The sofa blanket is getting really big — still need a few more rows before Scott can cover his feet and shoulders, but it covers the sofa completely!
Category: Crocheting
Crochet Project: Anya Scarf
Anya taught me how to knit, and I am slowly knitting her a scarf … but it’s more of a fancy going out scarf than a “keeping warm” scarf. I found the same yarn that I am using for our sofa blanket in a variegated color (Tidepool), and I used that to make a really warm scarf. I started off knitting, but the Bernat Blanket yarn doesn’t knit well for me — I managed to get about three rows in after more than an hour of working on it! Took that out, grabbed a crochet hook, and used double crochet stitches. Two days later, voila! She’s got a warm, snuggly scarf. Just in time for … 60 degree weather. It’ll get cold eventually. And her scarf is standing by!
Sofa Blanket Update
It’s getting bigger!
Sofa Blanket
I’ve started making a new blanket using Bernat blanket yarn. The pattern alternates between half double stitches and triple stitches (although the first and last row are half double stitches).
Bigger Pumpkin Hat
Anya asked me to make her a bigger pumpkin hat. When she was less than a year old, I made her a hat with a green stem and leaf and ribbed orange hat body to go along with her Halloween costume. Which meant I had to figure out a way to increase the hat size but retain the pumpkin ribbing. The hat is made with double crochet stitches (x in the chart below) and the ribs are front-post double crochet stitches (| in the chart below). The last row is Anya head-sized, so I am repeating that row until the hat is large enough for her. Then I’ll probably finish the hat with a row or two where the pipebars become front-post half-double crochet stitches and the x’s become back-post half-double crochet stitches.
I’m just getting to the ribbed section on the hat — but it’s much more Anya-head-sized that the one I made her in 2013!
Furls CAL – Sun Hat
WooHoo! The sun hat crochet along finally reached the pattern stage! I used the same cream coloured yarn for the main hat, but have a slightly iridescent light green yarn for the accent. I’m thinking about making Anya’s hat in reverse – using the green for the main yarn with cream as an accent. Partially because I don’t like having the exact same thing and partially because inverting the colours uses the yarn more efficiently (otherwise I am going to have a heap of the accent colour left over!)
Round four completed:
I have trouble keeping track of the start and end of rounds — not a problem unique to this pattern, Anya’s star blanket was just as tricky for me. Easy enough to re-count the stitches on early rounds — and frogging a few stitches isn’t such a big deal. As the project progresses to the point where a round comprises 40 or 50 stitches, adding or missing a stitch is a pain to correct. I’ve tried using those little round stitch markers, and honestly I just don’t get it. If they had splits in the rings and could easily slip back off of the project … that would make sense to me.
I’ve come up with an easy method to keep track of rounds — a water soluble marker I use for marking dress patterns. Test it on your yarn to make sure it comes off completely (and mark in an inconspicuous spot just in case). Which stitch it makes sense to highlight will vary by pattern. Here, the chain stitch which starts each round does not count as the first stitch. I chose to mark this ‘skipped’ stitch. The round should end immediately before the marked stitch, and the first hdc from the round into which the last hdc is slip stitched is immediately after it. Chain one and mark again. See the little blue marks on the “inside” of the hat? Those are my ch stitches. Voila, two rounds without frogging anything 🙂
Furls Crochet Along
Furls makes some beautiful crochet hooks — I picked some up a few years ago in a holiday promo coding failure (free shipping != 50$ off the order) and have been on their newsletter ever since. They’ve got a lot of cool project ideas – a lot of amigurumi critters and crochet along projects. I keep most of them, but nothing has been so awesome that I just had to do it. Until today.
This month’s crochet along project is a sun hat! I am really looking forward to making my own hat. I ordered the materials already – hopefully they’ll get here within a week so I can actually crochet along with the project.
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.