Baby Blanket

A long-time friend of mine had a baby girl this summer and it was the perfect reason to finish up this baby blanket I had on the go. 

If you're interested in crochet, I recommend you get this book or one like it. "63 Easy-to-Crochet Pattern Stitches" published by Leisure Arts. The book does give you the instructions on how to make the afghan pictured on the cover, but I like that it gives you the "general rule" (e.g. multiple of 3 +1) for each square so that you could make a larger piece if you wanted. 

The yarn I purchased was six different colours (including the white) of Bernat baby yarn and I made seven squares in each of five different colours, choosing 35 different patterns. For this blanket, I chose just to do the "back-and-forth" patterns and I didn't make any squares where you work from the centre out in rounds. It's easier to adjust sizes on the back-and-forth kind of squares. You can see in the picture that I've just got to add the white edging to the yellow squares and they'll be ready to sew together.  

Then I had to decide if I wanted to put them together in a regular pattern or more random. Usually I'm one to be very linear and structured, so I decided to "push the envelope" and go random. Except it wasn't really as I did have one square of each colour in a row and tried to make sure it wasn't too match-y to a row near it.

Sew the squares into rows and sew the rows together. It's kind of hard to see in this picture, but the last step is to crochet two more rounds around the entire edge of the blanket to finish it all off. The pattern actually has a fancier edge but I just chose the plain single crochet stitch. I figured that with all the colours and all the different patterns (and the yarn has a bit of shine to it too), that it could just get to be too much.

What I really like about a project like this is that you can do one or two squares in an evening, so you actually feel like you're accomplishing something. I have made a blanket that you did the entire width at once, and it feels like you do a lot of work with not much progress!

~Lisa

Quick and easy scarf

My Grandma O would have been 95 today, but she passed away about six weeks ago. So I thought I'd tell you about the scarf I made from her yarn that was gifted to me when she had to be moved out of her room at the lodge shortly before her passing. 

I got to this scarf pattern through Pinterest, so thanks for my friend for pinning it and to Jenkeng for posting the free instructions on her blog. I make no claims to this idea!
http://classycrochet.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/free-pattern-diamond-lattice-chain-crochet-infinity-scarf/

I had a few different yarns from Grandma to choose from and went with this variegated one because I thought it would be a bit fun. It definitely makes a scarf that is a more casual look and I've been wearing it with jeans and a vest. If you go with a yarn that is a solid colour and has a bit of sparkle I think you could "class it up" a notch.

My first step was to untangle the yarn I had. Most of it was still in a skein, but there was a bunch wrapped around the skein and had something sticky on it. Grandma loved peanut butter cups, so it may actually have been chocolate that she was hiding from my mom and aunts. (Grandma's classic line was "I'll be good tomorrow.") When I unwrapped and got rid of the sticky bits, I had several lengths of yarn, some of which were about 6 inches long all tied together. I have no idea why she bothered saving all those little pieces and I kind of felt bad throwing them out, but I didn't want to deal with all those knots in the yarn.

When I was finally ready to start, I followed the pattern as given. After starting, I thought the five-chain loops looked too big and I didn't like that it was a slip stitch to join in the loops, so I pulled that all apart. It wasn't a big deal because I wasn't too far in.

For my second attempt, I went with four-chain loops and started with a chain of 36 stitches. I also changed to a single crochet to join into the loops. I was several rows in to that scarf before I discovered that this particular size made all the variegation line up, so it was a strip down the middle of the yellow/green and all the pink/burgundy was along the edges. Ripped it apart again. The beauty of crochet that it comes undone very easily.

For the third (and final) attempt, it was a starting chain of 32 stitches and four-chain loops. Once I figured this would actually work, it was a just a matter of watching TV and crocheting! Four chain stitches and a single crochet don't take a lot of brain power. :)

I just kept going and figured I'd use up all the yarn I had. When I got to the end, I discovered it was too long for two wraps around my neck, but too short for three wraps. Argh! So I pulled several rows out again to end up with a good length for a double loop around the neck. 

I decided to do the infinity scarf (with the twist in it), though I actually have no idea why that's better than without the twist. The one thing I did get right the first time around was to make sure I ended up with the opposite pattern at each end of the scarf so that when I joined them together it would look like the pattern just continued and there was no obvious place that they joined.

The original pattern has it that you continued with the chain loops to join the two ends, but I went with more single crochet stitches so it doesn't have the final row sticking out of the pattern. 

All together it took me three evenings to make this scarf. The first night was all the trial runs I was doing, but did finally settle on my final version. I made most of it the second evening and probably would have finished it at this point if I knew it was going to end up too long anyway. I spent maybe 45 minutes on the third night to finish using up the yarn, ripping a good portion of that out since it was too long, and joining the ends together. If you're already experienced with crocheting and don't end up starting over as many times as I did, you can probably do it all in one long evening. 

Here's me wearing the scarf! 

(I have a hard time getting the camera lined up correctly for a selfie. Usually I manage to catch my forehead and the ceiling or my left ear and a bunch of wall, so it took me several tries to get the one above. It was even funnier to try and line it up for the picture to be mostly scarf.)

~Lisa