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It started back in the spring. My Mom has a friend who likes ladybugs, and when Mom was flipping through a crafting catelogue and saw a pattern for a ladybug afghan, she asked me if I could make it.

I took a look at the picture and agreed, though I told her not to buy the pattern. Now, normally I don’t condone depriving a designer of well earned money, but I seem to be having this problem with a lot of crochet patterns in that, I look at them, and most of the time I can figure out right away how it’s done.

Honestly though, a ladybug is just a big red circle with little black circles on it. I already know how to crochet a circle, so how hard could it be?

At the time I couldn’t work on it. Big On Bloor was coming up, and I was focusing on making things for that. Then the summer was taken up with the move. I suggested to Mom that she wait until Bernat Satin went on sale; I’d figure out how much I’d need, and she could go buy it.

Bernat Satin did go on sale, at the exact time when I couldn’t buy any of it (go two posts back to see what I was up to that prevented the yarn buying), but Mom did get some red and black Satin. She bought it just before leaving on her vacation.

When Charles and I were camping out there (again, go see the post about our move; you won’t believe it!); I was getting a bit tired of working on that yellow project that I had kept in my work bag during the move, and was the only yarn I had out; I decided to grab the two bags of yarn Mom had bought for the ladybug blanket.

I had no clean clothes, but I did make this:

Then it got bigger:

Here it is, bigger still, enjoying the nightlife:

Here it is today, with some black for the face added in:

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever crocheted a blanket in the round, mostly all in one colour, and all the same stitch, over, and over, and over before. If not, let me tell you: the farther along you get, the less fun it gets. I was blowing through a ball of yarn a day on this, which meant 16 inch diameter the first day, but only up to 24 inches the next day, then 28 inches… now a ball of yarn is just barely making it all the way around! Just endless rounds of dc… constantly counting for the increases… *yawn*

Understandably, I’d put this down for a while.

I picked it back up tonight and wondered how I would know where I’d left off. I’d done a small part of the latest round. (See how it starts with the black, then ends with red shortly thereafter?)

It turns out I needn’t have worried because apparently I’m brilliant. ^_-

First, how to crochet a circle in dc:

Start with your favourite way to start working in the round. With me, I ch-1, then did the no-turning-chain-dc, followed by 11 dc into the first ch.

When making a flat circle in dc you need to add as many dc’s as you started with to each round, so, round 2 was 24 dc, 2 dc in each of the previous round’s stitches.

Round 3 needed 36 stitches, basically a repeat of *1dc, 2dc* around.

The pictures I’ve seen of crocheted circles always struck me as odd, and I finally realized why: people tend to put their increases in the same spots every round, and what you end up with isn’t a circle, it’s a dodecagon.
I decided that, with this project, I was going to try moving my increases around, but still evenly spaced within a round, and see if that helped. It seems to be working so far, anyway.

For the rest of the rounds I was counting stitches. Basically, you count to whatever number the round is 12 times(so, if you’re doing round 6, you count up to 6 then start again). The trick is deciding where the increases will go. For example, I might do: 1-23-4-5-6, where stitches 2 and 3 went into the same stich in the previous round.

So, back to this evening: I laid the blanket out on the table (as seen above) and counted the rounds. It turns out the round I’d started before putting it down before was round 35. Good, now I know what number to count to, but where did I put the increases?

Let’s take a closer look at that black, which is the beginning of the round:

I hope you can clearly see how, counting from right to left, you count 3 single stitches, then 4 and 5 in the same stitch. Ok, so I know I’m counting 1-2-3-45-6-7-8…. up to 35.

But, oh man, where did I stop? Let’s take a look:

Like I said: brilliant. Clearly the last stitch I made was #5 in the pattern. So the next one will be 6, then 7 and so on.

Except that I’ve spent the evening blogging about it instead of actually working on it. But that’s ok, I found this: