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