My niece is doggy crazy. Real, plushie, animated or doodled, it really doesn't matter - she loves them all. So when it came to her second birthday, it was only natural to crochet her a dog of some kind. There are lots of patterns out there on the internet, but I really wanted to crochet something from this book that my mum had bought me for my birthday one year. The book is "Cute Crocheted Animals" by Emma Varnum, and can be found here.
The book itself is filled with easy to read patterns for a handful of animals - cats, rabbits, etc - and a lovely selection of outfits to crochet an entire wardrobe for your creations. The animals work up at around 10 to 12 inches, depending on the hook used, so in theory could also be used with many of the Build-a-Bear costumes.
At the time my niece had to most adorable little beagle puppy called Molly, and so I decided to make her a matching Molly dog. The book, as wonderful as it is, doesn't have a pattern for a dog, however!! This greatly surprised me, as a dog is probably one of the more popular crochet animals, surely? Up there with rabbits and cats, I'm sure. While the book didn't have a dog it *did* have a fox pattern, and so I decided to use that as a base. The colours and markings were almost perfect, however to be a beagle the ears definitely needed to go. I could probably have free-handed a pair of floppy ears, but I decided to be lazy and instead to search for a free pattern, and I found a perfect one on the Hello Stitches blog (the pattern is for an entire beagle, though I only used the ears!).
Apart from the ears, I followed the pattern "by the book", and I thoroughly enjoyed crocheting this little lady. The pattern was easy to follow, and she worked up pretty quickly! I can't say I'm a fan of carrying yarn for changing colours, but that's personal preference - I find it an awful waste of yarn. That said, it's better than the whole thing unravelling, so what can you do?
When it came to the wardrobe, I couldn't only do one outfit. Every little girl I know likes to be able to dress and undress their dolls and toys, so I made two outfits with the intention of making more at later points (which I still haven't done - Ooops!!) All of the clothing patterns I used can be found in the book, along with many more accessories, such as shoes, ties, etc. So this little doggo has a casual outfit, complete with shopping bag, for when she's popping about running errands, and then a sparkly, frilly outfit for going to parties! Maybe I went a bit gender-stereotypical with that (bad Tig!) but there was so much to choose from!
As with the plushie, the clothes pattern worked up very quickly and were easy to follow, although I have to admit to getting a little bored by the time I was making the second outfit. But then, I was using up scrap yarns for that outfit that I wasn't particularly fond of. The crazy thing is, I later went on to make my daughter a matching Molly cardigan, and she's worn it quite a lot, so even though I found the small one boring and didn't like the yarn it can't have been that bad!!
Wow, I make a lot of blankets! Yes, I know I've said it before, and to be honest I'll probably say it again. For example, I still have the disastrous rainbow ripple blanket to finish, or my small spotty blanket. Also the Star Wars intarsia blanket I haven't touched since I last blogged about it two years ago, or the two C2C blankets for my nieces. I'd also quit like to make a blanket for my grandma one day very soon (tm). But this post isn't about any of those however. This post is about a blanket that I was posting about two years, and one that I actually finished. This post is about my Square-a-day blanket.
About three years ago I had the fantastic idea that I could easily create a blanket with very little effort. All I had to do was to create one square every day for a year. I even had a great starting point - Crochet to Go by Ellen Gormley, a book that I had previously picked up in the Range, though is easily available on Amazon.
Unfortunately, as with any "resolution" to do things on a daily basis (I haven't kept my promise to go to the gym regularly for about 4 years, for example) I often faltered in my goal and it took much longer than a year to complete the requisite number of squares. And as much as I had promised myself to do every square out of the Crochet to Go book, I regularly browsed the internet looking for....well....more interesting squares. Using as many scrap ends as possible, the patterns I used in the end are as follows:
Square patterns from Ellen Gormley's "Crochet to Go!" book, published by D&C:
- Puddles Gather Rain
- Eyelets
- Oscar Square
- Cherry Cordial
- Pick a Posie
- Team Captain
- Star Power
Patterns found online:
- Manghan linen stitch square by Dedri at Look At What I Made
- Sweetest Baby Blanket found on Moogly blog
Other patterns:
- Standard granny square
- Solid Granny square
- Circle in a square pattern (improvised!)
In the end I had to do slightly more than a years worth of squares, as 365 squares don't really make an even rectangle, so there were 374 squares in total Still fewer squares than my sock weight My Little Pony blanket though, which had 493! I finished crocheting the squares in August of 2016 (wow, that was forever ago!) and it took me a whole month to join them all together in a simple SC join!
For the border, I had some wonderful hand-dyed rainbow yarn from Arwen Makes. (She has an etsy store, though we conducted my custom order through her Facebook page). The yarn was wonderfully soft, and exactly to my specifications. I had two skeins dyed and caked up, and they edged the blanket wonderfully, and I still have one whole gradient left over (about half of a cake) which I intend to use to edge the Spotty blanket I'll probably never finish!!
I didn't want the border design to detract too much from the rainbow gradient, so I opted for a simple scalloped edge. I did consider adding little picots to the top of the scallops, but it really did look too busy so I scrapped it pretty early on.
The end result was a wonderfully large blanket which managed to cover most of my (UK) double bed. It's incredibly warm and - unlike my Truly Hooked blanket - it has held up well in the face of repeated washing over the last two years. There has been a small amount of fading in the hand dyed border, but very little colour bleeding into the surrounding yarns. It has also been peed on by the resident Hellbeasts, and so I'v put the lack of colour bleeding down to the fact that the cream edging yarn was not natural merino as in the TH blanket, but cream Wilko acrylic. Cheap and cheerful!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Ahem.... Good to finally get that out of my system...
The amigurumi Amish animal puzzle balls (or amamani for short) are exclusively designed by Dedri Uys of Look At What I Made. I have blogged about her patterns many times before - I can't help it. They're great! The animal puzzle ball patterns themselves are available from a variety of sources. The free ones such as the plain ball, or Olive the Octopus, can be found on her website, while the paid ones can be found in downloadable PDF form from Annies, or paperback form from Amazon. Apparently I'm crazy, as I bought the digital download but then decided that I wanted the paper copy of the patterns anyway. (Or maybe they're just that good!)
Currently, I have completed the turtle ball - who we are calling Atuin - for my daughter, and am partway through the dinosaur for a friends' nephew. These patterns are actually much simpler than I originally thought - so much so that I can already complete the basic puzzle ball pattern from memory, without the book to hand. They don't take long, either. Or at least they wouldn't, if I wasn't juggling my nursing daughter as well as my crochet!
The yarn for this project came from my new local yarn store - Westcliff Wools. I had originally planned on using left over yarn from my crochet Christmas jumper four years ago, but I couldn't find it. I assumed that I had used it in my Fugly blanket, and after I had been to the yarn store and bought new yarn I found the original yarn in my wardrobe. Ooops! Still, it spurred me to sort my yarn out into colour coded bags so that I would always know where everything was in the future!
The yarn used for the turtle was a chunky weight yarn - the pattern called for an Aran, but there weren't enough suitable colours at the store in that weight. I did um and ah for a while, weighing up the choice of a funky coloured or a larger turtle, and as much as my friends were pushing me for bright colours, I had my heart set on more realistic colours - well, I have to use my degree somewhere, right? To that end, I left the store with three 100g balls of King Cole Big Value chunky, one eack of Bayleaf, Caramel, and Koala for the turtle, as well as two balls of King Cole Fashion Aran for the dinosaur - one each in Stonewash and Hint of Denim.
The pattern is pretty easy to work up - sometimes in the round and sometimes with rows for shaping - and in total it took me about six days, on and off (though mostly off!) That said, I did get a little confused when trying to navigate the book - Rather than step by step, the turtle pattern starts off with "Make x number of wedges from this page", and "crochet this number of lids from this page", before continuing to give the instructions for the head, legs, tail, etc. In addition, the back leg follows on directly from the front flipper - something that took me quite a while to figure out. The flipper ends with "do not finish off", but you flip over the page and there's a new heading and you're back to "row 1". However, I eventually worked it out, and once I did I had no further issues, and overall I enjoyed the pattern enough that I do plan on making several more. I definitely would like to make the Octopus, and I think the basic ball pattern would make a great gift for future babies.
Except my baby, apparently. The turtle didn't impress her... Maybe my friends were right and I should have made it more colourful?
Ah well, maybe she'll grow into it?
It feels like forever since I last blogged about my Truly Hooked blanket club. It's been almost two years! Whilst creating the blanket, I was so impressed by the vivid colours of the yarn, and how unbelievably soft and squishable it was. I was so excited for each month to bring me new yarny post so that I could add to the blanket I was slowly creating.
I never did receive another pack that quite matched the yellow for brightness - I mean, that pack was practically glow in the dark bright - but the colours continued to be just as rich, and the yarn was just as soft. The gradient continued with a yellow-green, a turquoise, and finally ended with blue, the last of which I forgot to take photos of before I worked them up, which is a shame. I was in such a hurry to complete them I forgot that tiny little detail...
The pattern that I chose for this blanket was the Sunny spread, free from Red heart, with an added crab stitch around the original border. It is a lovely pattern, but had I known then what I know now, I would have chosen a different one. And I would have partnered the colours with a charcoal grey rather than cream. I didn't want to use a pattern that worked in rows, as I was worried that I would run out of yarn before I finished the row or section that I was working on. Now I feel that rows would have shown off the wonderful gradient a lot better. Also, rows wouldn't have been so affected by colour bleeding. *facepalm*
Unfortunately - and as mentioned before - I live with three cats. Although I'm not sure "cats" is an appropriate term for the monstrous creatures that I happen to live with. More like furry little hellbeasts from the ninth dimension. They're evil. Not long after I took the photograph that I am about to post, one of the little assholes decided to pee all over this nice new blanket that was spread over the bed.
And.
It
STUNK!!
Unfortunately for my soft, squishable, gorgeously vivid hand dyed merino rainbow blanket, the only way to get the stink out was to machine wash it. At a high temperature. The washing instructions for such yarns are usually to hand wash, at cool temperatures (and to dry flat, for what it's worth!) The beautiful vivid colours that I loved so much....well....they didn't survive. There was colour bleeding. Lots of colour bleeding. The stark contrast between the bright rainbows and the soft cream? It's gone. The blanket now looks as though a toddler was let loose with finger paints on a dirty grey canvas. Technically? It's still rainbow. And it's definitely still amazingly soft. But it has broken my heart. I was so in love with that blanket, and now it's ruined. And I haven't been able to used hand dyed yarn since. I love it, I keep buying it, and man, do I want to use it. But I'm ruined for hand dyed at the moment...
