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


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


Newer skeins



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.