Weaving in ends

Oops! I don't seem to have posted here for a whole year! Must try harder in 2017. Recently, smallest granddaughter requested a blanket for her favourite doll. I thought I'd make a smaller version of the one I made for her when she was a baby and I've just finished crocheting all the squares. I've joined them using the join-as-you-go method, but whichever method I used, there would still have been an awful lot of loose ends! This is the snag of doing multi-coloured crochet or making items from squares or other motifs. See what I mean? You often see people saying that you should weave them in as you go along, but here's why I don't. For Christmas 2015, I decided to crochet some Christmas stockings for the grandchildren. The idea was that they would have money for their main present but I would give them some sweets and small toys in a stocking so they would have something to open and enjoy on Christmas day. I embarked on the three stockings, but after getting this far, I realised that they were coming out far too big. See all those ends?! Now, if I'd woven them in as I went, I would have just have had to throw those part finished stockings away because when I weave in an end, it stays weaved! I know that from bitter experience. A few years ago I was trying to make something out of African flower motifs and I'd followed the advice to weave in ends as soon as I finished and joined each motif. Unfortunately, I eventually realised that I didn't like the way the project was working out and I decided to frog it and rescue the yarn to use for something else. It was a complete pain trying to find and unpick the ends and I wasted quite a lot of yarn. This time, however, the unravelling was easy and the yarn, along with other random bits from my stash, ended up as small tea cosies which I use every day.   To be honest, I don't find it too bad tidying up the ends all in one go. I usually find an interesting drama on the BBC iPlayer and once you get into it, end-weaving can be quite relaxing. Here are the three small Christmas stockings I made. It was quite easy to modify the original pattern to make them smaller.
I did finish one large one. Here it is for comparison. It would have taken an awful lot of chocolate and treats to fill it and my son and daughter would not have been pleased if I'd given their children so much sweet stuff!

African flower pot-holders

I'm not entirely sure how to spell "pot-holder". I've seen it as "pot holder", "pot-holder" and "potholder". Anyway, I've made some of those circular things you handle hot pots and pans with. :)

This project was partly to help with stash busting and partly because I genuinely need new potholders and crochet ones will be pretty and quick to make.

I started to follow a pattern for an African flower granny mandala potholder but I thought it might come out too holey. I didn’t want to risk burns, so instead I did solid treble crochet (UK) circles to surround the African flower rather than treble clusters. I had to do a bit of frogging before I got it to lie flat, but I got there after a couple of tries.

I finished off the second pot-holder yesterday. I only did African flowers on the front, so the backs are just concentric circles of pink, white and blue. For some reason, one potholder fitted together perfectly, the other needed a bit of fudging because though I was sure I’d done the increasing the same, it seemed to have far more stitches. Anyway, they’re fine for my own use and worked great when removing the pizzas from the oven yesterday. :) I joined the two circles with double crochet (UK) and then did a final round of Crab Stitch to give a nice firm edge.

I may make this pattern again, but there are some other pretty ones I want to try first.

A table runner becomes a net curtain

My 92-year-old Dad moved into residential care last autumn and my brother and I had the job of selling his bungalow. I started to make a filet crochet runner for the lovely dark wood dining room table, thinking it would help to brighten up the place while the bungalow is being viewed by potential buyers. Once the bungalow was sold, I intended to find a home for the runner in our house. However, the bungalow sold more quickly than I expected so I didn't have time to get very far with the project. In fact all I had was a number of Japanese flower style motifs joined into a strip.

The table runner languished for some months. I was busy with Christmas projects and also wanted to finish a blanket for me to use while the weather was still cold. It didn't help matters that we don't really have a suitable place to display it as a table runner, so motivation wasn't high. And then, realising the Easter bunnies and baskets (see next post) were almost complete and wondering what to make next, I had a rummage through the bags of yarn and unfinished projects and found the pretty flower motifs I had made. My first though was to finish it as a table runner, but then I had a better idea. A net curtain!

I removed a couple of motifs and managed to improvise a way of joining the filet crochet onto the floral strip. Once I'd put some different sized stitches in to level up the row, the filet part became very straightforward.

I contemplated placing the another band of motifs part way up the curtain, but then rejected that idea and instead I'll place them randomly on the net. This is a venture into the unknown for someone who, until now, has always religiously followed patterns! :)

As spring is here and sometimes -- like today! the sun streams through the window on the landing outside my study-cum-workroom, I think a new curtain should look good and it will kick start the next round of cleaning and decorating. I went round the whole house a few years ago, but the décor is looking a bit tired and grimy because it was quite a few years ago now.

Anyway, I'm delighted to have found a good use for the motifs. Progress has therefore resumed and crocheting the filet net is a nice mindless project to do for relaxation.

A small project jumps the queue

I'm supposed to be finishing the Easter bunnies and baskets for the grandchildren and I really ought to finish the Fatty Lumpkin pony, which is currently stalled at the assembling stage. So what do I do? I end up making a quick pot-holder to use up the last of the James C. Brett Craft Cotton. I now know what sort of project it's good for and if I need more, I can buy it as and when required, so it seemed like a good idea to use up the ends of the balls on something useful rather than have them sitting around in my stash.

And my current pot-holders are getting very tatty. :)

It only took a few days.

Note: I don't usually get more than an hour each day -- two at the most -- to crochet and I'm not a fast crocheter, preferring to plod along in a meditative fashion. I'm sure that a speedy crocheter would be able to whip one of these up in an evening.

To use up the very last ends, I made a couple of little lid-lifters. The pot-holder is lovely and thick, but therefore would be too bulky for lifting the lids on my stainless steel saucepans or removing the lids from the glass casserole dishes.

It will soon be Easter

For the past week I've been busy making Easter presents for the grandchildren. I didn't want to just buy chocolate eggs because the postage makes it a very expensive way to buy chocolate. In fact I think last year I sent money to our son and daughter and asked them to buy eggs on our behalf for the grandkids.

However, this year I intend to do better.

I had seen some cute and easy bunny patterns on Ravelry, so I started making those first.

Here's the first bunny almost ready to assemble.

I know a lot of you like to weave in your ends as you go, but the photo below shows why I prefer to wait until I've finished and I'm sure it's all correct. I making 3 bunnies and I had almost finished the sixth ear when I realised that I'd done something stupid whilst making the 5th ear and somehow added in an extra yellow stripe! If I'd woven the ends in as I went, I'd probably have had to throw the ear away as too fiddly to frog, but it didn't take long to correct and now I have all the bunny parts and I'm almost ready to start sewing them together.

I haven't actually started sewing them yet because:

a) A lot of the yarn was reclaimed from a failed project that had been sitting around for more than 12 months gathering dust so I thought I ought to wash the bunny pieces.

b) I started making three little baskets to put the chocolate and bunnies in.

I had some James C. Brett Craft Cotton sitting around that I'd bought by accident a couple of years ago. How can you buy yarn by accident, you may be wondering? Well, it was while I was making the Funny Faces blanket for the latest grandchild and I thought it would be soft, like the James C. Brett Cotton On I was using for the blanket. Unfortunately, it's a cotton intended for dishcloths and such like, so it's more like string!

However, it does make very nice little baskets. :)

Here's the two-handled version.

And here's the version with one handle.

Anyway, everything is coming together. The bunnies can be assembled as soon as the pieces dry, I have bought a variety of chocolate and mini-eggs, the third basket is almost complete and I've been making some pretty little flowers for decoration. All being well, everything will be ready to post next week in good time for Easter.

In which I finish a hat just as the weather turns warm

I have finished another project. This time it's a slouchy hat. To be honest, I would never have attempted the pattern based on the photos posted with it, but someone on Ravelry had done it in a chunky tweed effect and added a flower. As I had some blue Marble Chunky to use up, I decided to copy what she did.

I didn't do as many increases or as many rows as the pattern says because of using different yarn and hook size, but I'm very pleased with the results. It actually looks good on me! If I sound surprised, it's because it's not easy to find hats that suit me.

The pattern is available free here. The flower was from Crochetgeek, also on Ravelry and available here on the Crochet Geek blog.

I was planning on wearing the new hat for our visit to London later this week, but the weather (which has never dropped below freezing all winter) has just turned even warmer, so my poor hat may not get an outing until next winter. Though having said that, March can be very cold and windy, so we will see. :)

Giving cushions a makeover

Partly to brighten up our sitting room and partly to use up all the yarn I bought for projects that are not now going to happen, I've decided to revamp all the cushions. This is the first. I think it came out quite well, considering I just improvised the design.

I used the Redheart corner-to-corner pattern to make 2 squares which were sewn together round 3 sides and buttons added on the back of the cushion to close the top. The border is just a simple shell stitch, a simplified version of the border in the Redheart pattern. (I didn't like the picots, so left them out.) The yarn is James C. Brett Marble Chunky from my stash. Very simple and quick to do and it matches the snuggly corner-to-corner blanket I made for myself!

Front

Back

I plan to work my way around all the cushions now, trying out different designs. A cushion cover is an good size for experimenting with new stitches and there are only so many blankets a small house and two people can use! :)

My big snuggly blanket is finished!

Once the Christmas presents were all finished, the next big project to work on was my big snuggly corner-to-corner blanket made out of James C. Brett Marble Chunky. I still have a few final ends to weave in, but as I've already started using this blanket, I think I can count it as finished. It's the biggest thing I've ever crocheted!

I made this partly to use up all the marble chunky in my stash. I'd bought it with the intention of making scarves and cowls to sell, but then I got a teaching job and had much less free time, so I abandoned the idea of selling items. As well as using up my stash, I did also buy a couple of extra balls to make sure it would be really big and snuggly for wrapping myself in while I watch TV. As you can see, it is as big as our bed!

Photographing so I could blog about it wasn't easy. It was raining hard, so taking it outside for better light and more space wasn't an option. The only place large enough to spread it out was our bed.

So... I had to stand on a chair and hold the camera above my head at arms length. Even increasing the ISO led to lots of blurred shots and these are far from perfect, but I think they do show off the beautiful way the colours vary.

Not all crochet patterns work well with variegated yarn, but the corner-to-corner pattern comes out really well and now I have a big snuggly blanket to wrap myself in while watching TV in the evening. :)

Here's a close up of the pattern.

And here's the border. I felt that the blanket needed a simple border, but I didn't want to just do rounds of double crochet (UK) that I'd used on the c2c lap blanket for my dad. Instead I did a modified version of the border from the original Red Heart Pattern. I simplified it and didn't do the picots, so this is just shells of 5 UK trebles.

In which I start a snuggly blanket just for me

I have finished several blankets in recent weeks, all for other people. The weather so far has been stormy but mild, but as we head towards the coldest part of the winter, I thought it was time I made a blanket just for me.

I have several big fat balls of James C. Brett Marble Chunky. This is a yarn which comes in lovely variegated colours and works up into a nice soft fabric. I'm making another corner-to-corner using this pattern. I was really pleased with the one I made for my Dad and I've noticed from looking at blankets that other people have made that it shows off a variegated yarn really well.

This is the yarn that I'm using and though I only started today, I have already produced a satisfyingly large triangle. It's a really easy pattern and will be something soothing to work on over Christmas and won't take much concentration. Ideal for these dark days when I'm not at my best and sometimes feel that I'm functioning on only half a brain.

Something I'll be making for me!

I have made several small blankets for other people recently, so I thought it was about time I made one for me. I've unravelled a couple of items that I made with a view to selling, but which no one bought. I also visited my lovely local wool shop to add a few more colours to the mix.

I plan to start crocheting a corner-to-corner blanket some time this week using this James C. Brett Marble Chunky. It's acrylic, so it will be very practical for an everyday snuggling blanket, but it's very soft too and comes in a variety of wonderful colours.