Crochet Kick

About a week ago, on June 13, I started this afghan. Today it's about half done.

The pattern is Chocolate Box from 200 Crochet Blocks by Jan Eaton. It's called Chocolate Box because of the colors she used in the book, browns and tans.

The yarn I'm using here was given to me by my friend Darija. It was from her late mother's stash, which really was huge. I only took a portion of it, about half, and it just about doubled my stash.

This yarn is very fine cotton, almost like crochet thread for doilies:
I had started making a hexagons afghan, with the yarn held double on a size G hook. It was taking forever. Each hexagon is about 3 inches across and takes me about half an hour to make. I was losing patience. So I decided to make the giant Chocolate Box square using the hot colors in the center and the cool colors on the outside, with a black border all around. Darija's mother had like 20 balls of black cotton yarn.

I used a size K hook, with 2 strands of 2 colors together, for a total of 4 strands. The variations in color are pretty interesting that way. It's going so much faster now. In the picture at top, I'm just about done with the purple. If you look closely, you'll see that I've run out of one color and had to substitute another, but with so many colors going on, I don't think it'll matter. For example, the purple on the outermost left is different from the purple on the right.

My plan is to do a diamond in a square. Once the hot colors are done, I'll use the cool colors to crochet on triangles. I don't have pattern or instructions on how to do it, but I think I've figured out a way.

The nice thing about crochet is, you can rip out stitches and redo pretty easily. And crochet is so fast and uses up so much yarn. It's entirely possible that I'll have this done by July 4 weekend to show to all of Husband's relatives who are coming to visit. Ultimately though, I plan to give it to Darija as an appreciation gift and a way to memorialize her mother.

What's so funny about peace, yarn and pottery

My apologies to Nick Lowe.

I've finished the baby blanket for a friend and am still feeling the crochet vibe. So I've swatched these, using the "Big Round" pattern from Jan Eaton's 200 Crochet Blocks:

The cluster stitches in the middle make me think of cupped flower petals.

One of the things in my Knitpicks order is a yarn guide that you wear on your finger. It's supposed to help stranded color knitters keep the different yarns separate. However, I'm going to use it to keep the yarn off my skin. When I crochet for a long time, the yarn sliding across the top of my tensioning finger gets to be quite uncomfortable and eventually a little groove gets indented into the top of the finger.

In other news, I've made progress on Husband's afghan, finished one more blue stripe and have wound the yarn for the next blue stripe. Then I will sew the stripes together, pick up stitches on the left and right and knit the side stripes.

In the past, the sewing together was not fun for me, but now I rather like it.

And I've cut off ridge row at the bottom of the Honorine sweater and have begun knitting down. It's just stockingnette in the round, which some people hate, but I love because it's just mindless knitting. I wonder if I could get away with knitting at the board meeting this weekend.... Maybe I'll work on it during lunch and they'll see that I can talk while eating and knitting, and then it won't be so bad during the rest of the day. I did knit during a Georgia Progressive Summit meeting while one of my board members was there...

Anyway, next Wed, Sept 19, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the Yarn Harlot, will be in town to speak. Honorine will the be perfect project to take along.

Wednesdays are my pottery class. I have been loving it. We are learning to make very large wheelthrown objects. Usually my pieces are about 8 inches tall, and use 5 pounds of clay. In the first class, I threw a jar at least a foot tall, using 8 pounds of clay, and yesterday I threw a huge bowl (that's me, the bowl lady) using 10 pounds. And all 10 pounds put up a fight, but I got it done. The bowl's at least a foot tall and 15 inches wide. I wanted to make my mother-in-law a huge salad serving bowl and I think I got it.

I really like Mariella, the instructor. She's got a lot of energy and not very rigid. I've had instructors who say there's only one way to do this or that, but Mariella's not that way. She thinks imperfections show that these pieces were made by an individual artisan, and not stamped out by some machine. I like that attitude.

I'll miss the next class because of the Yarn Harlot, but I'll go to Mariella's Monday afternoon class instead. Because this weekend will the weekend of work so I'm taking Monday off. I'm going to sleep in, have a cup of coffee, and then go do pottery for as long as they'll let me. I have some pieces from the spring quarter that have yet to be glazed. And I'll have to buy another bag of clay, since I've used up the entire 25 pound bag in just 2 sessions.

It will be bliss. There is nothing better than throwing pottery. You have to focus just on centering the clay on the wheel, and that centers you. Then in pulling up the clay and working on it, you have to pay attention to what the clay tells you. All your motions have to be smooth, deliberate, and slow. You have to feel the clay and make sure you don't push it too far that it weakens and collapses. One instructor said "the enemy of good is better."

In the end, if you do it right, which isn't hard, you get a piece that's beautiful and useful, and peace in your day.

Honorine and Babette

I've finished crocheting the squares for the orange and ivory baby blanket. There are 36 and I just barely had enough of the orange to finish. I frogged the swatches I had to get enough yarn.

Now all that remains is sewing them up and adding a border. And waiting for the baby. However, the baby girl (not mine) isn't born yet, so the blanket is nameless. And I just found out someone else had a baby boy, so of course I'm thinking, another baby blanket to make!

I've cast on for Honorine, using KnitPicks CotLin in Moroccan Red. When I got the box last week, the red made me swoon. Okay, not literally, but I was very happy with it. I swatched with size 6 US and size 5 US and size 6 gave me gauge (22 sts = 4 inches). However, after washing and blocking, the yarn expanded and the size 6 US swatch now turns out to be 20.5 sts to 4 inches.

What to do? Should I go with the pre-washed gauge and cast on the number of stitches for my bust size, or go with the after washing gauge and cast on the number for the smaller bust size and rely on washing to make it grow to my size?

I've also decided to knit it in the round and omit the lace insert for modesty. Actually, I don't want to have to wear a camisole underneath. It's just too warm in Atlanta most of the time to need it. This involved more math, as the lace insert uses a different yarn, with a different gauge which I had to convert to my washed CotLin gauge. In the end, I chose to go with the smallest size and cast on 180 stitches. Here's hoping this works!

Crocheting the orange and ivory really got me into the crochet groove. I've been eyeing Babette by Kathy Merrick from Interweave Crochet 2006 and there are lots of great pics on Flickr. I also have Glorious Patchwork by Kaffe Fassett (love his stuff!). The quilt on the cover was the inspiration for Babette.

But most of my yarn is not machine washable and there's no way I'm going to hand wash an afghan. Really now, people.

However, in flipping through Glorious Patchwork, I found a few quilts that I could convert into knitting or crocheting. After the orange and ivory blanket is done, I'll do some swatching and we'll see what comes of it.

However, it'll have to go the end of the line behind Husband's afghan, Honorine, Brother-in-law's vest -- for winter holiday or his January birthday, the Sandy cardigan from Big Girl Knits for Ma -- needs to be done by Chinese New Year next year, and fixing Sister's Bi-colored Cables sweater. I probably just need to reknit the sleeves. And the collar.

But for now, I will just enjoy going round and round on Honorine, my portable, mindless knitting.

WIPs

This weekend I was inspired to photograph my current projects:


Sister's Bicolor Cables cardigan, from Interweave Knits, in Cascade 220, not the recommended yarn.
The body is knit from the bottom up, in one piece up to the underarm. Then I finished the back.












Here are the sleeves. You can see that they are almost done, and then I decide to count the stitches and find that one has 10 more stitches on the needle than the other. I knit them both at the same time, from opposite ends of the same ball of yarn, precisely to make sure they match. And yet they don't. Another weekend of letting them sit.

This baby blanket is almost done, but here's a picture anyway. The yarn is Cascade Sierra in navy, light blue, pink, and white. The yarn in held double and that's how I got the tweedy look. Size J crochet hook. General pattern is 2 rows of double crochet of the solid colors and 4 rows of the mixed colors. There will be 2 rows of white on the sides to finish.

Husband's afghan: Cascade 220 in black and medium blue, held double, size 10 US needle. There will be alternating strips of black and blue, with a black border. Very similar to the baby blanket pattern, no? Very easy to make? Yes.

Here's a close up of each strip, knit in basket weave stitch. Each block of the basket weave is 5 stitches wide and 6 rows tall.

Last WIP, another baby blanket. Center is Mountain Colors Barefoot in Mystic Lake colorway, double crocheted. Don't remember what hook I used, but may be size F. It was started last year to be a scarf but now it will be a blanket. The other yarn shows is Knit Picks Essential Solid in burgundy, navy, and dark green. Currently log cabining one inch of the burgundy in garter stitch. When that's done, I'll switch back to double crochet. Much faster that way.