Hopefully Not a Disappearing Act

 

With a new home comes much work! I think every surface of this new house needs paint... thankfully a lot of my 'spinster' projects were finished before we closed. Now onto the world of home improvement! I am excited, but holding back temptations to pull out the sewing machine just yet.... probably should paint the girl's rooms before sewing curtains!

Granny Square Baby Blanket

I have a love/hate relationship with this blanket.... I love the colors and how it looks, but it truly is a learning piece that I'm going to have to go back and try to fix. When I made it, I had never been taught to weave the ends in, just to knot where I finished or joined other yarns. Yikes! There are a lot of knots coming undone and I may have to replace those squares... I also learned the hard way about joining the squares together. I would finish a square and single crochet it to another to form strips, and then crocheted the strips together. I made a second granny square blanket for my niece and found that if you crocheted the rows together, then crocheting back across the whole blanket ( I should draw a diagram) it holds up better over the long run, and looks better. I didn't crochet through both loops when joining the squares, just the back one, so it almost makes the squares look like 'tile' with 'grout' lines!

I love the blue and white.

You can see I'm still not perfect at getting the blanket perfectly square. I did a simple single crochet border around the edge, I think three rows?

You can see in this picture how crocheting just the back loop instead of going through both gives each square a nice definition...

This is the back of the blanket, definitely not as pretty as the front, but it works. 

Cat Tested

Cat approved.

I just had it sitting on the desk there, waiting for a time when I could add a few rows, and black cat took advantage of the situation and made herself right at home, it appears.

So I’ve had this other side project going on basically ever since I taught myself how to crochet. I’m making a ton of hexagons, and I want to tessellate them into another throw or blanket or something. I’m not sure what yet, but I don’t have enough yarn. This yarn does need to all be the same weight, because each hexagon has to fit perfectly with the next one. I laid some of them out and took a picture. It’ll end up looking something like this:

But I think the red is kind of photobombing everything. I have two shades of green, two shades of blue, cream, and then the few red hexagons. I like the pizzazz (for lack of a better word) that they add, because about 95% of the stuff I own is blue, green and/or white. But I’m just not sure about that red... I definitely don’t have enough of the right yarn to take this project very far now – I’m mostly just working with scraps of Wal-Mart yarn. But mom will probably be sending a birthday box in a few months and I can make requests. Any suggestions for colors that would balance this out??

Also, I’m not really sure how to attach all these hexagons to each other nicely. Have you ever done anything like that? Thoughts??

New Year, New Beginnings

Happy New Year, Anna!

So I decided to start the blanket over, being more aware of the length of each row. It’s still not perfect, but so far each row has been 103 cm, give or take 1 cm. Not too bad. And since I unraveled the last one, I have lots of little balls of yarn already cut to the correct length! Since I sit and crochet a lot at school while I’m monitoring study halls and things, this means I don’t have to carry tons of yarn with me everywhere!

The only trouble I’m having with this one is that the first row I made pulls down on one side. Not entirely sure why, but I’m leaving it for now and hoping everything will balance out in the end?  And if not, I can always rip it out and try again! This one project could keep me busy for years!

BTW, I love having floors that come in perfect 30cm x 30cm squares. It really helps me keep things lined up properly!

What have you been up to so far this year??