What to make for my Minecraft mad son who already has everything he could possibly think of? Ok, well not everything, but he has a lot - Minecraft T-shirts, minecraft jumpers, three versions of the Minecraft game, posters, figures, keyrings, toys....the GIANT Creeper blanket I made for him two years ago?
Well, he didn't have a Minecraft plushie. So after trawling Ravelry (like hardcore drugs for idle hands) I came across this plushie creeper pattern, by Minke van der Zee. And if you go to that Ravelry page you'll find that she has more Minecraft patterns, perfect for that Mining Mad small person in your life.
I used King Cole Moods Duet yarn, in the Meadows colourway, and a 4mm hook. I was hoping that the varigation in the yarn would reproduce the speckled pattern of the Creeper texture from the game. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way as the colour changes in the yarn seemed to line up in places, making the creeper look a bit....stripey! Such things don't seem to matter to my son though! He loves this Creeper almost as much as he loves his blanket.
The creeper is made by crocheting multiple rectangles and sewing them together, rather than crocheting in the round. This is supposed to give it a more rectangular appearance. As you can see by my photos though, I seem to have completely failed at this! My creeper hasn't kept the original shape after stuffing. I'm not sure whether it needs more stuffing, or less, but it doesn't look quite as straight edged as the one in the pattern.
It is still loved though, and this makes me happy. :)
I feel like I should have unlocked some sort of achievement or something, as I finally finished my blanket yesterday. It took me 60 days altogether, from Jan 29th to March 30th, and it is huge. My son absolutely loves it, and if I didn't put my foot down he would be trailing it all over the house!!
All in all, one very happy Mum.
Ok, so I started this blanket on January 29th. I really wanted it finished by March 29th (tomorrow). When I first told Damien I would have it finished by today, the plan was for a total of 100 squares, 165cm in each direction. Easy peasy - just do 2 squares a day and it'll be done in 50 days!! Since then, however, Damien has told me he wants his name on it. Given how much of the blanket I had already done by that point, all I could do was add his name to the existing blanket, making it much bigger - 180 squares, and around about 250cm by 200cm. Yowzers - that is HUGE!! So, I stepped up the pace, some days doing 10 squares in a day. Now I have carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands, serious muscle aches in my fore arms, and near constant eye strain. >.<
Well, the blanket won't be finished today. It is technically finished, in that all the squares are completed and sewn together, the stray threads are weaved and snipped, and - if I do say so myself - IT. LOOKS. AWESOME. However, now that it's finished, the raw edges have got a strange sort of scalloped look, and I don't like it. So, the plan has evolved yet again, and I am about to add an edging. Never one to do anything by halves, the edging is going to be 7 rounds. Yay for crazy amounts of extra effort!
This is the blanket as it stands now:
No photo today, but I am SOOOO close to finishing the blanket it is unreal... I am getting so antsy! Heheh.
So, I have completed 175/180 squares, and will likely have the last 5 finished tonight. 'Course, I then have to stitch them together, tidy up the loose ends and straighten the edges of the squares before I even *think* about an edging or border, which I have already decided I am going to do.
Still, it's not bad - I started on the 29th January, and am looking to be finished by the 29th March... Two months for a blanket that has so far used up twenty-five 100g balls of yarn, and is big enough to spread across a full sized double bed. I am feeling very proud of myself at the moment... =^.^=
I am officially two-thirds done with the blanket, which is brilliant. Progress has been slow lately as I made the letter squares for his name, and it took 9 mini-squares to make one full-sized square, but I'm finally done. I will post photos of that soon.
In the meantime, this it what the blanket looked like on the 13th March:
I am aiming to have it completely finished by the 29th, so that it only took me two months, and I can start out April with a new - more colourful - project....
I finally reached the end of the Creeper face! I still have another 80 squares before I'm done, (the finished design will look a bit like a demotivational poster!), but this is an exciting milestone.
Now I need to stitch them together vertically and tidy up the loose ends before I move onto the black background and his name. ^^
Definitely feeling very pleased. :)
So...I took almost 2 weeks off after a marathon crochet session killed my hands and left me a bit burned out. Back to it now though, and this is what the blanket looked like this morning:
So, I've been working on the blanket for 4 weeks now, but haven't done any crochet in the last week. Computer games stole my brain... >.<
Anyways, as of last Tuesday, I had done 60 squares, and this is how it looked:
The bottom row isn't sewn on in that picture, but I wanted to take advantage of the natural light while it lasted.
Now the hardest thing will be escaping the pull of WoW, and crocheting again!
So, today marks two weeks since I started on my son's Creeper blanket, and I thought I was doing pretty well. After all, I'd managed to go from this on the first day:
To this:
And finally to this:
It was originally supposed to be a 10 by 10 square creeper face to cover his bed, and so I intentionally made the squares about 7 inches across, so that it would cover his whole bed. The whole thing was going to be around about 165cm in each direction.
However....
My son has since decided that he wants the design changed, to accommodate his name as well... I have two choices. I can either scrap what I've done, (which is about 70 by 21 inches of blanket!), or work around what I've done and just add the name on once I've finished. I opted for the second option, and ran up a quick design on squared paper:
Unfortunately, the finished size of this design is about 231 x 297cm. My son only has a single bed, so this would drown it... Making the squares for his name a bit smaller I managed to shave off around half a meter in each direction, but the problem remains... His bed is 90 x 190cm... If I make the changes he wants, then he won't see them when it is spread on his bed.
He would know it was there I suppose... Maybe that is the point?
