I wanted a huge cutting mat for sewing projects. The ones I find at craft stores … well, large means like two feet. I want to be able to lay a yard of fabric across the thing. Then I found Rhino mats — anything from a 2’x4′ not-so-large mat to a 6’x12′ enormous self healing cutting mat. And they’ve got grid underlays!
Category: Crafts
Another Anya Blanket
I finished Anya’s car seat blanket – and well before it is cold enough to actually need it.
This uses yarn from her star blanket — I still have a few skeins left over from that project, but the pile is quite reduced.
Pumpkin Hat For A Pumpkin
Our little pumpkin has a Halloween costume:
Lorna got her the pumpkin outfit, and I crochet the hat from a pattern I purchased (see Raverly projects link if you are interested in the pattern). Scott and I were pumpkin farmers – basically people wearing jeans and carrying a pumpkin.
Star Blanket
(Continued from previous post) Here is the blanket I crochet for Anya before she was born — it took a very long time, and I had the hardest time finding the right yarn for ‘violet’. I think this is too dark, really, for the rest of the colors. But I was not going to use six divisions of the spectrum, and I certainly was not going to unravel enough to get rid of the orange!
Of the purple yarns that I have, this is the color Scott preferred for the blanket. It’ll do. When she’s a little older, I’ll make a simpler rectangle blanket for her to use in the car seat. For now, she is so small that we’re using a tiny little rectangular ripple blanket that I made.
Valley Yarn’s Stockbridge yarn felts beautifully – I washed and dried the finished blanket several times and have a warm, thick blanket that retained the star shape perfectly. The stitches are not as well defined as the examples on the pattern’s page, but it is exactly what I wanted.
Anya’s First Blanket
I wanted to make a blanket for Anya before she was born. I never managed to knit well (slowly and poorly, but not well). I didn’t have a sewing machine at the time, so a quilt was out. I do, however, crochet well (and fairly quickly). After a lot of searching, I decided on a star-shaped pattern with rainbow stripes. Then I tried to find a series of yarn that had each color of the rainbow … never did manage that! Everything except the orange are Valley Yarn’s Stockbridge yarn.
The pattern is easy to work – pretty much just double crochet stitches. There are “shells” that expand the points of the star, and skips to form the V in the star. The biggest challenge I had was keeping track of how many stitches between the shell and the V for each row. I ended up with an Excel spreadsheet with a line for each ring.
The first couple of rows (which ended up being the ‘red’ section for me) looks like a slightly malformed circle. I was concerned the finished blanket wouldn’t look anything like the examples on the Ravelry page; but as the orange section finished up, I could see the spikes of the star.
By the time the green ring was finished, the blanket looked awesome.
Finishing up the blue rings:
I used a purple-blue color for the ‘indigo’ rings.
At this point, we attended a baby/toddler CPR course. The instructor offhandedly mentioned that she hates to waste everyone’s time since we’ve all heard a hundred times now that babies aren’t supposed to have anything in their cribs. No pillows, no bumpers, no blankets, no toys … wait, no blankets?? So the blanket I’m making for Anya before she’s born cannot be used until she’s a year old?!? I did mention to the course instructor that, no she wasn’t wasting peoples time. I’d never heard such a thing.
Now that Anya is five months old … there are lots of places to use blankets other than baby beds. This blanket gets snuggled around her in the car-seat whenever we leave the house.
Finished blanket is in the next post.