7 :: A Ta-Dah Moment...

Fully deserving of the capitalisation, I think. May I present, in all it's finished glory, My Ripple Blanket.

Looking suitably atmospheric on my bed there! It's been most welcome the last two nights too as I've shivered myself to sleep due to both the sudden drop in temperature and the germs that are rampaging through the house at the moment.

Some thoughts, then. Lucy's pattern is the easiest ripple by far. Trust me, I tried others.  I'm SO VERY GLAD I hooked in the ends as I went along (accompanied by a very small securing knot) as I think I would have lost the will to live had I had to do them all at the end. It felt most decadent to just merrily snip them all off with my scissors.

I'm not sure if I'll ever attempt such a large blanket again. At least not for A Very Long Time.

There are some pretty impressive stats to go with it.

• Each ripple consists of 14 treble crochets and there are 30 ripples per row. That makes 420 stitches per row.
• I crocheted 164 rows, so that makes for 68,880 stitches. 
• I used 65 balls of yarn. There are 116m in each ball. That adds up to 4.69miles of yarn. I'm allowed to switch between metric and imperial because my convertor app lets me ; )

On and off, it has taken me 18 months to complete and felt at times like a mammoth task. But then, I do have a very large bed! I haven't actually measured it but I'm guessing that it's over 6' wide and over 5' long. It's big.

A very big tick off my to-do list.

2 :: grrrr ...

Forgive me for not introducing my Blogging Advent Calendar properly yesterday. Better late than never is always a good attitude in my book. A friend of mine introduced me to a new photography app on my phone in the week and I'm loving this pinhole camera photo so I thought I would use it as a bit of a theme to my posts for this month along with one (or two or three) photos that I have taken using my macro lens. 

I am going to refrain from using bad language here on my blog, but believe me there has been some used this morning in connection with my Ripple blanket. I am on The Last Row and look! I don't have enough yarn. Grrrr! 

I'm feeling so frustrated and am now faced with a dilemma. Do I use a scrap left over from another colour to finish this last little bit and use the change in colour as a reminder that this is the bottom of the blanket? (The chances are that this tiny little portion will never really be seen as it will be tucked in to the bottom of the bed). Or do I track down another ball of wool?

I'm swaying towards using a scrap of the nearest colour so that it is not so noticeable and employing the wabi-sabi aesthetic to the project, embracing the hand-made and all that.

What would you do?

Stitches...

There have been all sorts of different stitches around these parts lately.  Some beautifully soft malabrigo ones on my dpn's--I can feel a knitting phase coming on ...

Remember this? Well, it has been coming along s-l-o-w-l-y, inch by inch, stripe by stripe. Another 14 or 15 inches to go to cover my bed. It is a monster of a blanket and incredibly cosy. I can vouch for this for I am enjoying snuggling under it as I crochet the evenings away.  I hadn't touched it throughout the whole summer and paid for it dearly as quite a few of the colours I am using are now discontinued and it has been a job in itself tracking down odd balls here and there.  There are some pretty impressive stats to go with this blanket which I will finalise on its completion. Miles of yarn, miles!

There are a couple of sewing projects on the go too, which have required some accurate top-stitching.  I find that if I look at the needle as my guide, my stitching seems to go all over the place and so now I have discovered my own trick to fairly neat top-stitching. Not exactly rocket science, but all part of the process of learning!

There's been a new venture in bag-making, with a slight modification of my own due to my preference of a long handle to go over my body rather than a shorter one which invariably falls off my shoulder.

And then there's the stitching that needs to be unpicked and re-done. Sigh.  I'm trying to catch up with the FWQAL and not doing too badly considering how far behind I had fallen.

My creative space...

...is all about the ripple.




I have set myself what I consider to be a realistic challenge and that is to do just two rows a day.

Two rows is about an inch, therefore in a month's time, it should have grown thirty one inches.  See?  I'm a maths genius!

More creative spaces here.