Monday, August 23, 2010

Lots of hooking going on

Most of the things I've got going on are quick and easy projects so they're working up quickly. I worked on the copycat afghan in the morning and did 5 more repeats for a total of 10.

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In the evening I finished up the body of the surf and turf afghan. It's now been put into my WIP (works in progress) basket until I decide which border to use. I think I'm going to have to have a major border making session to get rid of all the projects waiting.

After the little ones went to bed I got out my baby afghan book and started working on Christine's wedding present.

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The pattern calls for 52 hexagons but I think I'm going to make it bigger so need to do a few more. Just need to figure out exactly how many. Guess I have some time to figure that out since I only have 4 motifs done so far. lol I need this done before my parents leave for Tennessee the weekend of Oct 9th.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Onto something new

I'm suppose to be starting an afghan for my cousin's wedding. She lives in Tennessee so I won't be going (it's a month before Pat's wedding so we can't swing it $$). I decided I could crochet her an afghan and send it with my parents though. So I started looking through my baby afghan book and then I moved onto Ravelry to see pictures of what people had done with the patterns in the book. I pretty much know which one I'm going to attempt for her. It's one of the ones I wanted to do for Esther and Tim's shower gift.

BUT I just had to keep looking. I saw a really neat variation of the afghan that's on the cover.
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The main color is white instead of blue and they used a variegated rainbow for the white accents. So I ran to my stash and pulled out a Caron one pound skein of white and the rainbow colorway of Jo-Ann Sensations Rainbow Classic. Another yarn that I wanted to love but just couldn't. The person who did the neat variation of the blanket said she used a K hook. The book says to use an I hook. I decided to try the K, got a few rows into it and didn't care for it so switched to my H. Here's how it's going so far...

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I'm figuring I'll make the body as big as either color of yarn will allow me. And of course I'll also have to get going on the wedding gift too....soon.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Soooo close

I had decided I wanted to do a mindless project next. I picked a baby blanket, using the diagonal box stitch as that project. I had at least one whole skein of Caron's Jumbo prints...baby rainbow ombre so used it.
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It was working up quick and easy...just like I was looking for. The idea was to do the body and then put it aside until I needed it or found a border I liked. I tried to gauge when I'd used about half the skein, figuring I'd then start to decrease the rows and finish the blanket with the second half of it. Well I didn't do so well as I ran out of skein, yet still have about 6.5 small rows to do plus sc around the whole thing.
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Maybe I can find a stray partial skein laying somewhere. If not, then it'll have to wait until I need it for a gift, pounders go on sale or I decide to use a 50% off coupon. So into my WIP (works in progress) basket it'll go.
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Lesson learned

Back in Jan '09 when I first started crocheting...I bought a LOT of yarn. JoAnn's Fabric had a huge yarn sale and I went crazy. One of the yarns I loved was TLC Essentials' Surf and Turf
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I thought the brown and turquoise would make a great baby boy blanket.   I even had someone in mind for it.   I bought 3 skeins, brought it home and started playing with it immediately.    I just couldn't like it no matter which pattern I tried to use with it.    The turquoise color run was just too small.  Instead of giving me splotches of color I was getting tiny streaks.   I tried sc, hdc, dc....I tried to work it into an afghan, hat, afghan again...always frogging it.   Then I came across the diagonal box stitch and decided to give the surf and turf one more try...taaaadaaaa!  The stitch gives more opportunity for the turquoise to "butt" up with other turquoise streaks, creating the splotches I was originally looking for.   It also helped that I dropped my hook down to an F hook which gave me a  wider worked up section for each color run  (4 whole dcs). 

Where the lesson comes in is that you have to pay attention to dye lot. I know, I know...how could I not already know that? It's been said a million times when talking about yarn. Well, the yarn companies started the no dye lot advertising and I didn't realize it only meant solids, not verigated. Even one of the skeins I originally bought is different then the original two...the dark brown is almost black. It's put aside waiting for another project. My original skeins had rust in it. The newer ones have grey in it. I prefer the rust ones.

Original skeins
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Newer skeins
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I also see the importance of trying to get all the yarn for your project at once. But I'm excusing myself to that fault and blaming it on being an inexperienced crocheter and not realizing how much yarn a project would need.

Here's a funny...while photographing this I realized....I messed up big time on the thing! I had stopped short for a row, creating a new side straight edge. Then used that point as the new edge for 9 rows. Nothing to do but to frog them and redo the rows. It wasn't so bad since the dark brown had been pooling into a solid stripe which I wasn't so happy about. So I broke the yarn and started working from the opposite end of the skein...problem solved.

Here it is before I frogged it.
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