Before we begin...Blanket for Jax

I have been crocheting very hard over the past couple of weeks and so far, I have 5 blankets ready to donate, about half of the squares done for another and am looking at a rainbow ripple I tucked away a few years back.  So I'll be blogging a bit next week about my progress and showing some photos!

But first, let me take you back about three years...

One of the friends I made through the Cwtch of Comfort project is a lovely lady named Gaelle.  She is an avid crocheter and teaches a range of classes from beginner to expert and so, as you can imagine, she has built up quite the collection of little sample pieces!  Testing out stitches and trying out yarns, she had a decent supply of odds and ends tat weren't ever going to be used.

On a slight tangent, Gaelle had a friend named Jax who used to be a member of the local quilting group-she could knit as well and had recently learnt a bit of crochet from Gaelle.  Jax passed away quite suddenly about 3 years ago and a few people from the quilting group that she was very close to, Gaelle being one of them, were asked to go through her craft supplies and redistribute them.  Gaelle came across a large quantity of knitted and crocheted pieces-some square, most not and thought it would be lovely to combine them into a blanket along with her pieces to have as a keepsake.

So as you can guess by all my rambling, this is where I come in!
I should have taken photos of all the pieces I had-Gaelle also had made two large motifs in blue, grey and white and passed those along as well so I tried to use them as the base for the blanket.  Given how mismatched the peieces were, I admit it took me a LONG time to find a way of putting it together.  I made a good start with it initially but I couldn't figure out how to make it go and I got very frustrated with it.  It didn't help that none of the colours seemed to work well and my attempts to make larger squares out of the pieces I had kinda looked amateurish.
So it got left in a box for a couple of years.
With the big stash busting blanket making project idea, I started hunting through bags and cupboards for my vast stash that somehow gets pushed into every cupboard and room of my house.  I looked through the box again and while I'd never choose these colours myself, they started to have a fresh appeal.  I worked like a demon on it for a few days, trying again to build up bigger squares from the pieces-crocheting edges around the knitted bits, adding a round or two here and there and then making a few little squares to accentuate the colours used (you can see those top and bottom)
It surprised me how quickly it came together!  Barring the first couple of years...

I think it just needed a time out.

So here you go!  The Blanket for Jax

I gave it to Gaelle last week and she's delighted with it!  I think Jax would have liked it too <3

HELLO!

And it's been an age!  I have completely disappeared up my own backside these past few years blog-wise.  Life is good, mostly, same old same old and there's a proper update in the near future I promise.  I did transfer within Greggs to a shop closer to me and it has its ups and downs-I'm often so tired that I have very little energy left for crochet and while my crochet group does still meet up, I can't make it down very often and we haven't really had a joint project for a while.  The last few projects we've done have been for Woolly Hugs, who are a fantastic group and well worth supporting as they do a lot of different blanket charity ventures to get involved with.  My issue is that they only accept blankets made with Stylecraft Special DK and they have a very specific palette for each project.  Whilst I understand the reasons for this, it does mean that when I'm trying to de-stash, I want to be able to use up what I've got and in whatever colours I have-Woolly Hugs is something I tend to have to buy yarn for...

So here's the point of this post!  I am attempting to have a declutter and actually get rid of a lot of the yarn I have before I allow myself to buy any more.  I have a lot of bags in the spare room of yarn that was meant to be for certain projects that never worked out (case in point to follow), I have two large bags of pastel/pinks that a friend passed along to me as she was moving house and needed rid of it and I've had a lot of squares kicking about that were meant for blanket projects that again never really worked out.

So over this past week, I have gone through the bags and pulled out all the squares (and there were quite a few!) and so far I have made THREE decent sized lapghans with them!  I also dug out a project a friend asked me to undertake a year or two ago and turn a whole bunch of sample/scrap/practise crochet and knitted pieces of all different sizes (these were made by a dear friend of hers that passed away from cancer) into a blanket-this has been my nemesis for a while but these past 7 days has seen me tackling that too and today it was finished!  Just need to weave some ends in and then it's ready for her....

Sorry!  I digress...back to the point!

My plan is to work through this yarn and make 30 blankets for 6 different charities.  So far, I haven't decided which charities specifically but I want to donate 5 to a nursing home; 5 to a neonatal ward; 5 to hospice care; 5 to foster kids/ kids in shelter; 5 to cancer patients and 5 to bereaved parents (for this, I'm thinking of Cwtch of Comfort of course)  So here's the thing.  I'm positive I've got enough yarn here to do this so please, please, I'm NOT asking for squares or yarn or even for donations from other people as this is a personal goal.  But I would like your recommendations/suggestions of places in the UK (preferably South Wales) to donate to.  And if you like this idea, please feel free to bust that stash and set a goal!  I'll cheer you on all the way :-D

I have three blankets so far to start off with-I'll take photos to share with you as soon as I can!