Baby Boy Blue Blanket

This morning started out so well with beautiful bright skies but turned wet, cold and dreary by lunch time :-(
I've been working on those little baby blankets and I decided to use the 'Criss Cross' Square from the 200 Blocks book-a simple but striking square with an easy to repeat pattern

(Top right square in reds and browns)

I had some Paton's Acrylic Smoothie Yarn which I really love to crochet with as it feels soft and has a nice weight to it :-)  I worked the square as in the pattern for five rounds and then I decided to play with it a little...
Once I was happy with the size (it's for a newborn so doesn't need to be massive) I decided to try out out of the borders in my lovely new book-using a simple pattern from there just to finish it off.

(The photo quality is pretty bad as I can't wait for day light to take a photo as I'm giving it to the recipient tomorrow morning)

I like the effect of playing around with the placement of the mesh stitches!  Is it called 'fillet crochet'?

The other blanket isn't quite finished yet and I've improvised a different effect that I think looks great too-hopefully have a photo of that soon :-)

I've done a couple of other squares for the 'Sleeping Forest' blanket as well...

Total number of squares to make-126 (63/63)
Brown edged granny squares-35 made.  28 to go!
Special Square Motifs-10 made.  53 to go!

Total number of square made so far-45 made.  81 to go!

Having a Hoot

Hello everyone!  Sorry for the long absence-I've been back in London staying with my parents with Myf for a holiday but I've finally made it back home so it's time to catch up!
Remember the little giveaway last post?  Well, I decided to make these little owls from this post here.  Aren't they cute?  It's a lovely pattern but there were a couple of issues with it-she mentions a couple of times 'pulling on the yarn tail' to close the circle hole but the pattern starts off with a chain of 4 and I haven't been able to close the little hole you get that way so I think she means starting off with a magic circle.  Also, in the third round, she tells you to put 3dc into each space around when she actually means 3dc in space, skip the next space, continue around so that you have 14 groups of 3dc around.  Does that make sense?  Anyway, those are pretty minor problems with it and overall I really like the pattern so please do give it a try!

So the lucky ladies received a little owl each and have said they really like them :-)  My sisters were a little late on the comments for the giveaway but I made them one each anyway because I'm lovely :-D And of course I had to make one for me and a couple for my gorgeous Myf.  Only trouble was, their little ones got very excited over the owls and this caused a bit of a problem so naturally I offered to make a special one for each of my nieces and nephew!  One of the nicest days of my holiday was being able to meet up with my lovely sisters for a family picnic with our parents and our children!  I got to give them their little owls in person :-)  Wasn't able to take a photo of the owls as I had a little mishap with my camera...it's fine now but I dropped it into a pond!  Anyway, here are some photos, hope you like them!

Apparently, the collective name for Owls is a 'Parliament'.  Isn't that cool?

The little one in the photo above is one I made with crochet thread for use as a key ring for my spare key.  I'm planning some more as soon as I have some spare time!

Helping a friend...

Hello lovelies, hope the weather is treating you kindly!  We've had some Arctic winds here and a little snow over the last week-almost made me wonder whether I'd dreamt the Spring!  But thankfully it's starting to warm up a little :-)

It's amazing to me that I've been crocheting for over 2 years now.  I still feel very much like a beginner-perhaps because I don't stray far from my comfort zone (Granny Squares Hooray!) but I was reminded recently that I'm not really a beginner any more-I should really think of myself as 'intermediate'.

A lady I know through a close friend recently got in touch about some problems she's having with a crochet project.  She's been crocheting for about a year and when she started, she wanted to make a baby blanket for her nephew.  Well, she's been working on this blanket for so long, having to frog it and restart it over and over again that the baby is now nearly a year old and what was once a labour of love is now a massive burden.
So she asked me whether I would mind finishing it for her (btw she suffers from EDH and her joints get REALLY painful after too much crocheting) and she brought round what she'd done along with all the yarn.
This is the pattern she was using...
It's described as an easy pattern and I suppose she's right.  However, it's done almost entirely in single crochet so it takes FOREVER to make even a few inches of depth, let alone enough for a cot blanket.  Plus, it is a 'self bordering' pattern and the way it's done is to alternate using single crochet and half double crochet for the first and last 5 stitches of each row.  This tends to play merry hell with the width.  The main part of the pattern goes for a 'crinkle' effect by putting 1sc, ch2, 1sc into each space which takes even longer and the amount of yarn it uses is insane!
While it is a very easy pattern to follow, I think it needs some revision-a beginner trying to make a blanket from this would get disheartened very quickly!

So, the first thing I noticed it that instead of putting 1sc, ch2, 1sc into each space, she was putting 1sc into a space, chaining 2 and putting the next 1sc into the next space so it wasn't looking right at all.  So I started from scratch and quickly discovered that it would take weeks of crocheting to get it to the right length plus for some unknown reason, it kept getting wider and wider!

I spoke to her and asked whether she'd mine if I played with the pattern a bit.  She was fine with that so instead of using single crochet, I opted for using double crochet shell stitches and changed the alternating rows to just dc stitches.  The result was a blanket that didn't take more than a week to complete and has a lovely ripple effect.

Here's some photos for you so you can see what I'm rambling on about :-)

This is a little sampler of the pattern I made to show my friend what it should look like.

This is what my friend had done so far-this had taken many frustrating months and still was less than 1/3 along...

This is what I came up with-it measures approx 30" by 37" so it should fit a standard cot bed.  Hopefully she likes it :-)