they can't have something? Ok, she is a bit too young to understand reasoning. I might have gotten away with putting the ninjas high on a shelf while she wasn't looking...but....well....she's just too damned cute as well! I can't say no to her! So against my better judgement I let my baby play with the purple ninja. She played, she drooled, she chewed and she threw the ninja around... Luckily the ninja held up through it all, but I couldn't send my friend a drooly ninja... So I made another one!!
To thank her for letting my daughter claim the first ninja, I also made her a baby elephant, Meimei. Meimei is a free pattern, available from Look At What I Made. As a side-note, this blog happens to be the same pattern blog from which I got the pattern for Sophie, and the same designer who has written the patterns for the Amish puzzle balls I am currently making. I love these patterns so much and will often browse the page looking for new ideas.
There are several elephant patterns by this designer, and they all use the same head pattern. I own the pattern for the elephant puzzle ball, and had previously crocheted the elephant lovey for a friends baby, so I felt confident crocheting this mini elephant plushie.
Meimei herself is easy to make, and as all of the pieces are crocheted into the body as you go, there's actually no sewing involved! Amigurumi often involves a lot of sewing, and the Little Lady Ninjas are no exception - arms and legs must be sewn onto the body, which must be sewn onto the head. It's not a difficult task, but it gets very boring very quickly. It's nice to find a pattern which doesn't need any sewing. One downside to Meimei is that I found it very difficult to place the eyes levelly due to the asymmetric way the head/face is formed. Maybe it's just me - again I used scrap yarn and a 4mm crochet hook, so maybe I just crocheted too tightly for the safety eyes to fit in the right place.
Difficulties aside, she was still an enjoyable make, and I hope she's very happy in her new home!
Another blanket post! I get the feeling that I make more blankets than anything else! Still, at least people are warm, am I right?
This wonderfully colourful blanket was recently made for my friend's nan. She (my friend) came to me in March to tell me that her nan had recently been admitted to hospital and diagnosed with dementia. She asked if I might liaise with the local crochet and knitting group, "The Crafty One's" (sic) and maybe come up with some sort of fiddle blanket that she might give to her nan.
Now, this woman dragged her ass out of bed in the middle of the night to pick me up and take me to hospital after our taxi abandoned us on my doorstep when the driver realised I was in labour. Contractions were two minutes apart - my daughter was on her way and would have been born on the doorstep were it not for this lady. There was no way I was going to say no!!
Stash wasn't a problem - I have yarn coming out of my metaphorical ears. I had more than enough buttons, beads and patterns, and I even had some left over pink granny squares from when I was making blankets for the preemie ward at the hospital. However, with a relatively new baby to care for, there was no chance I was going to be able to do much in and short space of time. So even if my friend hadn't suggested I ask the Crafty One's for help, I was going to have to ask for it anyway.
I put a plea out for donations of squares - any colour, any size, any stitch, and of course the wonderful ladies of the craft group were more than happy to help! I had an influx of wonderful squares from people, and added to the 12 that I had somehow managed to do, we had the makings of a great blanket after only a week, including some knitted squares.
What I hadn't considered previously was how I was going to join said squares. I had squares of all shapes, sizes, gauges and stitch counts, and I am a person who likes things to be precise, neat and orderly. When I realised that it would be impossible to make all of these squares the same size and stitch count, I had a little bit of a minor melt down! It was a real challenge to accept the "chaos" of the mismatched squares, the lack of coordination in the colours. I opted for a join as you go method, as my usual method of simply crocheting the squares together was not going to work here, and I again turned to Wilkos Stripes yarn in rainbow colours. Its a relatively cheap mixed fibre yarn, a little scratchy at first but very warm and washes well. The self striping rainbow colours enhanced the patchwork random feel of the squares, and in the end it actually worked up quite well.
To truly make it a "fiddle" blanket though, it needed an assortment of appliques, buttons, and other varied textures. I had mentioned that the blanket was hopefully going to have a garden theme, and one of the ladies at the craft group had kindly donated a bag of flowers, which I sewed into the name squares to look like entwined vines. I added flowers of my own, as well as a fox, rainbow, and squares which spelled out the lady's name. I used the chunkiest buttons I could find in my collection, (and they're really not going anywhere now - very securely attached!!)
Overall, the whole blanket took four weeks and cost only £8 in rainbow yarn. Despite this relatively low cost and me feeling very outside of my comfort zone the entire time, I did feel good when it was finished and I got sent a photo of the lady snuggled under her nice new blanket. A lovely community project which only serves to prove that - if you look for it - you can still find the sense of community in people. :)
About two years ago I took delivery of some My Little Pony sock weight yarn from Dye Candy. Originally, I blogged about how I would like to make a knitted mitre blanket, buuuut...that didn't happen.
This yarn was always going to be for my son - He might be 13 years old (now) but he's always been a My Little Pony fan. He has so much of the merchandise, and even did a presentation in school 18 months ago about how he liked MLP, and that was OK because people can like whatever they want. I did try to get him to let his little sister have the yarn for a blanket, considering they were very feminine colours and he did already have a blanket, but no. He was adamant. And so in July last year, I started work on what would become the most frustrating granny square blanket ever...
It started off well. I wanted to make a solid granny square blanket with a rustic feel. The size of the blanket was always going to be an issue because it was a comparatively small ratio of sock yarn to a much larger teenage boy. As such I worked out that I could get 13 2-inch squares to one mini-skein of yarn, and that if I added some white and cream I could make blocks and make the yarn go further. I had 5 months til Christmas and it would be a great gift! It was a great idea, in theory...
I was pregnant at the time. Hot, heavy, tired, and struggling with all of the negatives that pregnancy could bring. There were days when I was so ill that I couldn't bear to lift my hook, days that were so hot that working on a blanket was out of the question, and towards the end, days when I would just sleep. All day... But still I thought I could do it. I pushed through, often running out of the Drops Safran cotton that I bought from Wool Warehouse and having to wait while more was delivered - I had miscounted so badly. I was only getting 18 squares per ball, as opposed to the 25-30 I had expected.
Then December arrived. "I'm so close" I thought...."Only...how many squares to go..?" It was then that I felt the impending failure... I still needed over 150 squares... The blanket on a whole would later comprise of a total 493 3-inch squares. My contractions started on the morning of the 4th. The never-ending blanket felt like it would never be completed. I tried crocheting while I was in labour but I couldn't focus on my counting... It was just too much of a distraction. My daughter arrived on the 5th. I tried crocheting while she was sleeping, but I was just too tired... Christmas came and went, and I felt so guilty, like I had let my son down.
But as my daughter got older, I learned to crochet while she was feeding, or sleeping in my arms. But I had a lot of long nights in those early weeks, and I needed something to keep me awake after the midwives had put the fear of God into me. It was still extremely slow going, and as I started top-stitching some definition onto the blocks I felt that it was going to last forever, it was getting just that tedious.
Obviously it didn't last forever, though how I found the will to continue through to the end, I'm still not sure... On Mothers' day in March, (funnily enough, four years on from the Mothers' day on which I finished the Minecraft blanket) I was ready to give my son the blanket which he had waited two years for. At least the end project is enjoyable, even if the act of creating it was somewhat of a chore.
